Uncovering the Hidden Power of Language: Critical Race Theory,Critical Language Socialization and Multicultural Families in Korea

This study utilizes critical race theory and critical language socialization to unpack embedded ideologies regarding language usage and immigrant wives’ heritage language transmission within multicultural families in Korea. Specifically, this study unveils hidden structures and beliefs which hinder or promote immigrant women’s use of heritage languages, and its intergenerational transmission. According to Sizemore, the language used by various ethnic group members often reflects their interethnic relationships. Exploring Asian female immigrants’ experiences of marginalization in Korea, this study uncovers the complex interethnic relationship among Asians, as well as show how immigrant wives’ language usage reflects power relations within Korea.     

Praying for (the) Community: Disasters,Ritual and Solidarity in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic

ABSTRACT

Organised in the wake of disasters, early modern emergency rituals were intended to persuade God to waive further punishment. However, this article shows that these rituals were as much about communities as about God. Based on a close reading of prayer day letters, sermons, and instruction manuals from the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, it proposes a Durkheimian interpretation of the rituals. For a day, participants collectively lived through an emotional disaster experience. This experience was then converted into (financial) solidarity with the victims.     

Book Thieves: Theft and Literary Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Australia

Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as what these tropes reveal about prevailing discourses regarding thieves more generally. The book thief – invariably constructed in the popular imagination as a middle-class male – was a classed and gendered figure, one at odds with contemporary understandings of theft as an act committed by members of an uncultured criminal class. By scrutinizing the development of popular conceptions of the book thief as an entity clearly distinguishable from the ordinary thief, I demonstrate the centrality of literacy and literary culture to how thieves themselves were read.     

Becoming English: The Monro Family and Scottish Assimilation in Early-Modern England

ABSTRACT

Migrant assimilation into host societies has been the subject of intense theoretical debate, but the applicability of the resultant modelling to historical data is unclear. This article addresses that lacuna through a case-study of the assimilation trajectory of one Scottish family, the Monros, in England in the century after 1690. The Monro experience suggests that ‘classic’ assimilation modelling remains a useful, if imperfect, conceptual tool. At the same time, it acts as a counter-point to historiographical narratives about the rise of ‘Britishness’, since the main loci of this family’s identity were successively Scottish and English, but never ’British’.     

Free Trade and Print Culture: Political Communication in Early Nineteenth-Century England

This article highlights the potency of traditional popular print culture as a form of political communication for one of the pioneering campaigns of the nineteenth century: the free trade agitation of the 1840s. Contributing to recent debates about Victorian political communication, it challenges the view that the spread of literacy and print replaced a more traditional, inclusive, hybrid style of communication. The use and adaptation of broadside culture that blurred literacy, orality and visuality proved to be a more effective means of communicating free trade to popular audiences than ‘modern’ methods of political communication such as official newspapers or mass propaganda. Joseph Livesey, the most successful free trade populariser, was able to bridge the gap between free trade and Chartism, by drawing on elements of radical print culture, while seeking to shift them onto a more respectable trajectory. Livesey and cheap free trade print culture anticipated the shift from popular radicalism to popular liberalism in political culture and popular politics that occurred after 1850.     

Culture and Classroom Communication: A Pilot Study in the Post-Soviet Republic of Armenia

Using participant observations and informal interviews, the study examined whether and how classroom communication in Armenia reflects Armenian culture and history, including the Soviet influence for close to seven decades and Armenia’s transition from one socio-politico-economic system to another, followed by internationalization of education and globalization. Findings of the study revealed three major themes that have impacted the classroom communication style: courtesy, immediacy, solidarity. While consistent in some ways with Soviet communism, these themes may have also been influenced by Armenia’s traditional and family-centered culture and history which predate Soviet communism, as well as by internationalization of education and globalization.     

Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews

ABSTRACT

This article tracks the development of French social history from its Labroussian origins through to the uncertainties that beset the subject in the 1970s and 1980s, and the call for a tournant critique (‘critical turning point’) in response to the conceptual challenges to its traditional methodological approaches. It then describes the responses that emerged in the wake of the tournant critique, as social historians attempted to renew their field. Instead of pursuing the debate about whether ‘class' or ‘order’ was a more useful category of analysis for early modern historians, French social historians have attempted, like their colleagues in the social sciences, to make the individual rather than collectivities the central focus of their research. The article outlines three approaches which try to capture the agency of individuals: prosopography, micro-history, and network analysis. Finally, the article makes the case that longitudinal studies can provide a means through which social history's traditional concerns with explaining the ‘social’ can be met whilst not losing sight of the exciting questions posed by cultural history in the last two decades.     

Consolation,Individuation and Consumption: Towards A Theory of Cyclicality in English Funerary Practice

The paper contends that the scale of mortality is a more significant determinant of change in funerary practice than chronological periodisation. A concentration on scale suggests that change in funerary practice runs in cycles, reflecting the search by the bereaved for consolation that is undermined by the threat to individuation posed by industrial-level scales of operation and professionalization. Within this framework, the bereaved make active choices – depending on their unequal resources – amongst a range of products and services to secure consolation. England is posited as a case study to evidence cycles of change, and this paper uses historical data to consider change in use from churchyard to cemetery, from cemetery to crematorium, and the contemporary evolution of natural or ‘green’ burial.     

Culture as commons: theoretical challenges and empirical evidence from occupied cultural spaces in Italy

ABSTRACT

What happens when we try to understand art as a commons? Elinor Ostrom [(1990/2012). Governing the commons. Cambridge University Press] challenged Hardin’s “The tragedy of the commons” [(1968). Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248] demonstrating that the governance of common pool resources is not always destined to failure. Ostrom’s analysis was initially applied to the management of shared natural resources; however, over time the term “commons” has also been used to describe non-tangible resources, specifically knowledge. Can Ostrom’s theory of the commons inform artistic practice? This article investigates some challenges presented by these research questions and their implications for cultural policy. In order to provide an empirical ground for the discussion of this topic, this paper will analyse the case studies of two cultural spaces in Italy, Teatro Valle (Rome) and Asilo Filangieri (Naples), which were occupied by groups of cultural professionals and managed as commons between 2011 and 2016; the outcomes of these occupations indicate possible ways to develop a commons-oriented approach to culture.     

Anti-refugee attitudes towards Syrian people living in Turkey: Culture dimensions and motivational personal dispositions

Syria experienced a civil war that resulted in more than 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Turkey as of October 2022. This sociodemographic change has led to tensions between the local population living in Turkey and Syrian refugees, resulting in a social environment characterized by anti-refugee attitudes and intergroup conflicts. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the internalization of Hofstede's culture dimensions by individuals and anti-refugee attitudes and to test the mediating roles of needs for cognition and recognition in this relationship. The sample consisted of 439 (295 women and 144 men) Turkish university students aged between 18 and 31 years (M = 21.47, SD = 2.36). According to the main results, (i) internalization of culture dimensions of long-term orientation, masculinity, and uncertainty avoidance predicts the likelihood of endorsing anti-refugee attitudes towards Syrian people living in Turkey and (ii) the need for recognition associated with impression-motivated heuristic thinking mediates the relationship between internalization of culture dimensions of masculinity, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance and anti-refugee attitudes. The results can be addressed by interested parties to reduce negative attitudes of the local population and facilitate the process of refugees' adaptation and sustainable integration into society.     

Identity Management and Relational Culture in Interfaith Marital Communication in a United States Context: A Qualitative Study

This study explored the identity management processes in interfaith marital communication in a United States setting. Sixteen marital partners participated in this interview study. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, interpreted, and analyzed. Guided by identity management theory, the interview data analysis revealed three general themes: development of the interfaith relational identity via the co-creation of a superordinate spiritual and value system; implementation of relational boundaries to prioritize the relational identity; and identification of key milestone decisions (i.e. wedding plans and children socialization coordination) interfaith partners face in their intimate relationships. Contributions, limitations, and directions for future studies on interfaith marital communication are addressed.     

Measuring the Size and Concentration of Business Funding of Culture in the UK: Closing the Gap between Advocacy and Theory

In the past few years, UK public bodies have increased their calls for cultural leaders to diversify even further their funding sources and exploit the dynamics of the mixed-economy. So far only major cultural organisations in London have been able to successfully diversify their funding portfolio. A drop in public funding is likely to make it even more challenging for a large proportion of cultural organisations to close their income gap. To ensure the successful development of policies of funding decentralisation and inform organisational strategies, more theory-based empirical research on trends, drivers and motivations, and models of funding sustainability is needed. One of the many factors preventing the development of this line of research is a wide gap between research conducted for advocacy purposes and academia in the UK. This paper illustrates the extent and implications of this gap by providing a brief summary of the academic literature in the field and reviewing methods and results of existing data collection efforts by advocacy organisations, in particular the Private Investment in Culture survey by Arts & Business UK (A&B). The scope of this paper has been limited to business funding in the form of cash and in-kind sponsorship, donations and membership, since there is relatively more cross-sectional time series data and academic and advocacy studies of this form of funding than of individual giving and trust and foundation support. The paper proposes recommendations on ways of closing this gap, in particular by improving existing sampling methodology for this type of data collection and expanding and strengthening the existing academic research on motivations, market dynamics and concentration of business funding.     

Testing a Model of Intercultural Willingness to Communicate based on Ethnocentrism,Ambiguity Tolerance and Sensation Seeking: The Role of Learning English in Iran

The present study aimed at testing a model of intercultural willingness to communicate based on ethnocentrism, ambiguity tolerance and sensation seeking between English and non-English major university students in Iran. A significant difference was found between the two groups on ethnocentrism and the results showed that the model fit the data adequately. Ethnocentrism was the strongest predictor of intercultural willingness to communicate for both groups. Sensation seeking was a significant predictor of intercultural willingness to communicate only for the non-English major university students. Moreover, sensation seeking and ambiguity tolerance were significant predictors of ethnocentrism.