The Presbyopic Six: Exploring Marginalization of Protest and of Journalism in a Television-Online Advertising Campaign

This article is a textual analysis of a recent ad campaign for Varilux eyewear that features a fictional group of protesters known as "The Presbyopic Six." Varilux is a brand of eyeglass lenses marketed by Essilor, a French corporation. Viewers "follow" the protesters from their arrest for defacing a large-print book sign at a bookstore through booking, and through interviews with fictional journalist Lauren Lewis while incarcerated in a minimum-security prison. The ads suggest that new, more aggressive methods of protest have clearly passed the Presbyopic Six by. The campaign announces and celebrates their marginalization. The campaign also suggests that contemporary journalism is driven by the same kind of homogeneity. It could also be argued that a degree of evolution in protest and journalism is seen in these ads. Thus, the campaign may also be a veiled criticism of today's anonymous, aggressive protestors.     

Mystery and Miracle： National Treasures Unearthed from Sanxingdui

Bronze Standing Figure The bronze standing gure, 2.62 meters high with a 0.8-meter foundation, is the largest bronze masterpiece of ancient China ever discovered. The bronze gure wears a lotus-shaped crown carved with cloud and thunder patterns. It has a skinny face, two big eyes, a high nose bridge and a wide mouth. A small hole is pierced on each of its ears for hanging ear rings. The gure wears a serious but peaceful expression, its eyes shining with profound wisdom and its thin mouth lip…     

Empathy towards people of different race and ethnicity: Further empirical evidence for the Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy

The present study examined the generalizability of the factor pattern, structural parameters, and latent structure of a multidimensional hierarchical model of ethnocultural empathy in males and females. The Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE) (Wang et al., 2003) was administered to a sample of 610 Italian undergraduates to examine the generalizability and reliability of its factor structure across gender, the psychometric properties and the validity of the scale. Two models were tested through multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA): a confirmatory factor-analytic model that hypothesized a multidimensional model of ethnocultural empathy; and a structural equation model that proposed a multidimensional, hierarchical structure with global ethnocultural empathy as a superordinate construct that explained the covariances among the subdomains of the SEE. Both models satisfied multiple criteria for goodness-of-fit with the data. Full metric invariance of factor loadings and factor covariances, and partial invariance of error variances across gender for the four-factors model were supported. Scale reliability was also satisfactory, showing good internal consistency. As regard scale validity, evidence was found for a positive moderate association with a measure of general empathy and a negative high association with a measure of prejudice. Implications are discussed.     

“One Hour He Is a Christian and the Next He Is a Muslim!” A Family Dispute from the Cairo Geniza

This study publishes a newly identified letter to Moses Maimonides reconstructed from three Geniza fragments. The letter describes an inheritance dispute over real estate in the Egyptian delta town of al-Ma?alla. Having a letter written by a litigant provides information on what took place outside of court, information that is often missing from legal records. This allows us to explore the dynamics of a dispute in which one side makes a legal move, and the other counters with a move outside of court, and vice versa. These manoeuvrings included action in Jewish and Muslim courts, appeal to a jurisconsult, social pressure and performative disregard to the boundaries of the religious communities. As a result, we can conceive of the legal arena not only as encompassing different legal institutions but also as a social space constituted by the ways litigants experienced and interacted with legal institutions.     

秘密

有一天，一个正在当小学老师的朋友讲了一个小男孩的故事。 他7岁，上小学二年级。他有一双非常水灵的大眼睛，乌黑的、不谙世事的、清澈的眼睛。凝视他的眼睛的时候，老师常常会有一种错觉，以为那里面正含着眼泪，像一潭水似的，晃动着，但不涌出来。     

A Ṭā’ifa in Exile: Sayf al-Dawla and the Survival of the Banū Hūd

In 1145–1146, Sayf al-Dawla returned to al-Andalus to create an independent kingdom and return the Banū Hūd of Zaragoza to prominence. His task was a difficult one, not least because he’d spent a decade serving the Christian king Alfonso VII. After a year of campaigning, Sayf al-Dawla secured a base of support in Murcia. However, he died shortly after his coronation in a battle with Christian allies who were allegedly sent by Alfonso to help him. In addition to providing an explanation for the battle and his death, the article examines how Sayf al-Dawla promoted the legitimacy of his state through his coinage, adherence to Andalusī traditions, and a network of fellow exiles. It interprets the Zaragozan ?ā’ifa as a moveable faction rather than a fixed geographical entity and connects Sayf al-Dawla’s kingdom to later movements to demonstrate how his actions preserved the Banū Hūd’s prestige in Andalusī imaginations.     

URBAN HERMIT LI CHEN

With long flowing hair,a short cropped mustache,a white shirt and a pair of black pants tailored by his wife,Li Chen appeared distant throughout our meeting,as seen from his slim yet graceful     

Participatory Deep Learning in a Diverse Class on Minority Literatures

This paper is a reflexive exploration of my teaching and evaluation techniques in a diverse class on minority literature. I explain my classroom evaluation and teaching techniques in offering an African literature course as a junior African professor trained outside the United States and teaching in a predominantly white institution. Using Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Greg Light, Roy Cox, and Susanna Calkins, I assess my effectiveness as a student-centered teacher, pointing out my shortcomings and suggesting ways in which I will overcome these obstacles in future courses.     

Moving Beyond Test-Prep Pedagogy: Dialoguing With Multicultural Preservice Teachers for a Quality Education

In a “post-NCLB era,” the schooling experiences of mostly low-income students of color continue to be consumed by a test-prep pedagogy—narrowed curriculum, low expectations, and ignored relationships. In this article the author describes a pedagogical approach using educational dialogues to engage preservice teachers to critically define a quality education.     

The undulating contours of sōgō geijutsu (total work of art), or Hanada Kiyoteru's thoughts on transmedia in postwar Japan

This article provides an insight into the theorization of sōgō geijutsu or the work of total art during the postwar decades in Japan, primarily through the language of Hanada Kiyoteru, a notable communist critic during the 1950s, as a way to present a discursive precursor to what would be explored as intermedia in the 1960s. It is an attempt to trace the debates that were seen in journal Sōgō Bunka, which was established immediately after the war, and how the question of collectivity and collective production of art was discussed among the contributing critics, artists, and intellectuals. Totality as some may know already, is a problematic term that comes close to the wartime notion of ‘totality’, as it was employed for Japanese government's ideological deployment for its war efforts. Although the term has accrued a sinister ring, the critics mentioned in the article, especially Hanada, were determined to reclaim the term as a way of devising a postwar aesthetic-political platform. One important component of sōgō geijutsu was popular art and its relationship to the masses, as it was designed to relocate avant-garde art practices to the juncture of popular space and political praxis, while critiquing the modernist avant-garde art associated with high art. In addition to providing a fuller historiography of intermedia (or transmedia) in Japan, interrogating sōgō geijutsu also serves to shed some light on the complex and multivalent discourse of locating a ‘people’ and their communicative action. Through this history, the term totality gains a greater texture, no longer dismissible as a mere vestige of fascism in the minds of the Japanese artists and critics.     

“Piety Stories”: Muslim Tatar Women’s Identity Performance,Negotiation, and Transformation through Storytelling

This article examines “piety stories”—Muslim Tatar women’s narratives about adopting daily Islamic practices, such as five prayers or headscarves, in Tatarstan, Russia. I argue that sharing piety stories is a communicative way of performing identities, negotiating group memberships, and reaffirming one’s commitment to Muslim piety. These narratives provide a discursive way for the speaker to practice being a Muslim and for the audience, a blueprint for becoming one. By detailing a way of being where Muslim piety becomes one’s moral compass and source of agency, piety stories illustrate a culturally meaningful relationship among identity, Muslim piety, and local communicative practices.     

Kim Kardashian is my new BFF: Video games and the looking glass celebrity

Mobile-based celebrity games are a by-product of a new, more feminized video game industry. Within celebrity games, the player engages with celebrity culture in a variety of ways, often being transformed into their own brand of celebrity. Celebrity games are a form of hypertrophic media, based on the dyadic interactions between the player and celebrity. Within this, one becomes a looking-glass celebrity—an enculturation process by which the celebrity text situates the player as closer to the titular star than the player actually is. In turn, the player uses this position to reflexively construct what the player believes constitutes a successful celebrity. The path to fame, however, is a hollow one, wherein the player can never really lose and never really win.     

Making Meaning of Work: Uncovering the Complexity of Immigrant Experience in a Multicultural Landscape

Odd people have always been identified and often treated differently in human societies. In modern times, they have been described as being afflicted with a psychological condition to be treated by specialists and assigned to a “crazy” category by general society. Movies about such odd people have a long history. A recent movie, Silver Linings Playbook, presents a picture of mental patients displaying symptoms, but accepted into their home community. A pair of them shows the beginnings of a subcultural community among “odd people,” a version that has not been seen before.     

Stereotyping Hispanics: The differential effect of research method,label, and degree of contact

One hundred Anglo university students were asked to rate a number of ethnic/national groups (American, Chicano, Mexican American, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Japanese, and German) on a Semantic Differential and to openly produce traits they identified with each group. As expected, the freely produced traits differed from those obtained in another study which used the Katz and Braly technique with students from the same university. Furthermore, differential evaluations were found for Chicanos and Mexican Americans in which the latter group was perceived more positively in the Evaluative Dimension, but not in terms of Potency or Activity. Also, as expected, having a member of the group as a friend produced the highest correlations with a positive perception of the group as a whole.     

Autogenous culture as political form: explorations through participatory art in Singapore

This paper presents the concept of autogenous cultural practices as a political form that is neither a subject of state practices, nor a means of resistive anti-state force. Through a study of three participatory art projects carried out by the author, this paper examines how and if autogenous culture can be presented and more importantly effect societal change. These projects were carried out in a governmental disciplinary facility, a local non-governmental organization supporting sex workers and an independent art project with three young women who were graduates of the Normal Technical stream in Singapore respectively.     

Cross-cultural differences in attitudes towards disabled persons: A study of Jewish and Arab youth in Israel

Cultural values may be seen as the primary determinants of altitudes towards deviant or exceptional persons. The present study deals with the attitudes of Jewish and Arab youth in Israel towards the disabled as a function of cultural identity, existence of contact with a disabled person, and type of disability (blindness, amputation, facial disfigurement, or confinement to a wheelchair).A sample of 510 Jews and 655 Arabs filled out the Yuker Altitudes Towards Disabled Persons Scale (ATDP). The results indicated that overall, Jews were more positive towards the disabled than Arabs. Furthermore, the existence of previous contact with a disabled person was a positive factor in the formation of the Jews' attitudes, and a negative factor for the Arabs. In their ranking of different types of disability, Jews and Arabs differed significantly.The results are interpreted in the context of modern versus traditional cultures, whereby the Jewish youths' more tolerant Western approach seems to engender a more positive attitude than the Arab youths' conservative values.     

Life is not complete without critique: Chua Beng Huat as model

This essay outlines an intellectual portrait of Chua Beng Huat and offers a critical appreciation of his contributions as an academic, a scholar, and an intellectual. I highlight key biographical details: his family upbringing in Bukit Ho Swee, schooling in the Chinese and English mediums, higher education and academic experience in Canada, his return to Singapore, and serving as a sociology faculty at the National University of Singapore, which he made a home base for inter-Asia studies. I discuss his pedagogical approach, which extends to his research and public engagement. In reviewing his works, I focus on the theme of communitarianism as a basis of political legitimacy in East Asia, with housing provision in Singapore as a prime example. His project presents an alternative to Western liberal democracy taken as the universal bedrock of political modernity. I characterize it as the recuperation of the social in the face of capitalist modernity, which is conducive to atomization and corrosive of solidarity. Yet, he projects the possibilities of a more politically liberalized communitarianism. What he offers is not a set of ready answers that reconcile Marx’s “realm of necessity” and “realm of freedom,” but a lucid exposition of the tensions between the two realms under contemporary conditions.     

Counterpublic but obedient: a case of Taiwan’s BL fandom

BL (Boys’ Love) fandom has been regarded as a counterpublic by some academics since 2005. In this article, I investigate the dispute over “real-person” texts (texts based not on fictional characters but on real people, both public and non-public figures) on the BL board of PTT BBS in Taiwan as a case-study. The dispute is significant in the sense that, ostensibly, there were a few young female BL fans who actively defined what the BL scene consists of, as only these young women were involved in the dispute. Nevertheless, a closer look at the dispute reveals that the mainstream values actually played a significant role in framing the fandom in question. I then argue that the objection to the real-person texts should be regarded as a refusal by the BL fandom to be part of a counterpublic. The dispute started with a clarification of the genre, equating real-person with real gay people, BL with fantasy, and gay with reality. It is on this basis that real-person texts were not regarded as part of BL practices. Moral issues, such as respect and politeness, were also raised to question real-person texts. The conflict intensified, leading finally to the total exclusion of real-person texts from the BL board. To sum up, the dispute over real-person texts demonstrates how BL fans actively (re)formed the shape of the BL board; at the same time, it represents a refusal and exclusions, which place this counterpublic into question.     

Soeng Joeng Toi: opening fissures towards a platform and a bridge

ABSTRACT

In May of 2017, a space called Soeng Joeng Toi was established, gathering a variety of people to share and co-organise a space together. While it may be considered a relative newcomer, Soeng Joeng Toi’s appearance can be seen as an inevitable breakaway from the mainstream political, economic and cultural climate of a city like Guangzhou. From its initial planning stages to its official operation, much of Soeng Joeng Toi’s inspiration and methods have come from extensive exchange with independent spaces both in China and abroad, where mutual recognition of similar conditions and thinking of the commons have led these different spaces to continue developing in a sustained dialogue. This text, written from the perspective of two of Soeng Joeng Toi’s “co-proprietors,” introduces the beginnings of Soeng Joeng Toi, its current operations and experiences of connecting with others as well as explores the possibilities of a shared activism involving people from different fields and geographic regions.     

‘Of lost fathers and broken sons’: Farish Noor on the politics of love and the new thought in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper addresses the polemical and intimate writings of one of Malaysia’s leading public intellectuals, Farish Noor. Straddling secularism and Islamism, Noor’s ideas are informed by a compassion that seeks to bypass monotheism and an ethnically informed nationalism. An advocate of a multiethnic and plural society, Noor does not merely reject Islamism; rather, his thinking seeks to reconcile and transcend what he perceives as a false dichotomy between a system of reason and a system of belief. The achievement of this transcendence is a fraught one for it sometimes seems that Noor involuntarily contradicts himself. To resolve this contradiction I turn to Gille Deleuze’s work, Pure Immanence, which, I argue, provides a key in‐road into understanding the complexivity of Noor’s thought, in particular his valorization of love and his canny and novel attempts to interpret what he calls an ‘other Malaysia.’