The politics of media policy: how political?

This article reviews three recently published books which make an important contribution, in their different ways, to our understanding of major media policy issues in the digital era. They are all concerned with the core issue of how well media policy serves the public interest. They exemplify different approaches to the study of media policy with regard to how political they are in their content. The first two draw strongly on political science. The first might be best described as critically engaged and has an ideologically sensitive perspective on media policy in the United Kingdom and the United States. The second adopts a policy studies approach to examine the introduction of digital TV in the United Kingdom. The third, written by a media sociologist, provides a comparative study of policies for public service TV in six European countries. It offers rather less political analysis, but presents a useful policy content-focused approach. The article concludes by calling for more work on the development of policies that will ensure the continued fulfilment in the digital era of public service journalistic functions and provision of public service content.     

The Memory of a Cenerdtion:Movie Review of Deacock

The setting of the film Peacock is the small town of Heyang, home of the Gao family. The Gaos are not wealthy, but there is no lack of love and warmth among them. The parents are hardworking, honest people. Weihong, the daughter, loves art and is full of dreams, but often feels depressed about her failure to join the military. Both her career and her marriage are unsuccessful. The elder son, Weiguo, has a slight mental disorder and is his parents' pet, but is often bullied by people outside the family. He also suffers setbacks in finding his ideal mate and has to settle on a less-than-perfect love to marry. The younger son, Weiqiang, is a sensitive, gloomy lad who is silent but self-adoring. He drops out of middle school and marries a divorced actress. Heyang, though a fictional place, is based     

A Review of “African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900–1960”

The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 created a new kind of discomfort in the United States about “self-radicalized” terrorists, particularly related to Muslim immigrants. The two suspected bombers, brothers with Chechen backgrounds, had attended U.S. public schools. News media portrayed the brothers as “immigrants” and often showed them as having a struggle between their Chechen and U.S. identities. This article proposes that educators consider reframing the talk and discourses about immigrants and immigration toward a more complex understanding of transnationalism. The author demonstrates her work as a former English language learner teacher and her current research in the area of transnationalism to argue for educators to teach meaningfully about this concept. The goal, the author argues, is to help create a deeper understanding of newer arrivals to the United States so that the more newly arrived have greater choices about who they become and the identities they perform.     

The Memory of a Generation： Movie Review of Peacock

The setting of the film Peacock is the smalltown of Heyang, home of the Gao family. The Gaos are not wealthy, but there is no lack of love and warmth among them. The parents are hardworking, honest people. Weihong, the daughter, loves art and is full of dreams, but often feels depressed about her failure to join themilitary. Both her career and her marriage are unsuccessful. The elder son, Weiguo, has a slight mental disorder and is his parents‘ pet, but is often bullied by people outside the family.     

Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid

In March 2013, after six years of consultation, an Australian Labor government launched the national cultural policy document, Creative Australia. In July 2013, a Coalition government was elected, Senator George Brandis became Minister for the Arts, and the policy was dumped. With it went cross-party consensus about funding rationales and measurement strategies, with disastrous consequences for the cultural sector. This cautionary tale of gaffes, pay-back and abrupt changes of direction, highlights the fragility of policy memory that condemns artists and arts managers to a never-ending reinvention of the evidentiary wheel. Our paper examines the problem of collective understanding (“world”) in cultural policy-making in Australia, exacerbated not only by the short-term electoral cycles which undermine long-term cultural outcome timescales, but by a fixation on what Hannah Arendt calls “the peculiar and ingenious replacement of common sense with strict logicality”. Evidence of value is only meaningful when it occurs in a policy memory that can fully avow it and respond in appropriate ways. Measurement methods are over-determined by epistemology and by experience. We argue that the balance between these determinants of effective cultural policy-making has been lost. An emphasis on numerical data – especially economic data – has forced arguments for culture into a decontextualised register of quantitative proof. Recent events in Australia suggest that different, more direct ways of engaging with cultural policy-making are required for the problem of collective understanding to be successfully assayed.     

The Stunt of “Paving Lights”

“Paving lights”, popular in the countryside of Shanghai, is a stunt to pave with rice and colored mineral powders different deity portraits, symbolic patterns and couplets.     

Blessings of the “Tea Horse Route”——Review of the Documentary Film “Delamu”

For more than 2,000 years, on the southern border of China, there has been an overland pass linking Yunnan province, Tibet and the outside world--the “Tea Horse Route”. The route cuts across the Hengduan mountains, stretching along the “three rivers”to West Asia and Southeast Asia at both ends. It winds through unusually rough,     

Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: The Rhetorical Strategy of “Straight-Acting” among Gay Men

This study examines the rhetoric of straight-acting among gay men by analyzing the website entitled, Straight-Acting.com. The straight-acting rhetoric emerges because some gay men want to achieve hegemonic masculinity to overcome gay effeminate images. Also, gay effeminate men are unattractive to straight-acting gay men, because they violate normative gender-performative expression valued by the “straight-acting” men. This attitude is called, “sissyphobia.” Last, some website members view straight-acting as fluid, while others view straight-acting as stable. By exposing this topic, this analysis aims to further understand the role of gender in gay men's identity negotiation and their interpersonal relations.     

The role of adoptive parents’ intergroup contact in fostering the well-being of adoptees: The “extended intragroup contact effect”

The present study examines the effects of a new cultural socialization strategy on the well-being of transracially adopted adolescents and emerging adults. Specifically, we propose a novel strategy focused on the role of adoptive parents’ positive contact with members of their children’s ethnic group of origin, which we labelled “extended intragroup contact.” The hypothesis was that observing ingroup members (adoptive parents, belonging to the family ingroup) engaging in contact with another ingroup (members of children’s original ethnic group) would be associated with adoptees’ meaning in life and, in turn, with well-being. A self-report questionnaire was administered to 120 families, each composed of transracial adoptees (all born in Latin American countries) and their adoptive parents. The results were generally supportive of predictions, showing that knowing of positive interactions between members of two different ingroups (family ingroup and ethnic ingroup) had beneficial effects for the well-being of transracial adoptees. The theoretical and practical implications of findings are discussed, focusing on the importance of investigating extended intragroup contact as a strategy for improving the well-being of disadvantaged group members.     

Facebook contact: The effect of an outgroup member’s language proficiency on desire for future intergroup contact

Guided by contact theory, we examined the effect of an international student’s English language proficiency on American students’ desire for future interaction with international students, online and in-person. We created a fictitious Facebook page of a female Chinese international student and experimentally manipulated her Facebook posts to represent low or high English proficiency. American students (N = 126) in the high proficiency condition reported more identification with the international student, which subsequently led to more desire for future interaction with the student both online and in person. These effects generalized to a desire for interaction with other Chinese students (again, both online and in person). The findings of the study have theoretical and practical implications for online intergroup communication.