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Public Service Media and Diversity in the Digital Media Landscape: Opportunities and Limitations for Social Justice
No full textThis essay reviews the place and role of Public Service Media (PSM) in promoting social justice in the changing digital media landscape through the ethos of diversity. Media diversity – the value and practice of including varied viewpoints, social groups, voices, and channels or outlets in media – has long been a declared pillar of PSM organizations worldwide. However, current changes in the digital media landscape and the growing extension of PSM organizations to digital platforms require re-reading the premise of promoting media diversity as a tool for social justice. This essay identifies a paradox. On one hand, online media appear to accommodate a greater range of diverse voices and players, particularly in the PSM ecosystem. At the same time, these very same online spaces jeopardize diversity, as the increasing practices of personalization, algorithmic curation, and platformization often reduce diversity of representations, voices, and exposure to content, thereby hindering opportunities for social justice and equality. This essay shines a spotlight on this nexus of conflicting mechanisms.
The essay begins with in-depth definitions of the two somewhat convoluted terms diversity and social justice. This section includes a review of global perspectives on PSM organizations, and the long-standing value of diversity promoted through them for decades. We then review the impact and changes identified in PSM platforms worldwide in light of the digital turn in the media field. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of the inherent tension between mechanisms that promote and hinder diversity online. Throughout this discussion, we raise questions about the practical dimensions of using online media to promote social justice through diversity. It provides a useful starting point for considering the intersection of Public Service Media, online platforms, diversity, and social justice. Thus, the essay will serve academic scholars studying social justice on a conceptual level as well as practitioners and stakeholders in the media industry at large, and PSM in particular, seeking to practically promote social justice
The Just Prison? Women’s Prison Reform and the Figure of the “Offender-as-Victim” in Germany
No full textDuring the 1990s, the Berlin women’s prison was reformed to do justice to female inmates. This redesigning of space and programs was intended to meet women-specific conditions and needs. The present paper engages with this prison reform as transformation in the name of gender justice. Based on interviews with prison reformers, criminologists, and policymakers, as well as on the analysis of historical documents, we illuminate how a specific figure of the “criminalized woman” helps to translate the abstract notion of social justice into situated practice. From the 1970s onward, a new knowledge of women’s crime would emerge: it constituted female offenders as victims of patriarchal oppression and victimization, allowing the prison system to be criticized as androcentric and discriminatory against women. We argue that subsequent reform pursued gender justice in the form of difference-based, gender-responsive programs and spaces targeting individual inmates’ character and mindset. Thereby, the reformers’ initial critique of social justice would be unintentionally depoliticized and so gender, economic, and political inequalities remained unaddressed. Our purpose is hence twofold: first, to review the recent history of women’s incarceration in Germany, and second, to add a social justice focus to the international criminological debate on gender, prison, and reform
Art, Heart, and Pedagogy for Social Change
No full textThis article is a collective discussion with undergraduate students about their work in a second-year gender studies course. The discussion shares how active engagement in collective art production for social change can provide the seeds for decolonial, anti-racist and anti-ableist pedagogical practice. The course encourages students to actively engage in the classroom, raise questions and concerns about social justice, and implement ways to challenge social relations of power. Students work collectively on projects using a range of alternative ways of knowing, including sensory, heart, intellectual, and spiritual knowledge, to connect with the course material in creative ways. The article is a conversation with three students in the course and the work they produced. They discuss the various mediums they used, including poetry, collaging, and a case study of artists’ street art. The students touch on the politics of joy, self-care, heart knowledge, politics of suffering, and accessibility, illustrating how combining art with various ways of knowing has helped them develop deeply analytic, compassionate, and relational work for social change. The work affirms ways of knowing that have often evolved outside the colonial academic institution. The anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-ableist, feminist and Indigenous pedagogies used in the course help to pluralize constructive capacities for more decolonizing, equitable, inclusive, anti-racist and expansive educational futures
Efforts to Enhance Education About Gender-Based Violence: A Teacher Workshop and Toolkit
No full textFigures of Crime: Victims, Criminals, and Crime-fighters at the Crossroads of Criminalization and Social Justice (Guest Editors\u27 Introduction)
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Accordion Books of Belonging: Self-representing Narratives of Seeking Sanctuary Through Participatory Photography (Creative Intervention)
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“Of England’s Soldiers of the Queen”: Toy Soldiers and British Militarism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
No full textBy the end of the nineteenth century, Great Britain had established an Empire that spanned the globe, which was achieved through centuries of colonial expansion and military conquests. This age of “High Empire” was heavily dependent on the armies and navies it wielded, the bulwark of Britain’s insatiable quest for global dominance. However, as the island nation established the height of its colonial possessions, it was also undergoing major shifts in ideological perspectives about national identity, gender, and class responsibilities, along with Britain’s place in the world. The immense sense of nationalism and militarism that accompanied the expansion of territorial possessions offered new opportunities for the industrialized market to capitalize on the jingoism of the moment. The die-cast toy soldier quickly became one of these capitalizing commodities, gaining popularity primarily with middle- and upper-class male Britons. This paper looks to understand how William Britain’s Co., the pre-eminent company established in Britain during the early 1890s, would influence male comprehension of British militarism by glorifying ‘duty, honour, and service’ through regimental models and gleaming advertising. The rise of the toy soldier in Britain not only inspired boys across the country, but also notable male politicians and elites of society like H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill. William Britain’s toy soldiers are not simply lead-painted metal figures but a commodified representation of British turn-of-the-century nationalism, something that escalates through to World War One
Inside Earth Sensations Outside of Theory: Reflections on a Conference
No full textThis paper reflects on the Earth Sensations conference that took place in Aarhus, Denmark in October 2022. I consider a selection of presentations and expand on the emergent discussions those presentations engendered around ideas connected with agency, subjectivity, entanglement and the tensions between mind/body, theory/practice, and interiority/exteriority.
Keywords: sensory experience; theory and practice; internal and external landscapes; cosmic forces; entanglement, Jane Bennet
Mycoremediation’s Material Imaginaries: Neoliberal Rationality in the Fungal Turn
No full textThis article explores what mushrooms do in human projects and specifically what they do in a conversation and context framed by neoliberalist rationality. We highlight two forms of neoliberal rationality—homo economicus, or “the economic man,” and consumptive sovereignty—that often shape the way people interact with fungi in the post-9/11 United States. Through establishing the role of neoliberal rationality in mediating engagements with fungi, we examine how such rationality operates and configures metabolic exchanges between humans and fungi, and between humans and metabolic processes more broadly. We close by considering mycoremediation, the biological process of fungi metabolizing toxic compounds. Our goal is to reveal how dominant forms of reason work to direct human action, and in turn how those repeated actions structure our lives. We hope to disrupt reproductions of these logics by turning our ear to other networks we see operating beneath the surface: posthumanist theory and fungal life