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Model minority authoritarianism: Social mobility and the new anti-equality agenda
Get PDFThis article puts forward a cultural-political formation it terms ‘model minority authoritarianism’. The idea of the ‘model minority’ has both been venerated as the virtuous face of immigration and/or non-white achievement in the Global North and roundly contested and critiqued as a patronising, divisive and implicitly racist trope. Yet it is currently embraced by right-wing figures as a route through which the ideology of the opportunity for ‘upward social mobility’ and neoliberal, marketised meritocracy can be promoted; which is linked to displays of nationalism, military-style discipline and centralised control; and in which an image of ‘multicultural’ progressiveness is used to give credence to increasingly reactionary policies. This configuration comprises ‘model minority authoritarianism’. The article outlines its theorisation and analyses its manifestations by considering recent developments in the UK Conservative Party and its wider cultural networks. In particular, it examines the actions of Katherine Birbalsingh, former Head of the Social Mobility Commission and ‘Britain’s Strictest Teacher’, alongside policy sources including the Levelling Up White Paper and the ‘Sewell Report’. It argues that model minority authoritarianism needs to be understood as part of a broader right-wing ‘anti-equality’ agenda which vehemently attacks accounts of structural social inequality and practices seeking to redress it
Politics, government and the media: A site of struggle between opposing conceptions of public communication
No full textAs society faces waves of media change, from the rise of 24/7 media in the late 1980s to web-enabled media in the 2000s, successive governments have navigated between a riskier media/political interface and the institutional requirement to uphold public service core values. Such media change has been identified as ‘mediatisation’, a far-reaching historical meta-process whereby media proliferate and are institutionalised and normalised to the extent that they enable ‘the social construction of everyday life, society and culture’ (Krotz 2009, 24). Such pressures apply to all actors involved in government/media relations, from government press officers and journalists to governing politicians and their partisan advisers. This chapter examines the evolving interface between governments, politics and the media, taking the United Kingdom as a case study. It examines points of interest during the 25 years between the election in 1997 of New Labour under Tony Blair, who faced lasting reputational damage over his promotion of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the reluctant resignation in June 2022 of Boris Johnson, the Conservative Prime Minister whose government pronouncements could no longer be believed even by his own MPs. The chapter uses contemporary government, media and parliamentary documents, archival sources and interviews with media and political actors to ask who is winning the struggle and what this means for the quality of public communication
Sense of agency in gesture-based interactions: modulated by sensory modality but not feedback meaning
Get PDFIntroduction: Gesture-based interactions provide control over a system without the need for physical contact. Mid-air haptic technology allows a user to not visually engage with the interface while receiving system information and is readily manipulable, which has positive implications for automotive environments. It is important, however, that the user still feels a sense of agency, which here refers to perceiving system changes as caused by their gesture.
Methods: In the current study, 36 participants engaged in an experimental time perception task with an automotive-themed infotainment menu, serving as an implicit quantitative measure of agency. This was supplemented with additional self-reported measures. They selected different icons via gesture poses, with sensory feedback either visually or haptically. In addition, (sensory) feedback was also the same for each icon, arbitrarily different or carried semantic information.
Results: Mid-air haptics increased agency compared to visual, and this did not vary as a function of feedback meaning. Agency was also associated with general measures of trust and usability.
Discussion: Our findings demonstrate positive implications for mid-air haptics in automotive contexts and highlight the general importance of user agency
Ambivalent visibilities: Social media bullying and disconnective practice of the youth
Get PDFWhile bullying on social media among the youth remains a public health problem, there is little that we know about ways of dealing with bullying by disconnection. In this article, we build upon the concepts of disconnective practice (Light, 2014) and visibility (Brighenti, 2007) to explain the ways into which the youth deal with bullying on social media. We draw evidence from in-depth interviews with 152 youth across the Philippines. First, we find that disconnective practice is a continuum of acts that involves disconnecting from people and messages and is anchored on temporality. Second, we find that visibility is both a condition for and a process of disconnective practice. Grounded in the youth’s experiences with bullying on social media, we suggest the concept of ambivalent visibilities to characterize the youth’s efforts to manage their well-being amid the volatile landscape of social media interactions. We conclude this article by discussing the implications of ambivalent visibilities for Filipino youth, their support networks, and technology designers and platform owners
Qualities of music-evoked autobiographical memories are associated with auditory features of the memory-evoking music
Get PDFStudies of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) show that music is a potent cue for retrieving vivid and self-relevant memories. However, whether and how musical features are able to predict the qualities of MEAMs – including their emotional qualities, phenomenological characteristics and retrieval efficiency – remains unclear. In our study, a sample of 233 adult participants identified a piece of music that evoked an autobiographical memory (AM) before providing a written description of the memory, and then evaluating its emotional and phenomenological content. Participants were then presented with excerpts of ten songs that were popular during their childhood and early adulthood and reported the same details for any AMs evoked. Features of all songs were extracted using the Spotify Web API and subjected to principal components analysis for dimension reduction. This revealed a primary auditory feature component – characterised by low energeticness and high acousticness – that was found to predict several qualities of the memory. Specifically, results showed that low energetic – high acoustic songs were associated with AMs characterised emotionally by aesthetic appreciation, adoration, calmness, romance and sadness, while high energetic – low acoustic songs were associated with AMs high in memory energeticness, amusement and excitement. Phenomenologically, AMs associated with low energetic – high acoustic songs were described as less social, and more vivid, unique and important, and, in terms of retrieval efficacy, tended to be retrieved more slowly. Our findings show for the first time the extent to which the qualities of MEAMs can be predicted by music’s stimulus features. Further, by taking into account how the AMs were evoked, and subjective factors related to the memory-evoking music such as liking and familiarity, our study provides insights into possible mechanisms underlying music-assisted memory encoding and retrieval. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding the links between perception, emotion and memory processes, and make suggestions for future work that can advance this research area
Conservative Catholicism and Instrumental Violence Against Animals. The Role of Religious Practices, Beliefs, and Collective Narcissism
No full textFrom the Middle Ages to the modern era, Christianity and its traditional institution, the Catholic Church, have profoundly shaped Europe’s cultural traditions, social norms, and political structures, leaving a lasting influence on public and private life, including human–animal relationships across the continent. Based on the affiliative social-tuning hypothesis and collective narcissism theory, we tested in study 1 (n = 378, 75% women) whether Catholic affiliation or commitment to Catholic practices better predicts instrumental violence against animals. In study 2 (n = 866, 51% women), we examined whether Catholic beliefs about animals and collective narcissism are positively related to such violence. We also expected the relationship between Catholic collective narcissism and instrumental violence against animals to be moderated by gender and Catholic beliefs about animals. Both studies were conducted on Polish samples, where Catholicism is predominantly traditional and conservative, shaping culture, identity, and the political landscape. Results showed that people affiliated with Catholicism were more likely than atheists to accept violence against animals; however, commitment to religious practices was a better predictor than Catholic affiliation itself. Furthermore, we found that traditional Catholic beliefs about animals were positively associated with instrumental violence, while modern beliefs and beliefs about the animal soul were negatively associated. Finally, testing a moderation model, we found that Catholic collective narcissism was positively related to the acceptance of instrumental violence against animals among Catholics in Poland, but only when modern beliefs about animals were low; when these beliefs were high, the relationship was negative. Our findings provide new insights into human–animal relationships, highlighting the role of religious factors in attitudes toward animals. This understanding is critical for developing strategies to reduce violence against animals and promote ecological sustainability
Reclassifying the UCLA ‘Loneliness’ Scales: How the UCLA has obscured the distinction between loneliness and social disconnection
Get PDFLoneliness research has been built on the idea that loneliness is simultaneously a subjective emotional state and a perceived deficit in social connections. This ambiguity has been entrenched by the field's most widely used instrument, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (R-UCLA), which is a composite scale, equally capturing both of these distinct, separable constructs. This has exaggerated the true link between loneliness and measures of social networks. While a three-item loneliness scale has been derived from the UCLA, references to it as a short-form UCLA scale are inaccurate and misleading. The UCLA thus has no valid three-item short-forms. Through a brute-force item selection process (N = 21,589) and a multi-rater validation study (N = 352), we reevaluate the R-UCLA and develop a short version. We present the UCLA-3.5 (“I feel isolated from others”; “There are people I can turn to”; “I have a lot in common with the people around me”) as a psychometrically robust and efficient composite loneliness-disconnection scale that captures the R-UCLA’s multidimensionality. This work clarifies the loneliness literature by offering a distinction between the experience of loneliness and social network appraisals
Diverse language experiences in deaf infants and in hearing infants with deaf parents: 25 years of improved understanding and recognition
Get PDFMost infants first encounter language through the words spoken in their environment. However, for a smaller number of deaf and hearing infants, language can be presented in different sensory modalities, including a visual-manual signed language (e.g. American Sign Language - ASL or British Sign Language – BSL) and an auditory-oral spoken language (e.g. English). Language acquisition trajectories for children exposed to both signed and spoken language are less understood and less recognised. For hearing children with deaf parents using sign language, recent research suggests that they develop a special case of bilingualism – bimodal bilingualism - which offers some advantages in early communication skills. In deaf children, it has now been clearly demonstrated that early exposure to sign language brings about gains in both the spoken and signed modalities, suggesting an amodal impact of language experience in infancy. The present review presents progress made in the last 25 years in understanding the impact of sign language experience in infancy. It will discuss potential neurocognitive mechanisms by which learning gains in one language modality can be transferred to the other language modality. The research data collected so far leave several questions unanswered and suggest many avenues for future research