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Why Don't We Quit?
No full textFor almost a decade, Gabrielle Moser and Helena Reckitt have co-led intergenerational feminist groups focused on collective reading, writing, and research: the EMILIA-AMALIA Working Group in Toronto, Canada, and the Feminist Duration Reading Group in London, UK. Though they each have maintained independent curatorial practices, these groups have drawn the authors back, time and again, because of the opportunity they provide to curate—as well as read, write, and think—with others. In this short reflection the authors discuss their efforts to stop working as part of these groups, and their failures to step away. Identifying the benefits of thinking and curating with others, they explore the particular energies, practices, and urgencies of working within, and on behalf of, long-term feminist collectives
Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink
Get PDFUsing the 2022 Twitter to Mastodon migration as a case study, this article contributes a new understanding of social media migration (SMM). It begins with a review of existing studies of SMM, showing how migration is often understood as a combination of ‘push and pull factors’. We suggest a need to widen the conceptual scope for how we approach SMM in ways that more directly tie such movements to specific questions of power, agency and events that ripple through digital cultures. Drawing on social media account analysis, a survey of recently migrated Mastodon users, content from high-profile Twitter users and other media commentaries, we re-present the migration in order to detail our ‘eventful’ theory of migration. Eventful social media migration is comprised of five elements: an initial X factor; the emergence of a critical voice; a collective platform consciousness; an observable migration; and a wider terrain transformation
Delta-band audience brain synchrony tracks engagement with live and recorded dance
Get PDFEvolutionary theories claim that dance and music have evolved as collective rituals for social bonding and signaling. Yet, neuroscientific studies of these art forms typically involve people watching video or sound recordings alone in a laboratory. Across three live performances of a dance choreography, we simultaneously measured real-time dynamics between the brains of up to 23 audience members using mobile wet-electrode EEG. Interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) in the delta band (1?4 Hz) was highest when performers directly interacted with audience members (breaking the fourth wall) and varied systematically with the dancers? movements and artistically predicted and actual continuous engagement. In follow-up studies using video recordings of the performance, we show that audience brain synchrony and engagement are highest when dance is experienced live and together. Our study shows that the ancient social functions of the performing arts are preserved in engagement with contemporary dance
“Show me your phone!”: Affect, neoliberal rationality, and nationalism in Türkiye’s street interviews
Get PDFAs a recent cultural phenomenon, street interviews (vox pops, sokak röportajları) in Türkiye have challenged the country’s captured media ecology and its neoliberal authoritarian establishment. Produced by journalists and circulated through social media, these interviews invite citizens to reflect on pressing national problems but soon become sites of intense political debate. In their discussions with dissidents in these interviews, pro-government citizens frequently say “show me your phone” in the middle of the discussion to deflect political criticism. With this statement, pro-government citizens produce affective encounters, mobilize neoliberal rationality, and circulate a nationalist politics of thankfulness. Probing the political work of “show me your phone,” we make a call for theorizing global neoliberal populisms beyond populist strongmen's official talks and through ordinary citizens’ affective and networked performances around everyday objects
The politics of teacher wellbeing: ‘Sung baang’, neoliberalism and power struggles in Hong Kong
Get PDFThe concept of wellbeing has attracted global attention from governments and transnational organisations concerned with the ‘teacher crisis’ in education. Since 2006, the Hong Kong government have introduced a suite of policies (‘sung baang’) to address the problem of teacher stress and burnout. Education pressure groups are critical of these efforts, however, pointing to evidence that other, celebrated policies in vogue, such as decentralisation, exacerbate the problem. In this paper we adopt the analytic of discursive institutionalism to capture the politics of teacher wellbeing as policy text and discourse, with a unique focus on how meanings of teacher wellbeing are struggled over and mobilised by different stakeholders competing to leverage their power for political gains
‘Add To Music App’: TikTok and music discovery as technologies of the self
Get PDFThis article investigates TikTok as a site of music discovery in the context of the app’s recent attempts to reassert its role in relation to music streaming platforms. Based on a survey of over 150 TikTok users and six interviews, we examine the competing platform affordances of music discovery and passive content consumption, and how TikTok’s interface attempts to manage user attention and experience. Platform affordances are understood as unfixed, relational sites of contestation between users and platforms, defined by the specific needs and motivations of both. It is argued that the increased role of recommendation algorithms in online music discovery has the potential to disrupt platform users’ ability to articulate identity and build social connections via musical practice. This is complicated by TikTok’s unprecedented ability to approximate these functions via its For You Page and its success with framing musical experiences as embodied and socially embedded, something music streaming platforms have struggled to do. Despite this, TikTok’s failure to account for some elements of users’ music discovery practice has resulted in continued tensions between two key affordances: music discovery and passive entertainment. Data suggest that the user reception of new TikTok features designed to assist and choreograph music discovery is mixed, including awareness among users of the encroachment of platformization and datafication on music discovery and digital music culture
The hospitality of objects and their travelling memories
No full textThis article investigates the tangible and the ephemeral of hospitality by drawing on new materialism, the potential of the personal object, and the possibilities it affords for making oneself at home. Migrants' everyday material life and their biographies provide a lens to discuss the shaping of migrants' histories and cultural identities. In doing this, it invokes migrants' travelling memories and personal versions of history where objects become acts of self-welcome. Such a view challenges the host–guest dichotomy often taken for granted in traditional versions of hospitality, where migrants' material lives are omitted.
Aquest article investiga allò tangible i efímer de l'hospitalitat basant-se en el nou materialisme, el potencial de l'objecte personal i les possibilitats que ofereix per sentir-se com a casa. La vida material quotidiana dels migrants i les seves biografies proporcionen una lent per discutir la configuració de les històries i les identitats culturals dels migrants. En fer-ho, invoca els records de viatge dels migrants i les versions personals de la història on els objectes es converteixen en actes d'autoacollida. Aquesta visió desafia la dicotomia amfitrió-hoste que sovint es dóna per feta en les versions tradicionals de l'hospitalitat on s'ometen les vides materials dels migrants
Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring. By Shirin Rai. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 292p.
Get PDFThe fairy tale lives on: Marketing ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and other tales to a young adult audience
No full textFrom picture books to novels, in film and theatre, and even in erotic fan fiction, countless versions of ‘Hansel and Gretel' have been created, spanning hundreds of years. Fairytales like this one are ‘constantly altered, adapted, transformed, and tailored to fit new cultural contexts' (Tatar, 2004, p. 11). And yet, the well-known abandoned children at the heart of this edited collection are not often found in young adult (YA) texts, despite the fact that YA fairytale retellings have come to form a ‘particularly popular sub-genre in the Young Adult market' (Goldman, 2023, n.p.). In a market where allonormative romance and coming-of-age stories have the largest share, it is perhaps unsurprising that a YA reader is far more likely to encounter Cinderella than Hansel and Gretel, as her adolescent, female, straight, cisgender identity makes her much more compatible with the types of narratives most often told in YA fiction