Let’s be careful out there … : how digital rights advocates educate citizens in the digital age

From the early days of the printed press, citizens have challenged and modified the information environment as constructed by governments and media organizations. In the digital era, this struggle is manifested in the work of civil-society organizations calling to expand the boundaries of digital rights such as access to the internet, freedom of speech, and the right to privacy. Alongside their traditional activity of confronting governments and internet organizations, these bodies have also engaged in educating citizens about their rights. In order to shed light on such educational efforts, I examine the activities of four civil-society organizations operating in three countries (Germany, Israel, and the U.S.) by conducting a content analysis of their websites between 2013 and 2015. The results suggest that the organizations’ interactions with the public are guided by three main principles: (1) cultural informational framing: delivering accurate technological and political information, which is framed so as to resonate with the cultural premises and everyday lives of the target audiences; (2) personal activism: propelling citizens toward participation, primarily through political clicktivism and by providing them with technological guidance and tools for digital self-protection; and (3) branding digital rights activism: fostering a unique image for a particular organization’s digital rights activism, mostly through selling merchandise to citizens. Using these strategies, the organizations aim to construct the social–political–cultural identity of a generation who are knowledgeable, politically active, and aware of their rights in the digital age. The characteristics of this identity are discussed in the conclusion.     

Establishing a new scopic regime: the new landscape painting of Mao’s era

ABSTRACT

After 1949, with ‘serving the people’ established as the basic guideline of art, the reform of traditional landscape painting, which had been appropriated by the cultural elites for thousands of years, was put on the agenda as well. Beginning from the early of 1950s, there were continual debates on the reform of traditional Chinese painting within the art field, through which many artists gradually reached a consensus on the development direction of Chinese painting. At the same time, stimulated by the large-scale xiesheng movement sponsored by the government, Chinese landscape painting changed dramatically in subject, theme, and brushstroke technique, and developed a new style which has its own signifying system. Blending both Chinese and western drawing skills, the new landscape painting successfully created a unique scopic regime, which can establish an organic relationship between personal aesthetic experience and collective historical experience. As a prominent cultural achievement of Mao’s era, the new landscape painting embodies the cultural politics and the technologies of the self at that time.     

Narratives of life experience in the digital space: a case study of the images in Richard Deitsch’s single best moment project†

ABSTRACT

On 8 July 2013, Sports Illustrated media critic Richard Deitsch – inspired by a photo that captured a friend celebrating with a brother who had won the NCAA Hockey Championships – asked his 90,000-plus Twitter followers if they had the best moment of their life captured in a photograph. Deitsch retweeted the initial pictures, which prompted many more people to send out photos of their favorite moments. Many of his followers shared photos of some of their most intimate moments, leading CNN to call Deitsch ‘the sportswriter who made Twitter cry’ [Mendoza, D. (2013, July 11). The sportswriter who made Twitter cry. CNN. Retrieved December 11, 2013, from http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/11/tech/storify-best-moments/.s]. Through a thematic examination of 314 photos shared in the Deitsch exchange, the authors reveal that an overwhelming number of images are identified as milestone moments, or narratives of life experience, which denotes that as communication platforms evolve and technologies offer different modes of expression, users are still selecting narrative structure to disseminate their messages.     

Carl Schmitt’s politics in the age of drone strikes: examining the Schmittian texture of Obama’s enemy

When George Bush declared to his global audience that they were either ‘with us or against us’, he appeared to directly invoke the Schmittian antithesis of friend vs. enemy. Against the historical backdrop of Bush’s war on terror, and the scholarly attention his foreign policy received in relation to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, this paper examines whether the Obama administration’s targeted killing regime has marked a departure from Schmitt’s paradigms of war and enmity. Focusing specifically upon the rapid increase in use of drone strikes during Barack Obama’s presidency, this paper argues that the production of the enemy’s abstractness and drive for its annihilation together push at the limits of the Schmittian political logic. However, rather than denoting the point at which political relations are unexplainable through a Schmittian lens, this paper proposes that this produced enemy and its treatment in drone ‘warfare’ obfuscates the lines between a complex of Schmittian paradigms.     

Engaging publics in the mobile era: A study of Chinese charitable foundations’ use of WeChat

WeChat, the most widely used social mobile application nowadays in China, marks the advent of a mobile communication age that has reshaped Chinese people’s lifestyles. Understanding Chinese nonprofits’ communication performance on WeChat is a nascent field of study that calls for public relations scholars’ attention and investigation. By observing the most transparent Chinese charitable foundations, this study conducted a quantitative content analysis to examine their use of WeChat for dialogic communication with publics. Particularly, this study examined the dialogic features employed on the official WeChat accounts of these foundations as well as the public engagement functions fulfilled by their WeChat posts. The findings indicate that the dialogic potential of WeChat has not been fully utilized by the Chinese foundations. The official accounts have been relatively successful in fulfilling the provision of useful information toward interested publics, but most of them still have not created a dialogic loop with their audience. The WeChat posts primarily act as information sources but also perform the salient function of calling upon actions. In addition, certain communication strategies were identified in the posts to attract audience attention and to promote organizational activities, such as the incorporation of multimedia content and popular online events.     

Spatial politics in the digital realm: the logistics/precarity dialectics and Deliveroo’s tertiary space struggles

This paper uses the case of mobilization of delivery workers from digital platform Deliveroo in order to illustrate the production of space of resistance, which develops as a result of the tension of two emerging factors shaping the digital labour realm: logistics and precarity. On the one hand, I consider how logistics in the digital capitalist context produce precarious workers whose ICT-driven connectivity and flexibility responds to the logistical imperatives of effective commodities circulation. On the other hand, taking advantage of the tech-savvy precarious position they were hired for, Deliveroo workers display the capability to strategically cut across “abstract” and “differential” space, and therefore re-territorialize a third space dimension where digital labour can organize and antagonize digital capitalism.     

Nonverbal Communication of Similarity Via the Torso: It’s in the Bag

The human body plays a central role in nonverbal communication, conveying attitudes, personality, and values during social interactions. Three experiments in a large, open classroom setting investigated whether the visibility of torso-located cues affects nonverbal communication of similarity. In Experiments 1 and 2, half the participants wore a black plastic bag over their torso. Participants interacted with an unacquainted same-sex individual selected from a large class who was also wearing (or also not wearing) a bag. Experiment 3 added a clear bag condition, in which visual torso cues were not obscured. Across experiments, black bag-wearing participants selected partners who were less similar to them on attitudes, behaviors, and personality compared to the bag-less—and clear bag—participants. Nonverbal cues in the torso communicate information about similarity of attitudes, behavior, and personality; the center of the body plays a surprisingly central role in early-stage person perception and attraction.     

‘Black holes in the fabric of the nation’: refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT

This article explores the representation of refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a novel which has been widely celebrated for its response to the refugee crisis of its contemporary moment. In a distinct echo of Salman Rushdie’s claim, thirty-five years earlier, that it ‘may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated’, Hamid’s novel similarly claims that ‘we are all migrants through time.’ Moreover, like Rushdie’s fiction, Hamid’s novel incorporates elements of magical realism: its protagonists escape their unnamed war-torn city through a ‘door’ that instantaneously transports them to Mykonos, and they subsequently travel through other such ‘doors’ to London and California. Their story is interspersed with a series of vignettes in which other migrants also find themselves magically transported across national borders. As well as considering the ways in which Hamid’s novel seeks to humanise refugees, this article considers the novel’s evocation of a world in which human beings – like capital, images, and (mis)information – have gained access to largely ungovernable networks of instantaneous travel across vast distances. It argues that Hamid’s novel is not just ‘about’ refugees but also constitutes a reflection on how they and their journeys are represented and mediated by actually-existing technologies.     

Corruptus interruptus: the limits of transactional imaginaries in Moi’s Kenya

This article attempts to unsettle treatments of sovereignty that assume an intrinsic relationship between violence and the law even while critiquing the capacity of the law to ground social order through violence. In such discussions, the police become the embodiment of the force of law without content, especially in totalitarian contexts. In contrast, this article explores other conceptions of the police and by extension, sovereignty, at work in Kenya through an examination of police/citizen interactions at a marked political moment – the end of the 24-year rule of Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi in 2002. Through a particular example of the complicated conviviality that pervades state/society relations in many patrimonial political contexts – in this case between a policeman, a bus driver, and the bus diver’s wife – I attempt to reframe normative conceptions about the police and of enforcement in the context of Kenya’s failing patrimonial economy of circulation and capture in the early 2000s.     

It’s All in the Definition: Color-Blind Interpretations of School Diversity

Color-blind theory posits that ignoring race is a purposeful tool for protecting white privilege. Implicit in this theory is the idea that color blindness arises in times of racial threat because color-blind attitudes provide individuals with a tool for justifying racialized practices. Schools provide an ideal context for testing these implicit assumptions of color-blind theory. Public schools have shifted from using race conscious practices, such as forced busing, to racially ambiguous ones, such as touting diversity to address racial integration. Diversity is racially ambiguous because it can be interpreted as the inclusion of racial minorities but can also have a broader, color-blind meaning. In this study, I use a survey experiment to test whether experiencing racial threat leads white participants to have a color-blind interpretation of school diversity and whether racialized practices (in this case, picking a whiter school) mediates that relationship. I find evidence corroborating color-blind theory. Experiencing racial threat increases the probability that participants have a color-blind understanding of school diversity. Further, I find evidence that the mechanism explaining this relationship is participants picking whiter schools, highlighting that color blindness can be used as a tool to justify racialized practices.     

Storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter: belonging and the transnationality of home in older age

ABSTRACT

Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a fictional account of a Chinese American woman and her mother, a first-generation migrant, who is negotiating dementia in later life. Analysis of diasporic novels can provide insight into migrant belonging, especially the emotional geographies of home and emotional subjectivities of ageing that are not commonly or easily elucidated even by qualitative interviewing methods. This article examines Tan’s construction of ageing as an intergenerational, cultural and emotional process, and highlights the role of storytelling as an everyday home-making practice through which the transnationality of home in older age becomes evident.     

The underridization of Nancy: tracing the transformations in Nancy’s idea of community

My aim in this paper is to expose a misrepresentation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas on community in the secondary literature. I argue that discussions of Nancy’s work have failed to recognize a transformation that has occurred in his later thought, which distances him from Jacques Derrida. I propose that Nancy’s later work points the way beyond the “persistence of unhappy consciousness” in deconstruction through allowing for the possibility of the creation of a world alternative to globalization. Recognition of this transformation is suggestive for how Nancy’s theoretical framework might be employed in analyses of recent resistance movements.     

Waste’s dominion: the gymnastics of value in informal markets*

Abstract

This paper examines sites of informal trade in Morocco, what the locals call joutiat (sing. joutia). It departs from the semantic and real-world politics of disposability (of objects and people), to unravel the underlying meanings of the joutia as a contested space. The joutia is a place where not only objects of value wait to be rediscovered, but also where invisible and socially underprivileged beings perpetually ransack heaps of trade articles to unmask a hidden gem. I provide an account of the social dynamics of abjection inside/outside the joutia, arresting the ambivalence of objects, which – as they keep vacillating between value and lack of it – turn into “treashure”. I use this neologism, which combines two antithetical terms (trash and treasure), to (a) put into question issues of visibility and invisibility in informal Moroccan enterprises, (b) crystallise the paradoxes of being and becoming inside and outside the market arena, (c) offer a profound reflection on the absurd nature of value in the informal landscapes of (non)random economy and (d) demonstrate that the forms of abjection inside the market have their origin elsewhere.     

Navigating change in the era of COVID-19: The role of top leaders’ charismatic rhetoric and employees’ organizational identification

The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had tremendous and swift effects on organizational change. This study examined how organizations can leverage leadership and employee resources to facilitate positive change outcomes. Drawing from the self-concept based motivational theory of charismatic leadership and substitutes for leadership theory, the current study proposed a theoretical model connecting top leaders’ charismatic rhetoric, employees’ affective commitment to change, and employees’ turnover intention. Furthermore, the study investigated contingencies that may modify the relationship between leadership communication and followers’ outcomes. Results from an online panel of 417 U.S. employees showed that top leaders’ use of charismatic rhetoric during change led to followers’ affective commitment to change, which decreased their turnover intention. Furthermore, employees’ organizational identification moderated this relationship. When employees have low identification with their organizations, top leaders’ charismatic rhetoric to address the immediate change is more needed.