Tragic Narratives in Popular Culture: Depictions of Homicide in Rap Music1

Homicide is a rare event, but depictions of it are quite common in our culture and discourse. Commercially successful rappers have appropriated homicide as a central theme in their lyrical compositions. The tremendous success of rap music is indicative of its increasing popular appeal and cultural impact. We reveal the ways homicide is constructed within rap music and its frequency of occurrence across time. Employing a cultural criminology framework, we analyze the most popular rap songs over the period 1989–2000, as determined by Billboard music charts, for references to homicide. Using content analysis we explore the emergent themes associated with homicide scenarios in rap lyrics. Results show violent death was constructed in glorified ways, incorporated cautionary tales, or used as an analogy for powerful rhyming. The major themes found in these homicide‐related rap lyrics were the normalization of killing, respect maintenance, confrontation with the power structure, vengeance, and masculine confrontation. Gender patterns of killing were surprising and distinct. Homicide was almost always male on male. Careful consideration is given to the multiple meanings of homicide, particularly the ways rappers have appropriated the word “killing” and transformed it into a term that indicates creative success.     

Mass Media Campaign Impacts Influenza Vaccine Obtainment of University Students

Abstract

Objective: To describe the effectiveness of a mass media campaign in increasing the rate of college student influenza vaccine obtainment. Participants/Methods: Students (N = 721) at a large southern university completed a survey between September 2011 and January 2012 assessing what flu clinic media sources were visualized and if they encouraged them to obtain vaccination. Results: Nearly a 30% increase was seen in flu vaccination rates in Fall 2011 over Fall 2010. The main campus Web site portal was the most visualized media source among students. The majority of responses indicated that the source of information visualized had a moderate to strong influence over their decision to get vaccinated. Conclusions: Various communication channels should be utilized to increase influenza vaccination rate on a university campus. Use of mass media to influence college students to perceive, retain, and act on the message of obtaining the influenza vaccine did produce a noteworthy outcome.     

What We Should Want with History: A Meditation on Cultural Studies,Methodology, and Politics

This essay evaluates two of the central problems for Cultural Studies as a field: how to generate methodologically rigorous scholarship that is also politically useful; and how to productively use models and theory in the practice of history. Beginning with conversations about the place of (disciplinary) history in Cultural Studies, this essay explores one of the legendary debates in the field: between E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and (at least in theory) Louis Althusser. Though the debate centered on the degree to which the English Civil War could be termed a “bourgeois revolution,” Thompson's fundamental critique concerned Anderson's use of abstract models in history. However, the distinctions Thompson makes are not nearly as clear‐cut in practice – particularly when we look at Ellen Meiksins Wood's attempt to intervene on Thompson's side in her 1991 book The Pristine Culture of Capitlism. Wood's understanding of capitalism relies on an abstract conceptualization of that mode of produciton that is ironically similar to that of Althusser and Anderson. Arguing this as an illustratration of the importance of explicit models and methods, the essay develops Richard Johnson's account of Marx's use of abstraction and theory in his own historical scholarship. Marx's framework is then deployed to reconsider the English Civil War in realation to a key contemporary concern: the origins of copyright and intellectual property. It ends by advocating for what I term anarchic abstraction: a conscious, rigorous, politically‐committed, and dialectical attention to the order and determinations of history with no strict hierarchy given in advance.     

Biographical interviews and imagined futures essay writing: users of two methods in conversation

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a conversation between users of two research methods, biographical interviews and imagined futures essay writing. A dialogue form is used to discuss these methods and their potential to be combined. The value of comparing research methods is discussed, and then the two methods are described and points of connection and contrast are explored. Although one method emphasises looking back while the other looks forward, the two have much in common, including the exercise of imagination, and discussion of individual agency and structural constraint. Both involve the construction of narratives that help understanding of people’s lives as individual trajectories set in broader social and historical contexts. The two methods are quite different but complementary, and possibilities for their combination in one project are identified. The article ends by reflecting on the benefits and drawbacks of using dialogue to consider how research methods sit alongside each other.     

Managing Memphis: governance and regulation in sterile spaces of play

Designed for the express purpose of encouraging consumption-intensive capital accumulation, the physical and symbolic reconstitution of select parcels of America's urbanscape into spectacular, multifaceted environments has heralded a new epoch in the material [re]formation of urban America. Yet, on daring to venture behind the corporatist veil of urban regeneration, one is soon confronted with an array of social injustices instantiated through the brutalizing praxis of the neoliberal public/private institutional amalgams that regulate, manage, and govern today's entrepreneurial cityscapes. Our focal points in this paper are the policies and practices of social governance through which both valorized and pathologized urban bodies are made visible, regulated and managed, as they contribute toward materializing the differentiated (and indeed differentiating) new urban landscape. We concentrate our argument on one North American city, Memphis, and specifically the efforts by private and public institutions to regulate and manage the Memphis cityspace, and realize the goal of reinventing the city (both materially and symbolically). Through dissecting the Memphis scenario, we discuss, and expose: the ‘lean and mean’ (Smith, 1998) urban geographies of aggressive place management and marketing; and, the various narratives underpinning the discursive constitution of belonging and difference within the revanchist metropolis.     

Vaccine scares

Vaccination has been one of the great success stories. It has eradicated smallpox; it has greatly reduced polio and measles; it has hugely improved the health of children and adults throughout the globe. But when a single study linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism some parents refused to have their children vaccinated. Despite scientific refutation, a major public scare, lasting for years, has resulted. Nick Andrews looks at what went wrong.     

Successful Aging in the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging: Applying the MacArthur Model Cross–Nationally

Wide variation in the experience of aging is increasingly recognized and models for identifying groups based on how "successfully" individuals are aging have taken many forms. This study used the criteria developed in the MacArthur studies on successful aging to identify subgroups with higher, intermediate, or lower levels of function, and to compare them across a range of other domains. Data were drawn from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ALSA) in Adelaide, Australia, which is a population–based, bio–psycho–social study of a cohort of 1947 adults aged 70 years or more. Six waves have been conducted, between 1992 and 2000. At waves 1 and 3, an extensive personal interview and self–complete questionnaires were administered and objective physical and psychological functioning assessed. Eight–year mortality was also examined. Results showed risk and protective effects of successful aging for physical functioning and performance, lifestyle, cognition, affect, and personality. The findings confirm that people age with differing degrees of success and those aging most successfully not only live longer, but also experience a better quality of life. The MacArthur model proved useful for this cross–national comparison of determinants and outcomes of "successful" aging.     

Robust likelihood inference for public policy

Issues of public policy are typically decided by non‐specialists who are increasingly informed by statistical methods. In order to be influential, inferential techniques must be widely understood and accepted. This motivates the author to propose likelihood‐based methods that prove relatively insensitive to the choice of underlying distribution because they exploit a peculiarly stable relation between two standard errors and a 95% coverage probability. The author also notes that bootstrap and jackknife estimates of variance can sometimes be strongly biased. In fact, symbolic computations in R suggest that they are reliable only for statistics that are well approximated by averages whose distributions are roughly symmetric. The author thus proposes to transform the classical likelihood ratio into a statistic whose variance can be estimated robustly. He shows that the signed root of the log‐likelihood is well approximated by an average with a roughly symmetric distribution. This leads to Cox‐Tukey intervals for a Student‐like statistic and to simple confidence intervals for most models used in public policy.