Songwriting and Activism: A Young Singer's Efforts to Write Himself into the Traditions of an Activist Group

This article examines how music functions as a vehicle by which people may place themselves in social movements. Centering questions of culture, the article describes how an environmentalist group based in the northeastern USA used music to: (1) assert a collective identity; (2) project a past, present and future; and (3) forge relationships among group members and between group members and the general public. Against this background, the article considers how a young activist used music to take on and adapt a movement identity and position himself within the movement's traditions and social relations. In a discourse analysis of a song this young activist composed and performed at the group's summer music festival, the article shows how he adapted a range of cultural resources to reimagine and place himself within the group's relations of time and social space.     

Bloodlust: a postcolonial sociology of childbirth

This paper examines intersections between ethnocentric and androcentric desire. To that end it employs a broadly postcolonial analysis of the medicalisation of birth and of women. The paper explores an ambivalence characterised by a simultaneous lust for and loathing of the other through engaging with postcolonial discourse analysis, and it ties those impulses to an imperative of control and to an administration of the other's affairs. That imperative and those impulses represent a point at which the logic of patriarchy and the logic of colonialism converge, and that point is one around which the social production of material disadvantage and negative outcomes can be explored. In the service of modern paradigms of progress and development, both colonial discourses and medical discourses underpin material relationships with the other. Whether that other is racialised or gendered, the manifest result of those relationships is the production of outcomes which are sub-optimal and pernicious in effect, and which result in a material insufficiency in the discursively produced other. The process of colonising childbirth reproduces the material effects of colonial subjectivity within a highly ambivalent and deeply imperialistic encounter. An exploration of that process demonstrates a link between power, paternalism and poor outcomes which highlights a space for self-determination in the optimisation of health and wellbeing amongst members of population groups which are vulnerable to the representations and interests of administrative power.     

Explicating race privilege: examining symbolic barriers to Aboriginal and non-indigenous partnership

Processes of racialisation and patterns of privilege continue to structure relations between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australia. This study explored the everyday ways race is reinscribed and unequal relations of power expressed, constituted and legitimised in a context marked by a history of oppressive colonisation. Conceptualising barriers to partnership as ideologically reproduced through discourse, critical discourse analysis was utilised to examine non-Indigenous and Aboriginal participants' understandings of the history of poor relations between groups. Participants were four male and three female non-Indigenous local government representatives and five female and four male Aboriginal community members, recruited for semi-structured interviews or a focus group. We focus the first part of our analysis on the discourse of ‘abstract liberalism’, which was identified in local government representatives' talk. Arguably, this hegemonic discourse, which reflects a monological conception of the world, is indicative of the circuits and consequences of dispossession within this particular local context. The discourse of ‘disregard’, mobilised by Aboriginal participants, demonstrates the continuity of coloniality and offers a counter story to the dominant ideological narrative. Explicating the reproduction of race privilege, while engaging with Indigenous knowledge as a space of critique and resistance is discussed as central to decolonisation and anti-racism praxis.     

文化“走出去”路径探析——以《吴哥的微笑》为例

云南文化产业投资控股集团响应国家文化“走出去”和云南省建设“两强一堡”战略,通过带领云南演艺集团,紧紧抓住国有文艺院团转企改制的机遇,积极推动演艺“走出去”,与柬埔寨有关方面联合创作并推出大型文化旅游演艺项目《吴哥的微笑》,受到柬埔寨政府及世界各国游客的欢迎,取得了良好的经济效益和社会效益,探索出一条国有文艺院团转企改制闯市场及演艺“走出去”的成功路径。     

基于社会文化理论的二语课堂互动话语建构及实证研究

[摘 要]在社会文化理论框架之下,对国内外二语课堂互动话语研究现状进行归纳和总结,目的是将社会文化理论教学观和课堂互动话语策略有机结合起来,并通过社会文化理论中调节论、内化论、最近发展区理论和活动理论等核心理论在二语课堂中应用的论述,有力地佐证社会文化理论对二语课堂的互动话语研究的积极推动作用。理论研究最终在二语课堂中教师提问和学生反馈实证研究中得到进一步深化。     

Till Death Us Do Part? A Critical Analysis of Obligation and Choice for Spousal Caregivers

Research demonstrates a significant number of carers identify obligation or lack of other alternatives as the reasons they undertake informal care. By utilizing critical discourse analysis, this research explores choice for informal caregivers in contemporary Australian social policy. Analysis demonstrates increasing shifts in policy toward choice in consumer-directed care, a feature absent for those who provide care. Familial care is a central pillar of Australian social policy, as it is in many liberal and conservative welfare regimes. Analysis reveals that these core social policies are fundamentally incongruent, with significant implications for individuals and social work practice.     

Are You the One? China's TV Dating Shows and the Sheng Nü's Predicament

This study looks into TV dating shows in post-millennial China. These widespread shows, exemplified by Fei Cheng Wu Rao (translated, by both local and global media, as If You Are the One), open up an ongoing social forum, which, to varying extents, enables self-articulations and renegotiations of class and gender identities and gives voice to selected female participants of the media. Through the lens of critical discourse analysis, the paper focuses on analyzing the stage arrangements and hidden rules of Fei Cheng Wu Rao, female participants' self-introductions, both male and female participants' depictions of their “ideal” spouse, and the remarks of the host and the two expert commentators. The study argues that these dating shows play upon the predicament of Chinese single women, especially those labeled as “sheng nü” (“leftover women”), who strive for upward social mobility, yet are constrained within the new gender mandate of a market economy. Stigmatizing single womanhood, the dating shows also grant a glimpse of the varied ways the media and women participants play a complicit role in reducing women's potential to resist new forms of male privilege in post-socialist China.     

“Risky Business”

Over the last few decades the number of women becoming pregnant later on in life has markedly increased. Medical experts have raised concerns about the increase in the number of women having babies later, owing to evidence that suggests that advancing maternal age is associated with both a decline in fertility and an increase in health risks to both mother and baby. In recognition of these risks, experts have warned that women should aim to have their children between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. As a consequence, women giving birth past the age of thirty-five have typically been positioned as “older mothers.” In this paper we used a social constructionist thematic analysis in order to analyse how “older mothers” are represented in newspaper articles in the British press. We examined how the topics of “choice” and “risk” are handled in discussions of delayed motherhood, and found that the media position women as wholly responsible for choosing the timing of pregnancy and, as a consequence, as accountable for the associated risks. Moreover, we noted that newspapers also constructed a “right” time for women to become pregnant. As such, we discuss the implications for the ability of women to make real choices surrounding the timing of pregnancy.     

Rape,storytelling and social media: how Twitter interrupted the news media’s ability to construct collective memory

Abstract

This study, using the Mary Kay LeTourneau interview on ABC’s 20/20 television program, investigates how social media coupled with citizens’ voices interact with mainstream media in the telling of a story and the construction of collective memory. Grounded in discourse analysis, this research examines the 20/20 story and accompanying Twitter conversations to understand how dominant and feminist ideologies about gender, rape, sexual violence, sexuality, and love are presented and (re)articulated in these texts. In doing so, this study considers how a newly opened public sphere via social media may have the capabilities to influence our collective memories and remove some of this long-held power away from traditional mainstream media.     

Security and Belonging: Reconceptualising Aboriginal Spatial Mobilities in Yamatji Country,Western Australia

Abstract

Since British colonisation of Australia began, Aboriginal mobility practices have been poorly understood within the Anglo‐Australian consciousnesses. This paper examines current discourses and conceptualisations of Aboriginal mobilities in Yamatji country, Western Australia. Finding none of these explanations and interpretations singularly sufficient to encompass the diverse spatial practices of Aboriginal people in the region, the paper proposes an alternative framework for interpreting and understanding these population dynamics. The central tenet of this reconceptualisation is that contemporary Aboriginal spatialities – including spatial distribution, movements, and immobility – are iteratively shaped by the processes of procuring, contesting, and cultivating security and belonging. In a conscious shift away from generalised and pejorative interpretations of Aboriginal mobility, this more holistic framework considers historical and geographical context, cultural identity, and individual aspirations.