Blood,Sweat, and Tears: Navigating Creepy versus Cool in Wearable Biotech

ABSTRACT

This paper considers how personal data protections figure into the design process of wearable technology. The data question is becoming especially important in the face of recent innovations in biotechnology that capitalize on the new fungibility of biology and electronics, in which new biotech wearables capitalize on the ability to analyze and track changes in blood, sweat, and tears. Interviews and participant observation with wearable tech designers, data scientists, fashion tech entrepreneurs, and select experts in cybersecurity and intellectual property law, reveal a range of approaches to data protection in design within the culture where wearables are beginning to merge with biotech. While a few respondents were extremely vigilant about protecting consumer’s privacy, the majority felt that when consumers ‘opt in’ to data sharing, they should be cognizant of the risks. From their perspective, it is not necessarily the producer’s responsibility to protect user's personal data. These attitudes present a problematic logic, which leaves users vulnerable to data exploitation. The paper concludes by arguing that this laissez-faire culture is the environment in which wearable biotech is being developed and will be deployed. This emerging technology raises issues about bodies, data, and ownership in crucial need of analysis and critique to push its move into the mainstream toward more equitable and inclusive ends.     

Professionalization through attrition? An event history analysis of mortalities in citizen journalism

ABSTRACT

Despite both scholarly and popular claims that citizen journalism (CJ) represents a growing democratizing force in the journalistic field, recent scholarship in the area has noted the decline of the organizational population of CJ. In this paper, we investigate how individual characteristics of sites and the dynamics of larger organizational population affect a CJ site’s risk of experiencing a mortality. Drawing on the largest sample to date of US-based English-language CJ sites, this study examines the risk of site mortality through an event history framework. Findings indicate that the strongest predictor of a site’s mortality is the age of the site, consistent with organizational population theory’s ‘liability of newness.’ We also find that for-profit and community-based sites have lower rates of site mortality, indicating that adopting legitimate conventions of journalism may serve as a protective buffer to site death. The results offer mixed evidence on whether CJ has become more professionalized via attrition.     

Techno-Wizardry and movie magic: the trace of labour (or lack thereof) in 3D digital animation

ABSTRACT

This paper will argue that 3D digital animation, unlike its 2D and stop-motion counterparts, currently lacks recognisable self-reflexive aesthetic devices through which the trace of animators’ labour can be made visible. It will open with a brief history of how animation has previously shown its workings; from the pencil-wielding hand of Émile Cohl to the opening seconds of South Park, plus the intentional and unintentional smears and multiples visible on animation cells. These devices will then be discussed in relation to Marx’s analysis of the commodity in Capital Vol. 1, and how the process of fetishisation is momentarily disrupted by imperfections in the object which have been caused by production errors. These faults reconnect the object to its producer through the trace of (imperfect) labour which remains visible on the surface. In animation, similar (albeit consciously made) ‘errors’ connect the perceptive viewer directly to the work of 2D or stop-motion animators. This paper will argue the need for an equivalent to emerge in 3D digital animation, as well as highlighting some contemporary animators testing and subverting the limits of 3D and sketching some possible ways these might encourage further formal innovations.     

The Experiences of Reciprocity among Filipino Older Adults in Canada: Intergenerational,Transnational, and Community Considerations

ABSTRACT

This article illustrates the concept of reciprocity in the context of immigrant families. It recommends that definition of reciprocity account for exchanges beyond the immediate family, and render visible the simultaneous location of older people as care recipients and providers, and care arrangements across generations, borders, community, and time. Adopting a critical ethnographic study on the aging and care experiences of older Filipinos in Canada, this article analyzes data from extended observations and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 18 older people, 6 adult children, and 13 community stakeholders. Findings highlight the unique configurations of care among the Filipino community whereby older people engage in care exchange as active participants across intergenerational, transnational, and fictive kin networks.     

Your position in society matters for how happy you are

This article shows that people's perception of their position in society is strongly correlated with their level of happiness, and thus that differences in happiness levels among countries in different welfare state clusters are influenced by people's perceptions of their relative position in society (subjective position). The study drew on data from the European Social Survey. Two important findings emerged from the analysis. First, an individual's subjective position in society is a more important predictor of happiness than objective measures such as income, education and labour market position. Second, the link between individuals’ perceived position in society and their level of happiness is moderated by the welfare state. In the Nordic countries, people's perceptions of their position in society have less influence on happiness whereas in Eastern European countries we found a strong connection between subjective position and happiness.     

Who needs Cantonese,who speaks? Whispers across mountains,delta, and waterfronts

This essay digs into the ‘dirtiness’ of cultural studies to prioritize praxis, or as the way my mountain folks collect summer lotus: putting our feet in the muddy water, and finding ways to get the stems underneath the smooth leaves. Using Cantoneseness as a case to locate such ‘dirtiness’, I draw on personal/familial histories as well as research projects to tell how conjunctures of Cantoneseness are politically and unevenly lived. This complex journey travels roughly from my childhood in the Yuebei mountains of northern Guangdong through my teenage and early adult years in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) to my current location as a temporary resident in the East Pacific port of Vancouver. I selectively emphasize and speak on three different locations: first, the rural inland Cantonese location of Yuebei mountains – the borderland and hinterland experiences of my family and myself living what the mountains would offer and how these have changed; second, the industrial superior Cantonese location of PRD in Shenzhen and Guangzhou – my personal experiences and identities as a migrant youth, combined with a case study including interviews with migrant peasant-workers and their children; and third, the western transnational Cantonese location of East Pacific waterfronts in Vancouver and Richmond – my personal engagement with social activism as an ethnicized, international student, combined with a narrative study including interviews with social activists with different Cantoneseness and migration routes. While this mix of whispers speaks in its own way towards using cultural studies with more seriously (global) space-sensitive and (social justice) praxis-sensitive approaches, the primary focus is more modestly on my autobiographical accounts and research efforts as a specific case: to show some strategic locations of ‘Cantonescape’ on the one hand, and to invite wider conversations around cultural-spatial politics on the other.     

Capital Structure of Nongovernmental Development Organizations

In the first international study of this kind, we analyze the capital structure of 364 nongovernmental development organizations (NGDOs) from three different countries: Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We observe lower debt ratio values in the United Kingdom, and significant differences between countries were found by testing an econometric model with the five classical determinants of leverage, considering total debt and both long‐ and short‐term debt. We find support for the pecking order theory, and we broadly discuss some possible reasons for the obtained differences.     

‘More like a daughter than an employee’: the kinning process between migrant care workers,elderly care receivers and their extended families

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersections of formal and informal care in the relationships that develop between elderly care receivers and their families and migrant domestic care workers and their families. The domestic migrant care literature has tended to focus on two main ‘hidden costs’ of this ‘care-chain’: the ‘care exploitation’ of paid carers by their employers and the ‘care drain’ impact on the family members left behind by the migrant. In this paper, we employ a care circulation framework to examine the process of becoming kin-like – or ‘kinning’, which remains relatively under-explored and warrants further research. An analysis of this process of kinning helps to highlight how the domestic space of care receiver homes are transformed – through the negotiation of relationships with migrant care workers – into transnational social fields that bring the diaspora worlds of the migrants into the everyday worlds of the locals.     

Youth studies,citizenship and transitions: towards a new research agenda

A key goal in youth studies is to gain holistic understandings of what it means to be young. However, a significant impediment to achieving this has been the tendency of youth studies to develop along siloed and stratified subfields. In keeping with the goal of creating more productive dialogue between subfields in youth studies, this paper examines the intersections between research in youth citizenship and youth transitions to consider the fresh insights and cross fertilisations that such an analysis may yield. This examination reveals a sense of dissatisfaction in both subfields with traditional normative and linear models of citizenship and transitions which rely on step-wise and sequential notions of time. In response, the paper advances a new research agenda which posits more temporally, spatially and relationally-sensitive understandings of youth citizenship and transition. Drawing on Ingold (2007. Lines: A brief history. London: Routledge), this agenda proposes the use of three alternative metaphors – genealogical, wayfaring and threads – which could hold the potential to unsettle the normativity and linearity of previous youth transitions and citizenship frameworks, and thus provide deeper insights into what it means to live and to be young citizens in times of transition.