Carpool Karaoke: deconstructing the directly lived experience of hearing oneself singing

The various ways whereby spatial conditions afford to monumentalize culture and to appropriate geographically demarcated places in terms of individual and collective meaning structures has been amply documented in urban cultural studies. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how cultural identity is produced against the background of musical temporality. By way of a phenomenological inquiry into the staged spectacle of James Corden’s (the host of CBS Network’s Late Late Show) Carpool Karaoke, this paper addresses the issues of directly lived experience and authenticity as facets of cultural identity. By critically discussing the assumptions of self-presence and auto-affectivity while singing and listening to one’s sung voice against the background of pre-recorded songs, the notion of directly lived musical experience is put to the test. Furthermore, by examining the dramaturgical scaffolding of Carpool Karaoke, the analysis points to wider implications for post-modern cultural studies in terms of an identified ironic reversal of modernist universal criteria of legitimacy in favor of a celebration of post-modern being-with inauthentically. The analysis of the selected Carpool Karaoke corpus utilizes a resourceful blend of phenomenological method, semiotics and interpretive videography while challenging embedded orthodoxies in the extant literature.     

Walking the walk vs. talking the talk： A comparative analysis of the ASA and ASPA ethics initiatives

The American Sociological Association and the American Society for Public Administration are widely recognized as being among the premier professional associations in their respective fields within academia and beyond. Although a commitment to the promotion of ethical competence among their members is clearly viewed by both organizations as being central to the accomplishment of their missions, their techniques for doing so have included both similar and unique initiatives. It is the purpose of this paper to provide a comprehensive, comparative inventory of their ethics-related programs with a view toward determining if the establishment of what would appear to be a mutually beneficial, collaborative relationship between the ASA and ASPA in the ethics arena should be pursued.     

Animal ethics and the political

Some of the most important contributions to animal ethics over the past decade or so have come from political, as opposed to moral, philosophers. As such, some have argued that there been a ‘political turn’ in the field. If there has been such a turn, it needs to be shown that there is something which unites these contributions, and which sets them apart from previous work. We find that some of the features which have been claimed to be shared commitments of the turn are contested by key theorists working in the field. We also find that the originality of the turn can be exaggerated, with many of their ideas found in more traditional animal ethics. Nonetheless, we identify one unifying and distinctive feature of these contributions: the focus on justice; and specifically, the exploration of how political institutions, structures and processes might be transformed so as to secure justice for both human and nonhuman animals.     

Race as Category Crisis: Whiteness and the Topical Assignation of Race

In this essay, I examine whiteness along two different axes. First, I discuss, in the context of Richard Dyer's White , the manner in which discussions of whiteness tend to be decontextualised and dehistoricised. Fundamentally, in White , whiteness is represented in terms of a homogeneous and self-identical category. In the second part of my essay, I focus on how racialised bodies, once they are situated within a specific historico-cultural context, complicate and problematise unitary and homogenised concepts of whiteness. I argue that the power and endurace of whiteness emerges out of its historical dispersions and geo-political mobility.     

Men and manners: Kantian humanism,rhetoric and the history of ethics

Modern humanist ethics (more Kantian than is sometimes thought) is driven by a will-to-perfection in the form of ideals of self-transcendence. This perfectionism entails a (would-be) exclusion or marginalisation of certain elements of ‘pre-Enlightenment’ ethical cultures bearing on rhetoric, manners and self-empowerment. This essay provides a set of conceptual-historical arguments preliminary to reinserting these disparaged elements into the forefront of a progressive ethos which, it is claimed, cannot afford to be exclusively dependent on an amalgam of Enlightenment and Romantic ideals. Ethics is irreducible to the realm of ideal and values, and there are other sorts.     

Migrant protest in times of crisis: politics,ethics and the sacred from below

This paper focuses on the 300 Migrant Hunger Strikers event in Greece to explore the material conditions of possibility for migrant politics in times of crisis. It identifies three elements that played determinant roles in the articulation of the event: the politics of equality enacted by migrants, the ethics of hospitality and witnessing enacted by the Greek activists and host populations and the sacredness of the event. Critically engaging with the theories of Rancière, Derrida, Agamben and Durkheim, this paper demonstrates how these elements encountered and how their encounter helped migrants to achieve rights, albeit limited and temporary. Moving beyond the particularity of the event, this paper also highlights the event’s importance for migrant politics in times of austerity, and increased surveillance and racism against migrants. Despite its limited and temporary success, the event demonstrates how a politics of equality, ethical openness and respect for human life can form the basis of true cosmopolitan universality. The event also demonstrates how cosmopolitan universality is constructed from below by the migrants, who despite their undocumented status, engaged in an act of citizenship to demand equality.     

Journalism ethics and Levinas' Third: interruption in a world of multiple Others

This paper develops a theory of journalism ethics centered on the concept of interruption. Interruption provides a space in which the “Other” can speak; an instance in which those with whom we have no other contact but through news media can disrupt us. While steeped in Levinasian philosophy, the theory of journalism ethics developed here challenges some of its key tenets: unlimited responsibility for the Other and the single passive ethical imperative “interrupt me.” In a world inhabited by a multitude of others, a dogmatic reading of Levinas cannot foster a “community of interruption” in which the news media play a crucial role. Ultimately, to achieve such a community, the “Third” (the Other's other) must be privileged over the Other and the passive ethical imperative requires a complementary active imperative best stated as “let me interrupt!”     

Chav-spotting in Britain: the representation of social class as private choice

The word chav is a relatively new one in British English, used to describe a supposed social group defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a young person of a type characterised by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes … usually with connotations of a low social status”. Discourse on chavs in contemporary Britain has been widely implicated in the reinforcement of social inequalities. This article argues that a central element of such discourse is the representation of “everyday” British public experience as a practice of chav-spotting, of reading materials as signs of the private characteristics of those with which they are associated. This means reading class as a privately motivated phenomenon, as the product of the “choice incompetence” of chavs. This chav-spotting practice is viewed from two perspectives: (1) as a recontextualisation of class as the result of private choice; and (2) as a practice of sign-making by which meanings are articulated for publicly observable materials in accordance with (1).     

Technics over life: risk,ethics and the existential condition in high-tech antenatal care

The subject of this paper is the problem of selective abortion brought about by advanced techniques of foetal diagnosis. The issue of abortion today is analysed as an outcome and illustration of the emerging ‘vital politics’. The paper explores the technicality of this new form of bio-power, and the ethical practice and forms of subjectivity it imposes. Two main points are raised. First, it is argued that the implementation of state-of-the-art foetal diagnosis in clinical practice and maternity care is underlain by the rationales of control and experimentation. The ideas of risk and the dividual are introduced as the epistemic cornerstones of this practice of high-tech reproductive medicine according to the above rationales. Second, the paper argues that foetal diagnosis in antenatal care is characterised by an ethical split. This emerges when the machinery of reproductive health care withdraws into a position of technical responsibility and leaves the choice, and the ethical responsibility, concerning medical operations (selective abortion, in particular) to the pregnant woman. This suggests that high-tech biomedicine tends to individualise risks and to impose a form of ethical individuality characterised by the demand for reflexivity through personal risk assessment, producing the anxiety generated by existential responsibility.     

Analysing multimodality in an interactive digital environment: software as a meta-semiotic tool

The present paper discusses issues arising from the use of an interactive digital software tool to analyse multimodal communication. The focus is on the ways in which such technical resources and associated techniques enable the analyst of social semiosis to apply different types of analysis, and provide the site for critical reflection upon the results of such analyses. The aim is to present an argument for the use of an interactive digital software application as a meta-semiotic tool. Three major challenges for scholars engaged in multimodal social semiotics are addressed in pursuing this aim, specifically with reference to the development of digital interactive analytical resources. Firstly, scholars are faced with the task of not only accounting for an increasing range of semiotic resources, but also for the way different semiotic phenomena interact to produce meaning. Secondly, the multimodal semiotician has a broad range of analytical approaches potentially relevant to any task to draw upon. Thirdly, the nature of contemporary media forms offer challenges themselves in terms of access, analysis and presentation of analysis.     

Analysing characters' interactions in filmic text: a functional semiotic approach

This paper presents an analytical tool for constructing characters' action patterns in film. Understanding characters in moving images has been regarded as one of the most significant elements of narrative comprehension and interpretation because spectators' inferences of narrative structures are substantially mediated by characters. The social semiotic method presented in this paper shows how characters' actions and interactions can be systematically constructed based on the co-patterning of textual elements in film and how the patterns provide an analytical foundation for understanding and interpreting characters. In addition, this paper also reviews the previous explorations of the more fine-grained approaches to character analysis and then demonstrates how the method the paper suggests can support and strengthen the accounts provided to date. Most importantly, by comparing scenes within and across two war films, The Thin Red Line (1998) and Black Hawk Down (2001), the article will show the potential of this method for effectively constraining hypotheses for empirical investigations of filmic meaning.     

Public service ethics,values and spirituality in developing and transitional countries: Challenges and opportunities

Concerns over the unethical conduct of leaders and public officials have led to the renaissance of interest in public service ethics and values. Although national and organizational systems and structures have been instituted to either eradicate or ameliorate unethical behaviours in the public service of countries, the practice still persists with devastating consequences. As one way forward, spirituality has been touted as having the potential of stimulating the moral thoughts of individuals who are dealing with ethical issues, thereby reducing unethical behaviour and generating positive organizational behaviour. Drawing from the perspectives of developing and transitional countries, this special issue empirically examines the extent to which ethics, values and spirituality can reduce unethical behaviours.     

先秦儒家思想视野下的生态伦理观及现代价值

先秦儒家天人合一的生态哲学、仁民爱物的生态伦理情怀、取物有时有节的生态伦理实践精神以及制用天命的生态保护原则,在我国古代生态伦理思想中产生了深远而重大的影响。深入挖掘和梳理阐释先秦儒家生态伦理思想,对于进一步提高人们的环境道德自觉意识、构建节约型社会及建设生态文明具有重要的理论意义和实践价值。     

Distanced suffering: photographed suffering and the construction of white in/vulnerability

There has been much debate about the ethics and effectiveness of the circulation of photographs of suffering. An analysis of commentaries and reviews of such photographs shows that the genre interpellates a particular spectator, for whom the “distance” of suffering is viewed from a comfortable centre. This mode of spectatorship is identifiable as “white” in its claim to unmarked privilege. The photographs threaten to destabilise this unmarked privilege in potentially productive ways, but the reproduction of colonial viewing relations means that whiteness remains centred. The paper concludes by attempting to destabilise the centre by bringing the discussion of the relation between suffering and sovereignty closer to “home”.     

Begging and belonging in the city: a semiotic approach

Citizens develop routine spatial enunciations through which they “domesticate” both the intensity of transition and the extension of distance implied by moving across a city and smooth out the frontiers between environments of belonging (e.g. home) and environments of non-belonging (e.g. the streets). Yet urban “accidents” constantly threaten the impermeability of such routine spatial enunciations. Beggars represent, from the point of view of citizens, an instance of such urban “accidents”. The primary goal of urban beggars is to intercept the routine spatial enunciations of citizens, stop them, and convince them to donate part of their money. In order to achieve these goals, beggars develop a series of micro-strategies that can be analyzed as both semiotic practices and urban performances. At the same time, citizens constantly reabsorb these micro-strategies in their routine spatial enunciations, pushing beggars to the elaboration of new strategies, and so on and so forth, in a continuous struggle between the citizens’ desire to protect their feeling of sedentary belonging and the beggars’ need to invade it. From this point of view, routines of sedentary belonging are a manifestation of power. But why are citizens willing to have their routine spatial enunciations through the city be stopped by all sorts of agencies (for instance, the commercial agency of advertisement), whereas they cannot wait to expel beggars from the urban landscape? Perhaps this discrepancy depends on the elimination of the spiritual discourse of charity from the urban arena?     

Saving virgins,saving the USA: heteronormative masculinities and the securitisation of trafficking discourse in mainstream narrative film

Sex trafficking has become a high-profile, celebrity endorsed issue, attracting much international attention. Accompanying this has been a proliferation of films, including full-length feature films, which address the topic and have done much to influence public perception of the issue. This paper analyses two of these films which were made for the mainstream US market: Trade and Taken. Both films present a conservative and heteronormative perspective revolving around middle-aged North American law enforcement officers rescuing innocent young girls. Hence, these films participate in the general securitisation of trafficking discourse in which the US has been a leader. In spite of their ostensible concern about the exploitation of women, these films present trafficking mostly as an occasion for the redemption and rehabilitation of the beleaguered white American male, appropriating the problem of trafficking in the service of a US-led neo-imperialism bolstered by masculinism and xenophobia, and implicitly problematising women's independence and justifying the control of their movements and sexuality.     

E-victimization and e-predation theory as the dominant aggressive communication: the case of cyber bullying

ABSTRACT

The paper will focus on the identification of several key criteria in e-discourses via the constitution of e-images of the Anonymous arising from e-medias (Facebook, twitter, Snapchat, WeChat, etc.) with a specific focus on youngsters and their (ab)uses of these communication channels to facilitate digital predation, and so to lead to e-victimization. I will explain the specifics of e-victimization discourse taking into consideration its triadic dimension. I will then be able to conceptualize a dominant e-communication and the e-victimization theory around central ideas of dynamics of violence, gender discrimination and power abuse leading to a semio-sphere with a deep focus on anonymity, exposure, frequency, and insecurity as indicators of collective e-delinquency and proneness to e-victimization.     

The message on the street corner: alchemy,public health and the Brussels Manneken Pis urinating statue

Manneken Pis, a Renaissance fountain in Brussels depicting a urinating boy, is a “floating signifier”, attracting multiple symbolic meanings from its earliest appearance. There is a surprising degree of overlap between meanings attached to the statue by hermetic alchemists and those used in health promotion campaigns. Approaches to alchemy could be scientific or spiritual but shared symbolic modes of expression. Both alchemists and public health promoters see the statue as capable of inspiring practical changes in behavior in an individual. From the starting point of an account of an eighteenth-century search for the philosopher’s stone which is said to have ended in a tragic death, this article examines how alchemists and proponents of public health have used the image of the urinating boy.