Sacrifice for the family: representation and practice of stay-at-home fathers in the intersection of masculinity and class in Hong Kong

With changing socio-economic conditions, some men choose to become stay-at-home fathers in Hong Kong. Although they constitute only about .5% of the total male population, they have captured widespread media attention in recent years. This paper is an exploratory study on the gender representation of stay-at-home fathers in newspapers, and their identity and practice in real life in relation to the construction of masculinity in the Asian context, with particular focus on the intersection of masculinity and social class. Although stay-at-home fathers have given up their traditional breadwinner role, the media continue to portray them in terms of conventional masculinity. Contrary to the findings in Western society, this paper, which is based on Bourdieu’s practice theory, reports that middle-class men in Hong Kong with social and cultural capital are less reflexive in their gender habitus to accept their carer identity, whereas working-class fathers, who lack the appropriate capital to resume their provider status, define themselves as carers who are responsible to the family. As the identity of provider is still central to men, the emergence of this new fatherhood is only a refashioning of the traditional role of fathers and thus does not challenge the existing gender structure.     

Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from Putin to Putin

This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have negative outcomes, including a weakening of formal institutions, proliferation of “substitutions” (e.g., substitutes for institutions), and increasing centralization and personalization of control. Efforts by Russian leaders to disengage society from the sphere of decision-making entail a significant risk of systemic breakdown in unexpected ways. More specifically, given significantly weakened institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to the leadership's best guess (ad hoc manual policy adjustments) as to precisely what society will accept and what it will not, with a significant possibility of miscalculation. Three case studies of the policy-making process are presented: the 2005 cash-for-benefits reform, plans for the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up to and following major public protests in 2011–2012.     

Pulses from the multitude: virtuosity and black feminist discourse

Using a dialogic format this conversation between two authors uses political theorist Paolo Virno's conception of the “multitude” to examine and compare two different arenas of black feminist protest that took place on social media in the latter half of 2013. As a performative article, it offers historical and theoretical background to the terms “multitude,” “public intellect,” and “virtuosic labor” in racialized capitalist formations, situating them to provide an alternative to the power of the State – an alternative that unlike the State does not claim to confer rights. The article looks at the Facebook response to a call from the Crunk Feminist Collective to white feminists to speak out on the verdict exonerating Trayvon Martin’s killer and offer counter images to those that describe Martin's killing as justified. It then looks at the public dialogue around the applicability of the term “feminism” to Beyoncé's self-titled “visual album.” Through aesthetic inquiry, the authors look at the form these examples of protest take to situate and propose the active viewing of these aesthetic forms by others on social media, as well as by the authors of this article, as a kind of virtuosic labor. The article concludes with a series of poems created using the “cut-up” technique designed to transmit feeling through subjective action and a task manifesto for white feminists to use as a guide.     

(Un)twisted: talking back to media representations of eating disorders

In 2014–2015, there were several news reports about a rise in the diagnoses of eating disorders (EDs), as attributed to the use of image-driven social media. Such coverage can be situated within a long history of concern in which those diagnosed with an ED are constructed as ‘especially vulnerable’ to the power of media images – a subjectivity which is pathologised and devalued precisely through its association with femininity. The most incisive objections to EDs being presented as a response to the ‘weight’ of media representation have come from Abigail Bray (2005) in her work on how anorexia is constructed as a reading as well as an eating disorder. In exploring the results of 17 semi-structured interviews with people who have experience of an ED discussing their encounters with media representations of EDs (material that is often co-opted into debates about the ‘toxic’ nature of media culture in this regard), this article uses empirical evidence to intervene in how ‘ED’ media subjectivities are often defined. In particular, it aims to explore the qualitative responses in the context of more ‘every day’ understandings of media engagement, thus working against the gendered pathologising which has persistently occurred.     

Participatory Communication,Theatre and Peace: Performance as a Tool for Change at the End of Conflict

This article presents insights on a participatory theatre initiative implemented in Kenya, with the aim of understanding the changes that were initiated towards the re-establishment of peace between communities. The project was carried out in the aftermath of the post-election violence that took place in the country between 2007 and 2008. Amani People’s Theatre organised a number of theatre-based activities adopting a participatory approach, which ensured the involvement of community members from different tribes. Participants used the plays to re-enact the events, experienced during the conflict and the issues that still affected their communities as a result of those events, and worked together on finding solutions. The article begins with a literature review on Theatre for Development and its progress towards a more participatory approach. This is followed by an introduction of the project and the context in which it took place. The study design and Theory of Change developed for the analysis are then presented, opening the path to a discussion of the findings generated through that framework. Lastly, final reflections bring to light a number of issues that must be considered when working with participatory theatre in peace interventions.     

Criminalising Academia: The Protection of State Information Bill and Academic Freedom

This article assesses the implications of the controversial Protection of State Information Bill for academic freedom in South Africa, specifically for communications, media and journalism studies. The Bill requires the security cluster to classify sensitive documents on national security grounds. Academic teaching and research can help citizens to understand whether the security cluster is acting in the universal interest, rather than the interest of a political elite; it can also be used to assess media performance in reporting on national security matters. Using a critical approach to the concept of national security, I argue that the Bill favours secrecy over openness, and South Africa’s embrace of the human security definition of national security has contributed to the problem. This overemphasis on secrecy is likely to reduce the few spaces that exist in academia for critical, emancipatory work on security issues, which could hobble the sector’s attempts to understand the deeper processes at work in the security cluster. If such enquiry is marginalised, then the higher education system risks becoming an instrument for continuity rather than change in South Africa’s existing, highly unequal power relations: relations that are being maintained increasingly by force.     

Social media and political communication in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament

Social media play an increasingly important part in the communication strategies of political campaigns by reflecting information about the policy preferences and opinions of political actors and their public followers. In addition, the content of the messages provides rich information about the political issues and the framing of those issues during elections, such as whether contested issues concern Europe or rather extend pre-existing national debates. In this study, we survey the European landscape of social media using tweets originating from and referring to political actors during the 2014 European Parliament election campaign. We describe the language and national distribution of the messages, the relative volume of different types of communications, and the factors that determine the adoption and use of social media by the candidates. We also analyze the dynamics of the volume and content of the communications over the duration of the campaign with reference to both the EU integration dimension of the debate and the prominence of the most visible list-leading candidates. Our findings indicate that the lead candidates and their televised debate had a prominent influence on the volume and content of communications, and that the content and emotional tone of communications more reflects preferences along the EU dimension of political contestation rather than classic national issues relating to left-right differences.     

Has Television Personalized Voting Behavior?

Scholars and political observers have suggested that television has “personalized” voting behavior in American presidential elections by encouraging citizens to cast ballots on the basis of candidate image and personality. Though an oft-heard assertion, little solid evidence exists that this is true, and the reinvigoration of partisanship and the persistence of ideological conflict suggest personalization may be less pervasive than supposed. In this paper, I use National Election Studies data to examine whether voters are more concerned with candidates’ personal characteristics now than they were at the outset of the television era. I find, however, that voters are no more likely today to mention candidate personality as a reason for their vote choice than they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, while personality affects voting behavior, its influence on candidate choice is not significantly larger than it was a half-century ago. The results are not contingent on exposure to television or political awareness and are insensitive to different measures of perceptions of candidate image. The findings are consistent with the resurgence of partisan voting in American elections and suggest that some concerns about TV’s effects on political judgment are exaggerated.

The Mix of Media Use Matters: Investigating the Effects of Individual News Repertoires on Offline and Online Political Participation

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online.     

‘Utterly Disgraceful’: Social Media and the Workplace

Social media use by Australian public servants has given rise to questions pertaining to their political rights, impartiality and privacy outside of work. Drawing on the recent case Starr v Department of Human Services these issues are explored. The findings suggest that social media use has heightened tensions around public servant's rights to comment on issues of the day, and its use by employees both inside and beyond the workplace remains contested terrain.