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.     

Rhetorical citizenship: studying the discursive crafting and enactment of citizenship

This article argues for the relevance of a rhetorical approach to the study of citizenship, proposing the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a term for a fourth dimension of citizenship and as a scholarly approach to the topic in addition to the dimensions of status, rights, and identity commonly recognized in the literature. We show how this view aligns with current views of the multidi Citizenship Studies mensionality of citizenship, explain our use of the term rhetoric, and illustrate the usefulness of a rhetorical approach in two examples. In close textual readings both examples – one vernacular, one elite – are shown to discursively craft and enact different notions of citizenship vis-a-vis the European refugee crisis. We conclude that a rhetorical perspective on public civic discourse is useful in virtue of its close attention to discursive creativity as well as to textual properties that may significantly, but often implicitly, affect citizens’ understanding of their own role in the polity, and further because it recognizes deep differences as inevitable while valorizing discourse across them.     

Do Civil Wars,Coups and Riots Have the Same Structural Determinants?

The literature on political instability focuses on institutional and leader survival or outcomes like civil wars and coups. We suggest that this approach overlooks lower levels of instability and that isolating outcomes understates the likelihood that they are manifestations of similar structural determinants. We extend the notion of instability to encompass jointly but distinctly civil wars, coups, and riots. Our explanation focuses on the role of political institutions and the related ethnopolitical strife over state power. Using data from 1950 to 2007, we find that the three outcomes share some determinants such as a factional partial democracy and the exclusion from power of a large proportion of the population; the inverted U-shaped effect of political institutions is driven by a subset of semidemocracies; and there is a substitution relationship between civil wars and coups emerging from the composition of governing coalitions.     

Why do Indonesian politicians promote shari’a laws? An analytic framework for Muslim-majority democracies

Taking the discussion in the existing literature on the adoption of shari’a laws in democratising Muslim-majority countries as a starting point, we posit that there are two broad motivations for democratically-elected politicians to adopt shari’a laws and regulations: ideological conviction on the one hand and response to the expressed or perceived preference of constituents on the other hand. The ‘demand side’ can be further divided into the preferences of individual voters, and the interests of groups which act as power brokers, influencing the voting choices of individual citizens. These groups may be economic, religious, or other actors. These motivations are not mutually exclusive; the passage of a given shari’a regulation may fulfil two or all three of them simultaneously. However, we posit that the interaction between the place, timing, and content of shari’a laws passed in a nation as a whole will vary in various predictable ways, according to the dominant motivations. The dominant motivation may also affect the vigour with which the law is implemented.     

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.     

The Victims’ Directive and What Victims Want From Restorative Justice

Following fierce campaigning by victims’ groups, the European Commission has entered into a process of legislative and policy reforms with the aim of repositioning the victim in criminal proceedings. By November 2015, member states will need to have demonstrated that they have modified their domestic laws to give effect to the Directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime. For the first time, restorative justice is explicitly regulated at EU legal level, as the Directive aims to establish a baseline for its safe implementation across member states. With this EU-wide policy backdrop and using original data, the article posits evidence-based recommendations for the implementation of the Directive. The research was carried out in 2013–14 as part of the “Restorative Justice in Europe” project co-financed by the European Commission. The research took place in the United Kingdom and combined desk research and qualitative research strategies with victims, while it triangulated its findings with follow-up surveys with offenders and professionals.     

日本近世关于伊势外宫地位的论争

江户时代伊势神宫中的内外两宫围绕外宫的性质和地位高低问题发生过激烈的论战。外宫神职主张,外宫的祭神不仅是丰受大神,同时也是国常立尊和天御中主神,这样就赋予了丰受大神以祖先神的性质。外宫神职同时延续了中世的"二宫一光说",即认为两宫关系是阴与阳、水与火的二元关系,天照是二宫之通称。外宫据此谋求提高自身地位,达至与内宫地位对等。内宫方面则逐个反驳以上主张,否定外宫祭神是国常立尊,并彻底反对中国的阴阳思想。外宫在论战中的失败是追求地位对等与封建等级秩序之间的根本矛盾所决定的。     

Regendering modernism: the woman artist in Irish women’s fiction

The period between 1922 and 1960 is often characterized as one of social and cultural stagnation in Ireland. Irish fiction was dominated by an avant-garde writing in exile and the local dominance of the short story. Attention to the non-canonical fiction of women during the period, however, reveals a literature that exceeds this paradigm. Meaney focuses on two novels, The Troubled House by Rosamond Jacob and As Music and Splendour by Kate O’Brien, which both feature women as artists. This figure provides in both cases a mode of combining a commitment to narrative realism with a self-reflexive exploration of the role of art, thus evading the fictional polarities of the period. The woman artist as fictional character also offers an opportunity to explore the relationship between gender, sexuality, politics and art. The linkage between sexual dissidence and aesthetic freedom is a persistent trope of modernism in the Irish context, even if it is often critically submerged under the figure of exile. Both The Troubled House and As Music and Splendour might be considered to be supplements to Irish modernism in the Derridean sense, ‘an originary necessity and an essential accident’. Through the figure of the woman artist, both of these marginal novels transgress the configurations of gender at the heart of that modernism’s aesthetic project. Both link transgressive sexuality with artistic production. In doing so they posit a very different relationship between sexuality, aesthetics and politics.     

认罪认罚案件上诉问题探讨

认罪认罚案件上诉权的设置存在多元价值冲突的情形,基于公正价值与效率价值的平衡需要,应当明确赋予认罪认罚案件被告人上诉权.在上诉权的设置上,应当对适用速裁程序审理的认罪认罚案件被告人的上诉权进行限制,要求速裁案件被告人上诉必须有正当理由,而认罪认罚案件适用其他程序审理的则无需附加理由.速裁案件被告人上诉的正当理由主要包括...