Doing (things with) sounds: introduction to the special issue

This special issue aims at analyzing music as a site of social semiosis, i.e., at investigating the manifold ways in which music is constituted as a socially shared event. The papers collected here follow three main threads, considered as central aspects of music making: studying the kind of coordination and participation required to make music together; looking at the semiotic resources employed by musicians to construct their roles in interaction; examining the relationship between language and music. A variety of perspectives is adopted, ranging from social semiotics to conversation analysis, anthropology, multimodal analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Such a variety is also reflected in the musical traditions – Western art music, jazz, gospel, church hymns, pop music – and in the settings under examination, which comprise instructional activities like musical classes and rehearsals, as well as ordinary conversations and written accounts of musicians' biographies. Issues of epistemicity and authority, intersubjectivity, correction of musical action, solidarity, and ideology are thereby addressed. The issue thus aims at exploring the richness and complexity of music making as a social practice, and documents how the integration of different disciplinary perspectives can offer fruitful insights on music as a domain of sociality which lies at the intersection of aurality and writing, norm and creativity, individuality and collectiveness.     

The overweight female body in Malaysian slimming advertisements: problem and solution

This study analyses image and text to investigate the way slimming advertising exploits women’s fear of being overweight to the extent that they feel obliged to do something about their own bodies. We show how Malaysian slimming advertisements construct certain types of female body which reinforce cultural stereotypes, namely the overweight body that exceeds culturally acceptable limits of desirable body size, and the desirable and attainable slim body with no excess fat. Three sample advertisements were selected from a Malaysian English newspaper and analysed using Jewitt and Oyama’s framework to identify the way images and text are used to give specific meanings relating to the female body. The images were examined in terms of representational, interactional and compositional meanings, and the analysis provides evidence of how the extremely overweight female body is pathologised, making it the focus of critical scrutiny. The advertisements use body images to illustrate the problem of being very overweight and the desirability of being slim, and the consumption of slimming services as a quick and easy solution to the problem.     

“非虚构写作”在网络舆情事件中的情感动员功能与表达逻辑

社交媒体时代,舆论生态的“后真相时代”特征日益鲜明,情感与信念成为网络舆情事件的主要动力。“非虚构写作”作为将纪实报道与文学创作结合起来的写作手法,在网络舆情事件中发挥着强大的情感动员功能。通过将悲情叙事、身份标签、戏谑表达等传统的网络情感动员表达逻辑与“文史合一”、忧患意识等“非虚构写作”本土概念巧妙嫁接,“非虚构写作”引发了一系列重大网络舆情事件,呈现出社会学观察、原型叙事、文化冲突三种表达逻辑。“非虚构写作”在舆情表达、舆论监督、社会观察等方面发挥着积极作用。同时,带有深刻情感色彩的“非虚构写作”也蕴含着网络民粹主义、网络暴力、网络虚假信息等诸多风险因素。如何实现“非虚构写作”批判与建设、解构与建构、破与立等方面的平衡,这为互联网生态建设提出了新的内容和新的问题。     

Peasant,Patriot, Environmentalist: Sustainable Development Discourse in Havana

Private urban agricultural ventures, initially a spontaneous response to food shortages during the Special Period, soon became a state‐sponsored project, related to global notions of sustainability. This article explores the relationship between sustainability discourse and its local dimensions to reveal the role of sustainability in the reformulation of the Revolution. Urban gardeners engage with international discourses of sustainability and interact with the Cuban state's articulation of these discourses. While this process forces urban gardeners to adapt to the changing meanings of growing food, it also provides a different language through which gardeners define themselves, especially in the context of a changing relationship with the state.     

(In)civility and online deliberation: readers’ reactions to race-related news stories

Reacting to an increase in gratuitous racist and sexist comments made by readers in response to online articles, media outlets in South Africa have begun closing down their comments sections, an action that has been repeated many times over across the globe. After a particularly abusive tirade against a young women who wrote an article about being black in Cape Town, Independent Media established an advisory panel in 2014 to investigate the nature of user-generated content (UGC) on their news site, Independent Online (IOL). One of the panel’s recommendations was that what is meant by “uncivil” discourse on online news sites be delineated more accurately and narrowly. Employing computer-mediated discourse analysis, we explore the nature of civility and incivility generated by readers of online news. We look at readers’ posts in response to race-based topics and uncover the complexities inherent in describing both (in)civility and deliberative discourse precisely. Our sample is drawn from the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian Online, one of the few national media establishments that permitted user comments during our data collection phase.     

Contributing to Global Growt

正The highlight of this year’s Group of 20(G20)Summit in Brisbane,Australia,was the formulation of a comprehensive growth strategy raising the collective GDP of all the 20 nations by 2 percent within five years.This is the first time that the G20 has set concrete goals for economic growth.In the time since the financial crisis,the global economy has grown at a slower pace than usual.Amid the influence of     

Beyond the literary veil – Women writing Africa: The northern region (2009)

Abstract

Whenever African literature is discussed there is an articulated incorrect assumption that this relates to all the regions of Africa, except North Africa. A related further assumption is that only men in North Africa write. Female writers from the North barely receive critical attention, although they have been writing creative works. The aim of this article is to dispel the notion of literary drought when describing North Africa. Using the text, Women writing Africa: The northern region, the article demonstrates the different sensibilities that female authors in North Africa have created and manifest, when writing against patriarchy as well as against ideological philistinism within their communities. It is argued that female authors from North Africa – African-Arab women – are versatile in their imaginations as they engage with social reality from the perspective of creative art as well as political discourse. The article concludes that this assertion removes the literary veil so that North African female authors can begin to be appreciated artistically, more than has been the situation up to now.     

Where goes economics and the economies?

What is happening to economics and the economies? This paper provides some reflections on the current state of the discourse of economics and its relationship to changes in the economies to which that discourse is linked. The arguement is that the discourse of economics is in a fundamental state of flux, in both its conventional and its heterodox forms. The new analytical agendas thrown up by these changes are assessed and the ‘politics’ of their implications alluded to.