Black Petes & Black Crooks? Racial stereotyping and offending in the Netherlands

In the popular Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas, the caricature of his helper ‘Zwarte Piet’ [Black Pete] is often of a black-faced white person. The representation of this character has been surrounded by controversy in Europe and abroad. The following paper discusses these recent controversial media stories in the Netherlands and Western Europe along with the historical context of this character. We also make an argument about how the pervasive imagery in news, television, and theatre of people of color in the Netherlands may be influencing crime statistics by creating and encouraging negative views of ‘the other’. In the Netherlands, Dutch Caribbean and Surinamese first-generation immigrants compared to white, native Dutch are over-represented in official arrest and prison statistics. We theorize that the reasons for this noticeable overrepresentation in crime statistic is it at least in part due to a societal stigma of ‘the other’ and racial profiling of black ethnic minorities.     

数字政府建设中的政务服务

本文基于新公共管理和新公共服务两大理论的学理分析,剖析了数字政府建设中政务服务效能提升的制约瓶颈并提供了相应的对策建议.分析结果表明:分散的政务服务抑制了服务效能、异向的政务数据影响了业务协同、失衡的供给能力制约了发展水平.研究结论认为,优化政务服务基础平台、完善政务信息共享机制、提高政务服务供给能力是数字政府建设中政...     

The rise of BASIC in UN climate change negotiations

This paper assesses the role of the BASIC countries — Brazil, South Africa, India, and China — in UN climate change negotiations. The paper explores the formation and evolution of the group, and focuses on how the four major developing countries of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa have coordinated their positions and acted jointly to achieve an agreed outcome with other players in the recent UN Climate Change Conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun, based on an analysis of their country profiles and negotiation positions on a wide range of climate issues. The paper argues that the emergence of the BASIC Group is a reflection of the ongoing power shift from EU–US agreement to BASIC–US compromise in UN climate negotiations since the early 1990s. The rise of BASIC also has its roots in recent global market dynamics and further reflects the power transformation in the economic dimension of the international system.     

GPC-GC/MS法分析血中20种安眠镇静药物

目的研究建立液液提取-在线GPC-GC/MS同时分析血中巴比妥类、吩噻嗪类、苯并二氮杂卓类、三环类和其他安眠精神类药物的方法。方法血样加入内标SKF525A,加β-葡萄糖酸苷酶水解后用乙腈沉淀蛋白浸取药物,加无水硫酸镁脱水,提取液浓缩至干后用GPC流动相定容,在线GPC净化,大体积进样,GC-MS分析。结果选择总离子监测模式,血中20种安眠镇静药物提取率在80.2%～99.3%之间,检出限小于21.6ng/mL;在0.1～10μg/mL浓度范围内工作曲线的线性关系良好。结论方法可用于安眠镇静类药物误服中毒者和刑事案件中毒者血样的分析。     

Connecting restorative justice with gender-responsive programming

Despite the encouraging results of public opinion assessments on restorative justice, people are not likely to spontaneously suggest restorative measures after a crime. Restorative justice thus seems in need of a public relations strategy. This paper discusses the strategy labeling victims as the universal remedy to promote restorative justice, and the proposal of promoting restorative justice through the media by foregrounding crime victims in media reports on crime. This strategy stems from a belief that the most appealing aspect of restorative justice to the public is its thoughtfulness to victims. However, I will argue that there are three problems with this approach. These concern: (1) the victim’s position in both restorative justice theory and practice; (2) the characteristics of media reporting on crime in general and victims in particular; and (3) the risk of attaining a result opposite to the initial objective (i.e. increasing punitive attitudes instead of promoting restorative justice).     

The Intellectual and Cultural Dimensions of International Relations: Present Ironies and Future Possibilities

Reported is a study that focused on the Millennial Generation and potential differences in viewing an exhibition in person versus online. The exhibition featured the artwork of Paul-Henri Bourguignon, whose extensive body of work includes a variety of paintings and drawings that employ a wide range of styles. Some viewers traveled to the physical space of a museum gallery, while others viewed reproductions of the same works on the Internet. Informants engaged in reflexive self-interviews using Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. The authors compare viewers’ responses to works experienced in person versus online and discuss implications.     

Can Twitter Add to Performance Evaluation in the Area of Performing Arts? Reflections from La Scala Opera House

ABSTRACT

Social media are continuously diffusing in performing arts organizations. Yet little is known on how social media data can contribute to the performing arts evaluation process. This article addresses this issue by investigating if and how Twitter data can add a valuable source of information to the performance evaluation process. A literature review with an empirical application on the evaluation of the performance Aida at Teatro Alla Scala provides evidence about the type of indicators that can be derived from Twitter and support a discussion about potentialities and pitfalls connected to their adoption for the evaluation of performing arts.     

How to construct your sexuality according to French magazines

Gendered magazines are a major contemporary form of mediation, (re)production and organization of (hetero)sexuality. They illustrate how sexual activity and performance become the concern and responsibility of individuals who are able to invest time and resources in the construction of a sexually-skilled self. Drawing on contemporary research, the article seeks to promote a dialogue between media and communications research, analysing French media narratives on sexuality through the reading of a selection of articles from the best-selling summer magazines aimed at 18- to 25-year-old readers. The article uses a semiodiscursive analysis to understand how didactic models are made to (re)produce specific knowledge on sexuality and to ascertain that this knowledge is coded in an expertise discourse. Through the hypothesis of a didactic ambition, three didactic models are identified, and attention is here focused on the short-coming/reparative model, that simultaneously creates a dysfunction and a fix. The analysis eventually reveals that didactic models are made to organize social life by strictly dividing sexual and therefore social roles between “men” and “women”. The moral criteria called upon regulate the ideal treatment of those didactic modalities and the discourse in magazines ends up shaping sexuality as a contemporary moral economy, a problem that should be pragmatically treated through the use of a certain type of knowledge.     

Bourgeois Myth versus Media Poetry in Prime-time: Re-visiting Mark Frost and David Lynch's Twin Peaks

This article explores IVIark Frost and David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks from the perspective of the two dominant world-views it dramatized. The world-view based in bourgeois myth can be described as employing significations that are always present in naturally and mythically transcendent terms. The other world-view is generated by media poetry, which is a virtual mode of signification that re-mediates linguistic/audio/visual phenomena with contingent capacities for meaning. That generative potential for signification is an aspect of all media use, but media poetry specifically highlights and exploits the capacity of new multi-media to enhance “poetic” possibilities for meaning-making. This may occur through either the actual use of virtual media, through a critical ambiguity with regard to official ideologies and formal/generic con-straints, or through thematic content that destabilizes fixed meanings/representations and entertains possibilities for alternative significations. The article makes the case that the adolescent characters in the show specifically embody the productive world-view inherent in media poetry, and the “poetic” challenges they present to adult, mythic society allow for the continual re-mediation of any and all bourgeois myths. Those adolescents, especially Laura Palmer, embody cultural meanings that refuse ideological codification; that is, that can still become. Twin Peaks, as the article demonstrates, is a striking example of media poetry since it was aired on prime-time network television; it still deserves attention for the stunning ways it remediated the mythic nature of American, middle-class society.     

(Anti) Queer: Introduction

Thumbnail images depicting the face of a social actor were the most common type of image used in hard-news stories on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald online (smh online), a high-circulation Australian daily broadsheet, between 2002 and 2006. While not all online newspapers use such images to the same extent as the smh online, close-up thumbnails of faces are commonplace on online newspaper home pages in general. This paper examines the use of these “thumbnail faces” on the smh online home page. Over four years (and across four page-design periods), these images were used more frequently, despite the fact that they function in a very different way to traditional hard-news images. Thumbnail faces cannot “tell stories”, nor “provide evidence”, but they play an important interpersonal role in individual news stories, collectively on the home page, and over time in the discursive relationship between the smh online and its readership.