How people organise cultural attitudes: cultural belief systems and the populist radical right

Political scientists generally agree that all individuals structure their cultural attitudes in the same unidimensional fashion. However, various populist radical right parties remarkably combine moral progressiveness with conservatism regarding immigration-related issues. This suggests that the structuring of cultural attitudes among the electorate may also be more complex than typically assumed. Applying Correlational Class Analysis to representative survey data, the study uncovers three cultural belief systems. For individuals adhering to an integrated one, all cultural attitudes are interdependent, as typically assumed. However, two alternative belief systems are also uncovered: intermediate and partitioned. In the latter, positions on one cultural attitude (e.g. ethnocentrism) are barely related to positions on others (e.g. rejecting Islam or opposing homosexuality). The existence of multiple cultural belief systems challenges the widely held assumption that all people organise their cultural attitudes similarly. Both political party agendas and individuals’ education level and religion appear key to understanding variation in belief systems.     

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.     

Victims of Terrorism and Political Violence: Identity,Needs, and Service Delivery in Northern Ireland and Great Britain

Terrorism and political violence exist fundamentally as communicative acts; inherently the acts themselves serve to inspire anxiety and fear. As the recipients of such a communicative act, victims of terrorism and political violence serve as the vehicle for the dissemination of these communications to both the intended and broader audiences. Their victimising experience is thus a complex interplay between a profound personal trauma and the political/communicative dimension of the attack. Given this complexity, this article addresses how victims’ needs are understood by victims of terrorism and political violence in both Northern Ireland (NI) and Great Britain (GB). Through engagement with practitioners, victims, survivors, and community activists, this article conceptualises the existing perceptions amongst these different groups regarding needs, the delivery of services to victims in NI and GB, and examines the origins of the different approaches. Results demonstrate that victims’ needs are highly context-dependent at a public level, but relate heavily to the experiences of other victims of terrorism and political violence at a private level.     

大学校园心理健康文化创建探讨

大学校园文化建设是学生教育工作的重要组成部分,校园文化活动是学生教育的重要载体,创建校园心理健康文化对学生心理健康教育工作有巨大的推动作用。通过对广大高校校园心理健康活动情况的调查,心理健康活动的主要方式具有不同的功能和特点,应该根据实际情况合理运用不同活动方式,创建品牌化的校园心理健康文化。     

Taiwan: An Internal Affair! How China’s Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Interact on the Taiwan Issue?

Taiwan may be an internal affair but the domestic public opinion is not invited to participate very much in a debate and a decision-making process that have remained confined to the Chinese Communist Party and the military top leadership and, on purpose, involves a very small number of officials and experts. Conservative and nationalist forces do constrain Beijing’s Taiwan policy. And some leaders are tempted to use the Taiwan issue for unrelated domestic or foreign policy purpose. Nevertheless, what is striking is the potential for flexibility in China’s Taiwan policy. While Chinese local governments and companies’ increasing interests in business-as-usual in the Strait and the unbearable cost of any armed conflict tend to narrow the government’s options, concentration of power and the efficiency of the propaganda machine allow it to rather smoothly manage, in particular vis-à-vis the elites’ conservative opinion group as well as its own public opinion, this flexibility.     

With friends like these: foreign policy as personal relationship

Governments are run by humans who have sympathies and moods. The study of leaders' personalities, albeit not widespread, is an important tool for foreign policy analysis. Plus, friendship is a feeling that decision-makers like to express for each other. This paper analyses the activity of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's three times premier, who has made ‘friendship’ a central tenet of his personal foreign policy. Three cases are considered, namely, Berlusconi's relationship with George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin. The paper concludes that his friendship-based foreign policy has somehow worked; but, because he decided to ignore Italy's structural constraints in the international arena, he ended up wasting opportunities and resources.     

中国新闻出版业向东盟“走出去”发展研究

中国新闻出版业向东盟"走出去"极具重要性,但当前存在受文化差异影响较大、出版单位文化创新能力较差、人才缺乏和认识上的不足等方面的问题。在政策支持进一步加强、中国—东盟自由贸易区建成等有利条件下,应充分响应国家相关政策,增强向东盟"走出去"的主动性;发挥广西的平台作用,增强新闻出版整体实力;增强新闻出版业"走出去"的能力;加强新闻出版人才培养;为新闻出版业"走出去"提供法律和机制保障。     

“Excuse Me,But Are You Raping Me Now?” Discourse and Experience in (the Grey Areas of) Sexual Violence

In feminist research on sexual violence and victimization, the relationship between discourse and experience has often been at the forefront of intense debates. Poststructuralist scholars have emphasized that the discourses used to name sexual violence may in fact perpetuate the very problem they set out to describe, by freezing women into powerless positions of rapability. Others have likened this sort of argument to anti-feminist trivialization of the pervasively gendered experiential reality to which such discourses refer, highlighting that women’s victimization is not a discursive problem. In this article, I seek to carve out a path that cuts through such polarization by exploring the multifaceted dialectical relationship between, on one hand, gendered discourses on sex and sexual violence and, on the other, people’s reported experiences of these phenomena and, in particular, of the “grey area” between sex and sexual violence. I do this by analysing autobiographical stories from the influential Swedish campaign #prataomdet (#talkaboutit), which emphasized the need for a new language that can do justice to people’s experiences of sexual violence and the grey area between sex and sexual violence.     

Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts

This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.