Introduction to Painful Laughter: Media and Politics in the Age of Cringe

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Wieland Schwanebeck
Keyword(s):  
Special Issue ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Media And Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Sociopolitical Issues

This introduction to the Special Issue on cringe humour briefly traces the starting point of the contemporary cringe boom, and it looks into the roots of awkwardness as a cultural phenomenon in the 1960s. Moreover, the introduction argues for the cathartic potential of cringe humour in the context of sociopolitical issues, and briefly presents the subsequent articles.

scholarly journals The Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Religious Exercise: Preliminary Remarks

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Adelaide Madera
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Legal Contexts

Since 2020, the spread of COVID-19 has had an overwhelming impact not only on our personal lives, but also on domestic regulatory frameworks. Influential academics have strongly underlined that, in times of deep crisis, such as the current global health crisis, the long-term workability of legal systems is put to a severe test. In this period, in fact, the protection of health has been given priority, as a precondition that is orientating many current legal choices. Such an unprecedented health emergency has also raised a serious challenge in terms of fundamental rights and liberties. Several basic rights that normally enjoy robust protection under constitutional, supranational, and international guarantees, have experienced a devastating “suspension” for the sake of public health and safety, thus giving rise to a vigorous debate concerning whether and to what extent the pandemic emergency justifies limitations on fundamental rights. The present paper introduces the Special Issue on “The crisis of the religious freedom during the age of COVID-19 pandemic”. Taking as a starting point the valuable contributions of the participants in the Special Issue, it explores analogous and distinctive implications of the COVID-19 pandemic in different legal contexts and underlines the relevance of cooperation between religious and public actors to face a global health crisis.

Editorial: Refashioning stories for celebrity counterpublics

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina Moro ◽  
Samita Nandy ◽  
Kiera Obbard ◽  
Andrew Zolides
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Ted Talks

Using celebrity narratives as a starting point, this Special Issue explores the social significance of storytelling for social change. It builds on the 8th Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies conference, which brought together scholars and media practitioners to explore how narratives inspired by the lives of celebrities, public intellectuals, critics and activists offer useful rhetorical tools to better understand dominant ideologies. This editorial further problematizes what it means to be a popular ‘storyteller’ using the critical lens of celebrity activism and life-writing. Throughout the issue, contributors analyse the politics of representation at play within a wide range of glamourous narratives, including documentaries, memoirs, TED talks, stand-up performances and award acceptance speeches in Hollywood and beyond. The studies show how we can strategically use aesthetic communication to shape identity politics in public personas and bring urgent social change in an image-driven celebrity culture.

Hemispheric Studies

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Bauer
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Investigation ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Hemispheric Studies ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
The 1960S

When, in 1990, Gustavo Pérez Firmat asked, “Do the Americas have a common literature?” He was responding to a fledgling critical endeavor that had been pioneered during the previous decade in only a handful of studies, by such Latin Americanists and literary comparatists as M. J. Valdés, José Ballón, Bell Gale Chevigny, Gari Laguardia, Vera Kutzinski, Alfred Owen Aldridge, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (“Cheek” 2). Although “inter-American literary studies”—the comparative investigation of the “literatures and cultures of this hemisphere” as one unit of study—seemed to Pérez Firmat “something of a terra incognita” in 1990 (“Cheek” 1–2), the hemispheric conception of American studies had originated in the United States some sixty years earlier with the Berkeley historian Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870–1953), who argued, in his seminal 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association, for an “essential unity” in the history of the Western hemisphere (472). Although the contributing historians in Lewis Hanke's 1964 collection of essays Do the Americas Have a Common History? gave this “Bolton Thesis” a decidedly mixed review, the thesis provided the inspiration for Pérez Firmat's landmark collection and a starting point for much subsequent hemispheric scholarship. Meanwhile, inter-American studies has had a strong tradition in Europe that is, in fact, older than Pérez Firmat's or Hanke's collection. As early as the 1950s, the eminent Italian Americanist Antonello Gerbi was publishing his groundbreaking works in comparative hemispheric and Atlantic history, which studied the early modern polemic about the degenerative influences the New World environments had on plants, animals, and humans. Also, Hans Galinsky, at the University of Mainz, was exploring the literature of the European discovery and aesthetic forms such as the baroque in the early Americas from a comparative perspective in the 1960s.

scholarly journals GRAPE, Solar Terrestrial Physics in an operational environment

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgiana De Franceschi ◽  
Maurizio Candidi
Keyword(s):  
Space Environment ◽  
Ionospheric Scintillation ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Operational Environment ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Earth Space ◽  
Near Earth Space ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Space Data

<p>[…] The collection of papers that forms this special issue represents the whole amplitude of research that is being conducted in the framework of GRAPE, while also connecting to other initiatives that address the same objectives in regions outside the polar regions, and worldwide, such as the Training Research and Applications Network to Support the Mitigation of Ionospheric Threats (TRANSMIT; www.transmitionosphere.net), a Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) Marie Curie Initial Training Network that is focused on the study of ionospheric phenomena and their effects on systems embedded in our daily life, Near-Earth Space Data Infrastructure for e-Science (ESPAS), an FP7-funded project that aims to provide the e-Infrastructure necessary to support the access to observations, for the modeling and prediction of the near-Earth Space environment, Concept for Ionospheric Scintillation Mitigation for Professional GNSS in Latin America (CIGALA) and its follow-up and extension Countering GNSS High-Accuracy Applications Limitations due to Ionospheric Disturbances in Brazil (CALIBRA), both of which are funded by the European Commission in the frame of FP7, for facing the equatorial ionosphere and its impact on GNSS. The main objective of the present Special Issue of Annals of Geophysics is to collect recent reports on work performed in the polar regions and on the datasets collected in time by the instrumentation deployed across various countries. This collection will set the starting point for further research in the field, especially in the perspective of the new and very advanced space system that will be available in the next few years. […]</p>

scholarly journals Italian Thrilling Spectacle Between Aesthetics, Ethics, and Ideology. Popular Genres of Italian Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s in Czechoslovak Film and Non-Film Periodicals (1960–1989)

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-372
Author(s):  
Jan Švábenický
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract This study examines journalistic, publicist, and critical discourse in relation to the popular genres in the Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s in Czechoslovak film and non-film periodical press. Of interest are mainly comprehensive texts that analyse Italian popular genres as a genre system and a specific corpus of films that belong to the same genre. Czech and Slovak translations of foreign studies and texts (with the exception of some examples), interviews with Italian filmmakers, short glosses, or informative texts are beyond the scope of this research. This study reflects critical, journalistic, and publicist interpretations and views by Czechoslovak press of popular genres in national Italian cinema in the selected historical period. Research is divided into two parts that develop specific aspects of these analytic questions. The first part analyses texts about this subject matter in various film a and non-film periodicals, including newspapers and journals with emphasis on long studies and interpretations of a few categories of popular genres viewed in the extensive context of their national, socio-cultural, iconographic, and industrial aspects. The second part deals only with the popular genre of western all’italiana (western in Italian style), which represented an international cinematic and socio-cultural phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and was of the greatest interest to Czechoslovak critics, journalists, and publicists in relation to popular genres of Italian cinema in general.

scholarly journals Introduction to special issue: Learning assessments for sustainability? Exploring the interaction between two global movements

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 121
Author(s):  
Oren Pizmony-Levy ◽  
Dafna Gan
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Secondary Analysis ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Learning Assessments ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Meaningful Engagement ◽  
Global Movements ◽  
The 1960S

The aim of this special issue, “Learning Assessments for Sustainability?”, is to examine the interaction between the environmental and sustainability education (ESE) movement and the international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) movement. Both global educational movements emerged in the 1960s and their simultaneous work have affected each other since then. While the articles in this special issue highlight the potential benefits of ILSAs as a source of data for secondary analysis, they also demonstrate the limitations of ILSAs and their negative consequences to ESE. As such, we call for more research on the interaction between ESE and ILSAs and for a serious consideration of how test-based accountability practices might work against meaningful engagement with ESE. This introductory article includes three sections. The first section provides context about the movements. The second section presents an overview of the articles and alternative ways for reading them. The third section discusses lessons learned from the collection of articles. We conclude with a call for further research and reflection.

The folk’ish heritage in Nordic democracy: Examples from Denmark and Norway

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.

scholarly journals Special Issue “Risk, Ruin and Survival: Decision Making in Insurance and Finance”

Risks ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiandong Ren ◽  
Kristina Sendova ◽  
Ričardas Zitikis
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Starting Point

It has been six years since Editor-in-Chief Steffensen (2013) wrote in his editorial that “to Risks inclusiveness, inter-disciplinarity, and open-mindedness is the very starting point [...]

scholarly journals Social Theory after Strathern: An Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Street ◽  
Jacob Copeman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Subject And Object

Taking its cue from the articles in this special issue, this introduction explores what value a critical engagement with Strathern’s work might have for the social sciences by setting such an engagement in motion. It argues that Strathern’s writings are a particularly fruitful starting point for reflecting on our assumptions about what exactly theory might be and how and where it may be made to travel. Through the juxtaposition of articles published in this special issue and Strathern’s writings on Melanesia it explores the theorization of power in the social sciences as one arena in which Strathernian strategies might be harnessed in order to reflect on and extend Euro-American concepts. It also takes Strathern’s own interest in gardening as a metaphoric base for generating novel topologies of subject and object, the particular and the general, and the concrete and the abstract. This introduction does not provide a primer for ‘Strathernian theory’. Instead it reviews some of the original strategies and techniques – differentiation, staging of analogy, surprise, bifurcation, the echo, and an unremitting focus on how we make our familiar categories of analysis known to ourselves – that Strathern has used to ‘garden’ her theory: it can be used, if you like, as a conceptual toolkit.

Repositioning Indianness: Native American Organizations in Portland, Oregon, 1959––1975

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas G. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Indians ◽  
The United States ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Shifts

This article examines the processes of community building among American Indians who migrated to Portland, Oregon, in the decades following World War II, contextualized within a larger movement of Indians to the cities of the United States and shifts in government relations with Indian people. It argues that, during the 1960s, working-and middle-class Indians living in Portland came together and formed groups that enabled them to cultivate "Indianness" or to "be Indian" in the city. As the decade wore on, Indian migration to Portland increased, the social problems of urban Indians became more visible, and a younger generation emerged to challenge the leadership of Portland's established Indian organizations. Influenced by both their college educations and a national Indian activist movement, these new leaders promoted a repositioning of Indianness, taking Indian identity as the starting point from which to solve urban Indian problems. By the mid-1970s, the younger generation of college-educated Indians gained a government mandate and ascended to the helm of Portland's Indian community. In winning support from local, state, and federal officials, these leaders reflected fundamental changes under way in the administration of U.S. Indian affairs not only in Portland, but also across the country.

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