scholarly journals What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Ecological Citizenship ◽  
Contemporary Media

Questions of cultural citizenship and risk have become central to contemporary sociological debates. This paper seeks to relate these concerns to a discussion of ecological citizenship and questions of visual and commercial culture. In the first section, I argue that ecological citizenship needs to avoid a moralistic rejection of the pleasures of contemporary visual and consumer culture. Such a possibility I argue has become evident in recent debates on the risk society. However, I argue despite Beck's realisation that questions of risk become defined through contemporary media his analysis remains overly distant from more everyday understandings. In order to address this question, I seek to demonstrate how an interpretative understanding of visual culture (in this case the 1995 film Safe) might help us develop more complex understandings of the competing cultures of risk and citizenship.

scholarly journals introduction

2005 ◽  
Vol 183 ◽  
pp. 523-531 ◽  
Author(s):  
michel hockx ◽  
julia strauss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Job Insecurity ◽  
Market Manipulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The World ◽  
Positive Experiences ◽  
Complex Phenomena

this collection offers a variety of perspectives on culture in contemporary china. we begin and end with pieces by jing wang and deborah davis on the production and consumption of culture in general, before moving on to three specific areas: visual culture, music and poetry. jing wang's opening piece on “bourgeois bohemians” (bobos) in china revolves around the all-important question of how taste is constructed and a multiplicity of lifestyles imagined. in china as elsewhere in the world, lifestyles are first imagined and transmitted through advertising. wang describes how marketing campaigns propagate idealized lifestyles to different segments of china's self identified urban middle class; notably the bohemian and the xin xin renlei. deborah davis focuses on the consumption end of culture, suggesting that for all the real resentments and worries engendered by growing income inequality and job insecurity, urbanites in shanghai experience consumer culture and the pursuit of individual taste and comfort in the home through shopping to be positive experiences, particularly when juxtaposed against the deprivations of the past. both wang and davis show that the production and consumption of culture are complex phenomena that go beyond mere market manipulation. there is substantial agency involved, from urbanites joyfully participating in redecoration of their flats to the ways in which niche segments of the urban middle class separate into different “tribes.”the braester, denton and finnane essays focus on different aspects of the production and consumption of visual culture: film, museums and fashion. braester suggests that one cannot sharply differentiate commercial film from art film on the basis of content or aesthetics, as directors previously known for making art films move into commercials, and both share similar sensibilities.

Selling Yourself: The Commercialization of Feeling in the Work of Sophie Calle

2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Emotional Demands

This article argues that Sophie Calle's desire to become her own work of art exists in tension with the fear of becoming a mere product for consumption. Recognising this fear of commodification allows us to view Calle's work from a couple of new angles. Firstly, it tells a compelling story about contemporary emotional life, in particular, the emotional demands made of women. Drawing on sociological perspectives, this article will explore Calle's work in relation to a commercial culture that turns the traditionally ‘feminine’ emotional domain into a lucrative resource. Secondly, it allows us to see Calle's art-making as a form of defence against this injunction to ‘sell oneself’. In a consumer culture in which one's sense of a private self is pushed further and further into a corner, art appears as a refuge in which one's creative singularity may be preserved.

scholarly journals Adverts in ‘Little Reviews’ (1890–1930): Networks, Poetry and Design

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Hélène Védrine
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Visual Displays ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Literature Reviews ◽  
Mainstream Press ◽  
Page Design

Between the 1880s and the 1920s, advertising proved fundamental to art and literature reviews since it fostered a new link between visual and consumerist culture. This article is based on fin de siècle and avant-garde magazines read in dialogue. It samples French and Belgian magazines illustrating innovations to 1880s periodicals and 1920s modernist magazines. The paper highlights the use of visual techniques in advertisements (page design, typography, etc.) that strengthen aesthetic and political stances. Advertising rhetoric masks aesthetic manifestos but also social and political agenda, revealed by visual displays of text. Publicity is also an important medium for poetic experimentation, embedded in ordinary advertising design already in the 1890s. Its subversive use informs new means of artistic expression, considered avant-garde innovations (collage, cadavre exquis, or typographic combinations). Advertising later represents new modernist stances within avant-garde magazines. Surrealism and Dada exploited publicity to promote their revolutionary aesthetic. In the 1920s, advertising being increasingly professionalized, specific designers used new visual means, strengthened artistic exchanges, and gradually erased the division between art and commercial culture in magazines. Thus modernism became part of a visual culture resonant with consumer commodities. Advertising ultimately exemplifies an interesting change in periodicals’ patterns, across literature and art reviews to the mainstream press, through posters, and decorative or architectural designs.

scholarly journals Harnessing the Complexity of Children's Consumer Culture

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven K. Khan
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Complex Systems ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Childhood Experience ◽  
Systems Perspective ◽  
Political Project ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Ethical Relationships

In this paper I argue that consumption is a common matrix of childhood experience that children bring to curriculum, schooling and learning. Next I describe how children’s consumer culture (CCC) can be seen to share some important characteristics of complex systems. Finally, I address the question of how the emergent potential of children’s consumer culture could be utilized by educators to assist in the project of forming lifelong ethical relationships with and between peoples, places, things, and thoughts. Unprecedented changes on a global scale have revealed our traditional notions of citizenship as being deficient, partial, and incomplete. These changes prompt us, then, to examine what it might mean to be a citizen in a truly globalized and technologically connected world. Schools and curriculum have an important role to play in an unfolding political project to craft new social, natural, cultural and ethical contracts. The context through which such a project could emerge, I suggest, is from within the complex system that is children’s commercial culture. Neither school and its curriculum nor CCC and its curriculum by themselves have served as effective sites for a successful pedagogy of citizenship. However, both reveal only partial aspects of different cultures of power necessary for citizenship. Both powers exist in a schizophrenic tension. The space created between such tensions might be appropriated to foster a pedagogy for citizenship that emerges from a common curriculum of consumption. A complex systems perspective opens windows of possibilities that might offer a view of how such tensions could be harnessed for this project.

Children's Consumption in History

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Thomas Cook
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Consumer Socialization ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
The 1960S

The academic study of children as consumers took root in the 1960s and did not begin in earnest until the 1970s, when the paradigm of ‘consumer socialization’ took hold among psychologically oriented business scholars. In the 1980s, some discussion of the history of children's consumption and popular culture began to appear in edited volumes and journal articles, with full treatments of some aspects of that history coming into view in the 1990s. Even as children's consumer culture takes centre stage in contemporary media reports, political punditry, and academic scholarship, the history of children's consumption remains largely unrecognized in, or otherwise marginal to, both histories of childhood and histories of consumption. Children's consumer lives or the popular culture of childhood most often occupy a side or subsidiary position in the overall historiography of childhood as in, for instance, recent works by Steven Mintz and Hugh Cunningham. It appears that, in a time of severe economic depression, both parents and commercial actors looked to childhood and the ‘child’ as promising bearers of hope for the future.

Inappropriate and Inarticulate

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Bickford
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Music Listening ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Bureaucratic Organization ◽  
Everyday Activities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Music Consumption ◽  
School Music

This chapter examines how interactions using music devices are part of a Ȝchildishȝ expressive tradition that is engaged primarily with the bureaucratic organization of language and communication in school. Music listening, despite being wordless, is an important part of children’s intimate expressive repertoires. I propose understanding these modes of music listening through reference to two master tropes of intimate peer expression in school: inappropriateness and inarticulateness. I consider several examples where music listening practices make clear reference to the bureaucratic context of school to argue that music consumption should be understood as intimately tied up with schooling. Identifying music listening as an element of these interactional and communicative frames grounds popular music listening and consumer culture in everyday expressive practices and provides a key perspective for linking bureaucratic networks of educational institutions to the emerging public presence of children in commercial culture through the everyday activities of children in school.

Archaeologies of City Life: Commercial Culture, Masculinity, and Spatial Relations in 1980s London

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 573-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Mort
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Commercial Culture ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
City Life ◽  
Cultural Transformations

Studies of contemporary systems of consumption across the humanities and social sciences are frequently shadowed by a recurrent problem. Difficulties centre on the tendency to construct a set of general theories, pitched at high levels of abstraction, about the economic and cultural transformations which have been associated with recent shifts in the structure of demand. It is argued that such a synthetic use of the concept of consumption cannot grasp the specificities of particular market sectors and their attendant forms of cultural and spatial relations. In this paper I propose a more precise and grounded focus to study the formation of a particular regime of gendered commerce in one area of London during the 1980s. The study demonstrates the ways in which a distinctive grouping of media professionals and cultural entrepreneurs occupied a pivotal role in the transformations taking place in Soho during this period. Shifts in the material and symbolic structures of social space were central to this process of urban change, which drew on earlier representations of city life to claim cultural authority. It was this metropolitan regime which actively shaped the production of a series of identifiable masculine identities. Such personas were plural and diverse, rather than unified and monolithic. The product of different masculine communities in the area, they were linked by consumer culture, but differentiated by their access to heterosocial or homosocial space.

scholarly journals TRAJECTORIES OF MEMORY AND GLANCE: A REFLECTION ON VISUAL CULTURE

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 394-398
Author(s):  
Basia Nikiforova
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Culture Change ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Wide Field ◽  
Place Memory ◽  
Present World

New book “Trajectories of Memory and Glance: a Reflection on Visual Culture” is an important contribution to the field of memory studies, which opens up a discussion about memory and visuality as two significant trajectories within the present world that have caused a culture change. This book aims to show how visual plane of memory actually covers a wide field and why memory and visuality are two “signatures” of our epoch, transforming the collective mindset. The structure of Trajectories of Memory and Glance is not linear: it works through the personal and collective categories of memory, nostalgia, art, culture and media, focusing on different groups and societies. The book consists of nine chapters that include such issues as interplay between memory and image, longing and communication, nostalgia and global consumer culture, topography of culture and memory, place and non-place, memory of Holocaust, paradigms of visibility and visuality, and others.

scholarly journals On instant pedagogy

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Jarosław Marzec
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
The Other ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One

The main intention of this text is to show the interpretative track in the attempt to find the genealogy of expert appraisal. The main thesis expresses Zygmunt Bauman’s view of mutual connection between the weak and light status of identity in consumer culture and the tendency to create cultural practices in order to overcome that weakness, and to strengthen and confirm that status of identity. On the one hand, the main feature of consumer culture and our freedom expressed by consumption determines our identities and is the main reason for „corrosion of identity” (R. Sennett), but on the other hand it demands and generates the necessity of cultural institutions that guarantee its confirmation. Hence, we may find the reason for the so-called „counselling boom” and expansion of expert appraisal in our risk society. The presented text also shows the cultural background for cultural practices in the risk society and consists of the attempt to grasp social instant pedagogies. This phenomenon is analysed here by the role of advertisements and psychological guides as the main cultural practices of instant pedagogy. My intention seeks to bring to account often hidden and obvious practices, and to highlight in a critical manner the tendencies in our social milieu and in the face of „the unbearable lightness of consumption”.

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