Showing papers in "European Journal of Cultural Studies in 2012"
TL;DR: The concept of cultural intermediaries has been a productive device for examining the producers of symbolic value in various industries, commodity chains and urban spaces, highlighting such issues as the blurring of work and leisure, the conservatism of new and creative work, and the material practices involved in the promotion of consumption as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The term ‘cultural intermediaries’ is good to think with: it has been a productive device for examining the producers of symbolic value in various industries, commodity chains and urban spaces, highlighting such issues as the blurring of work and leisure, the conservatism of ‘new’ and ‘creative’ work, and the material practices involved in the promotion of consumption (e.g. Bovone, 2005; Entwistle, 2006; McFall, 2004; Moor, 2008; Negus, 2002; Nixon and Crewe, 2004; Smith Maguire, 2008; Wright, 2005). In addition, cultural intermediary research offers an important complement to the study of cultural production, within which questions of agency are typically focused on consumers, and questions of power on institutions. The concept of cultural intermediaries usefully prioritizes issues of agency, negotiation and power, moving the everyday, contested practices of market agents to the fore for the study of the production of culture (Garnham, 2005; Havens et al., 2009; Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2010). Generally, research on cultural intermediaries has followed two different (although not incompatible) directions: cultural intermediaries as exemplars of the new middle class, involved in the mediation of production and consumption (following e.g. Bourdieu, 1984, 1996); and cultural intermediaries as market actors involved in the qualification of goods, mediating between economy and culture (following developments in actornetwork theory and new economic sociology, e.g. Callon et al., 2002; Muniesa et al., 2007). Engagements within and between these streams of work have resulted in conceptual developments: for example, du Gay’s (2004) discussion of devices and dispositions, and Cronin’s (2004) elaboration of multiple regimes of mediation. Nevertheless,
184 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the debate about population mobility needs to transcend the "migrancy problematic" and identify how the ordering of humanity works in a globalized and neo-liberal context.
Abstract: The article discusses the effects that the debate about the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ is having on the regulation, scrutiny and the surveillance of migrant communities. Through the story of a young migrant it explores the ways that old hierarchies of belonging are taking new forms within the social landscape of contemporary London. This biographical case study is drawn from a larger qualitative study of 30 young adult migrants. Although the article focuses on a single case, its arguments are informed by the larger sample. The article argues that the debate about population mobility needs to transcend the ‘migrancy problematic’ and identify how the ordering of humanity works in a globalized and neo-liberal context. Combining insights from Stuart Hall’s recent writings and Franz Fanon’s lesser-known essays, the article argues that new hierarchies of belonging are established that replay aspects of colonial racism but in a form suited to London’s postcolonial situation.
126 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the narrative of multicultural backlash, which purports that "parallel societies" and "intolerable subjects" and practices have been allowed to flourish within European societies.
Abstract: During the last decade, European countries have declared a ‘crisis’ of multiculturalism. This crisis has gained significant political traction, despite the empirical absence of a failed experiment with multiculturalism. This introduction focuses on the narrative of multicultural backlash, which purports that ‘parallel societies’ and ‘intolerable subjects’ and practices have been allowed to flourish within European societies. Beyond particular contexts, the problem of intolerable subjects is seen as a shared European challenge, requiring disintegrated migrants and Muslim populations to display loyalty, adopt ‘our’ values, and prove the legitimacy of their belonging. This introduction critiques multicultural backlash, less as a rejection of piecemeal multicultural policies than as a denial of lived multiculture. This is developed through an examination of racism in a post-racial era, and by analysing the ways in which integrationist projects further embed culturalist ontology.
84 citations
TL;DR: On the brink of multiculturalism's demise in Europe, "culture" configures prominently in the immigration politics of Europe and its nation-states as discussed by the authors, and new discourses of integration emphasize dominant v...
Abstract: On the brink of multiculturalism’s demise in Europe, ‘culture’ configures prominently in the immigration politics of Europe and its nation-states. New discourses of integration emphasize dominant v...
63 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the liberal version of this ‘integrationist’ discourse emphasizes the Enlightenment values associated with secularism, individualism, gender equality, sexual freedom and freedom of expression as markers of civilizational superiority.
Abstract: Attacks on multiculturalism from across the political spectrum reduce the complex history of settlement and interaction in the UK to a simple narrative of excessive British tolerance and increasingly disruptive immigrant communities. The liberal version of this ‘integrationist’ discourse emphasizes the Enlightenment values associated with secularism, individualism, gender equality, sexual freedom and freedom of expression as markers of civilizational superiority. Various efforts are made to ‘civilize’ Muslims in particular into adopting these values. What emerges is, in effect, a liberal form of anti-Muslim racism which, paradoxically, takes liberalism into an illiberal embrace of conservative themes. With the racialization of ‘Muslimness’, the conservative cultural racism that was dominant in the 1980s has been revamped and reshaped, and the language of ‘values’ rather than ethnicity has become central.
61 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the professional ethos and practices of television buyers in France, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands were analyzed and ethnographic observations revealed that professional ethos of this "cosmopolitan tribe" is remarkably similar across national backgrounds.
Abstract: This article analyses the professional ethos and practices of television buyers in France, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. During interviews and ethnographic observations, the professional ethos of this ‘cosmopolitan tribe’ proved to be remarkably similar across national backgrounds. This article discusses the relation between personal taste and professional ethos in television buying, pointing to specific forms of ‘cosmopolitan capital’ central to this process. Moreover, it develops a typology of buyers, each type representing a different solution to the tensions between culture and economy, consumption and production and national and transnational inherent in transnational cultural mediation. This analysis of the practices of transnational cultural intermediaries highlights several limitations of Bourdieusian accounts of cultural mediation. Moreover, it opens up new questions about (transnational) cultural mediation, the shaping of professional habitus and ‘the production of belief’ in the cultural field.
57 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an ethnographically informed account of cultural intermediaries working within a "nerd-culture scene" in a Canadian city, and analyse their labour in terms of their subcultural careers, gatekeeping functions within the scene and dispositions towards the "mainstream".
Abstract: Recent studies of cultural intermediaries demonstrate that economic activity in even the most rationalized organizations and industries is thoroughly cultural. However, they may not do justice to contexts where production and mediation are embedded in communities with distinctive traditions and aesthetic standards. This article offers an ethnographically informed account of intermediaries working within one such context: namely, the organizations and stores composing the ‘nerd-culture scene’ in a Canadian city. Retailers and group organizers enable geeky cultural practices by providing spaces where individuals can develop their interests and hobbies. Their labour is analysed in terms of their subcultural careers, gatekeeping functions within the scene and dispositions towards the ‘mainstream’. They are not simply economic agents but also culturally and socially situated actors motivated to do this work for its intrinsic rewards. Subcultural scenes cut across industrial sectors and cultural industries, making them a special context for the work of cultural intermediaries.
45 citations
TL;DR: This article explored why apparent political indifference coincides with nationalist passion in Chinese cyberspace, drawing on interviews with university students and the notion of "new politics" and found that the apparent indifference coincided with nationalist passions.
Abstract: This article explores why apparent political indifference coincides with nationalist passion in Chinese cyberspace. Drawing on interviews with university students and the notion of ‘new politics’, ...
43 citations
TL;DR: Marketing has long been considered part of cultural intermediary activity, but still sits a little oddly alongside the "cultural" TV producers and "quality" journalists and critics originally used as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Marketing has long been considered part of cultural intermediary activity, but still sits a little oddly alongside the ‘cultural’ TV producers and ‘quality’ journalists and critics originally used ...
41 citations
TL;DR: The role and number of intermediaries involved in the process of artistic mediation tend to be all the more important as the art world becomes more autonomous, ruled by specific values, words and actions.
Abstract: The role and number of intermediaries involved in the process of artistic mediation tend to be all the more important as the art world becomes more autonomous, ruled by specific values, words and actions. This is particularly obvious in the case of contemporary visual arts, as this article demonstrates. The example of a French member of the Nouveaux Realistes movement helps mapping the various categories of persons, institutions, gestures, objects owing to which a piece of scrap may be offered the career of an authentic artwork. The article concludes by providing a historical explanation of the growing role of intermediaries in modern and contemporary art, and insight into current French cultural policy concerning intermediaries in the visual arts.
37 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors highlight the adoption of market-driven data into practices which traditionally have relied on editors' dispositions, intuitions and aesthetic sensibilities, highlighting ways in which acquisition editors integrate BookScan data into their daily work within publishing firms, as well as the creative ways they use BookScan's legitimacy to pursue projects of their choosing.
Abstract: How do cultural intermediaries mediate the introduction of new technologies which may challenge the legitimacy of their daily decision-making practices? Using the case of acquisition editors in the US trade publishing industry and the release of BookScan, the first point-of-sale data service for US book publishers, this work highlights the adoption of market-driven data into practices which traditionally have relied on editors’ dispositions, intuitions and aesthetic sensibilities. The findings highlight ways in which acquisition editors integrate BookScan data into their daily work within publishing firms, as well the creative ways in which they use BookScan’s legitimacy to pursue projects of their choosing. Ten years after the introduction of BookScan, while the data service cannot be ignored, acquisition editors navigate its application, protecting both their cultural capital as ‘arbiters of taste’ within publishing firms and their ability to promote works they deem to be of cultural value or import.
TL;DR: The authors traces the origin of the "end of tolerance" strategy, which follows from this development and examines the emergence of neo-racism in Denmark with its ideas of xenophobia as a natural reaction to other 'cultures' which do not belong 'naturally'.
Abstract: Successful integration must include the long-term enactment of ‘the will to feel Danish’. As Jews in Denmark have done in the course of many generations, so immigrant Muslims must immerse themselves to the extent that feeling Danish is naturalized. Such is the perspective proposed in a recent focus group discussion in Denmark on the integration of Muslims into Danish society. This idea of incompatibility between native Danes and Muslim ‘newcomers’ has become a salient feature of what is termed ‘value-based journalism’ and ‘value-based politics’ in the last decade. This article traces the origin of the ‘end of tolerance’ strategy, which follows from this development and examines the emergence of neo-racism in Denmark with its ideas of xenophobia as a natural reaction to other ‘cultures’ which do not belong ’naturally’. It shows that migrants of non-European origin are talked about in an increasingly crass and uncompromising way as a consequence of the belief in incompatibility.
TL;DR: When retro retailers buy and sell goods they are appropriating and recontextualizing objects and styles both symbolically and materially as discussed by the authors, and through knowledge and practices they change the value of it.
Abstract: When retro retailers buy and sell goods they are appropriating and recontextualising objects and styles both symbolically and materially. Through knowledge and practices they change the value of it...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the most serious defect of Debord's theory of the spectacle, which is its rejection of the necessary intermediation of social life by culture and communication, and their analysis subscribes to the trope of mass society which sees the populace as culturally denuded, divorced from community and subject to the imposition of false needs.
Abstract: In 1967, Guy Debord published his landmark analysis of the spectacle. Building on Marx’s theory of alienation, the spectacle describes our passive, quasi-visual relation to the social world. The individual, divorced from the collective praxis that constructs our social world, is reduced to consuming corporate-supplied entrancing narratives. This article explicates and assesses Debord’s theory. Its most serious defect is Debord’s rejection of the necessary intermediation of social life by culture and communication. Furthermore, his analysis subscribes to the trope of mass society, which sees the populace as culturally denuded, divorced from community and subject to the imposition of false needs. Against this alienated world, Debord pits the ideal of a collective revolutionary subject that freely creates society. However, both terms – alienated masses and revolutionary collective – are implicitly dependent upon liberal individualism, which abstracts individuals from the cultural traditions and social relati...
TL;DR: The authors examines how service industry jobs become cultural intermediaries, focusing on the differences between the devices and dispositions of cocktail and neighborhood bartenders, and examines the difference between the two groups.
Abstract: Focusing on the differences between the devices and dispositions of cocktail and neighborhood bartenders, this article examines how service industry jobs become cultural intermediaries. Unlike othe...
TL;DR: In this paper, a comparative study between Finnish and French gamblers found that the French emphasised the dream of winning large sums of money, while the Finns highlighted personal development.
Abstract: Psychological studies have tended to understand gambling motives as preconceived and individualistic. However, from a sociological point of view motives can only be conceived after the act has taken place, forming vocabularies of justifying one’s action to make it rational in the eyes of others. Motives cannot be taken at face value but as expressions of what is thought to be culturally acceptable. Using group interview data, this comparative study between Finnish and French gamblers asks how gambling is justified in these two cultural contexts. Different vocabularies of justification were found. While the French emphasised the dream of winning large sums of money, the Finns highlighted personal development. The results confirm that cultural aspects should be considered more in gambling research as the vocabularies of justifying gambling are connected to the cultural and institutional context in question.
TL;DR: The role of racist women in hate groups remains an underdeveloped area of research as mentioned in this paper, although scholars have suggested that female participation in such groups may vary among the different ideologies, and they have also suggested that women participation may vary with different ideologies.
Abstract: The role of racist women in hate groups remains an underdeveloped area of research, although scholars have suggested that female participation in such groups may vary among the different ideologies...
TL;DR: In this article, a textual analysis of a fan-produced YouTube series based on the German soap Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love) is performed to examine how subversive practices of rearticulating narrative conventions of soap operas may function as strategies of resistance.
Abstract: Despite the increasing efforts of representing gay main characters, popular soap operas still hinge on the discourse of heteronormativity. Queer theorists have uttered the necessity for exposing the oppressiveness of heteronormative practices and offering viable alternatives to the heteronormative way of living. This article argues that fan-produced re-edited videos of soap operas may embed the potential to expose and challenge the way that heteronormativity functions. By a textual analysis of Christian & Oliver, a fan-produced YouTube series based on the German soap Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love), the article enquires how subversive practices of rearticulating narrative conventions of soap operas may function as strategies of resistance. Since texts only become resistant through reading practices, this article discusses the fragility of resistance by elaborating on the negotiated position of resistance within popular culture, discussing the role of fans as producers of new texts and differentiating the...
TL;DR: The importance and significance of music in terms of the state and society were discovered and redefined at particular junctures in the history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The importance and significance of music in terms of the state and society were discovered and redefined at particular junctures in the history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. This history...
TL;DR: The Style/As Resistance project as discussed by the authors was the first one of its kind in the UK, where the authors were asked by Spanish curator, Aimar Arriola, to reflect on how Subculture came to be written and the current relevance of its main assumptions.
Abstract: In May 2010 I was invited by Spanish curator, Aimar Arriola, to participate in a project entitled Style/As Resistance sponsored by the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm as part of their CuratorLab program. Aimar asked me to reflect on how my book, Subculture (first published in 1979) came to be written and ‘the current relevance of its main assumptions’ (Arriola, 2011). These reflections would take the form of responses to a set of questions posed by four individuals from different backgrounds and disciplines, each with different professional, intellectual and existential stakes in the designated topic: Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London; Spanish philosopher and queer activist, Beatriz Preciado; Ina Blom, art critic and professor at the University of Oslo; and Lars Bang Larsen, an art historian and curator based in Kassel and Copenhagen. I agreed to the undertaking and the interview was published together with essays and photo-essays from more than a dozen European artists and activists in Style/As Resistance (Album, 2011). What follows is a ‘mash-up’ of that extended email interview and portions of another interview conducted in 2005 by LA-based artist and curator, Brad Eberhard, for a Bay Area art and poetry magazine called The Lonely Seagull, together with a few extemporaneous remarks thrown in to segue back and forth between the two (the interview questions are reproduced along with the interlocutors’ names in the appendix). Subculture was thrown together on the run between 1977 and 1978 with events (e.g. UK punk) haphazardly unfolding and the publication deadline ominously descending so that, far from being freely chosen at leisure, the conceptual architecture of the book, such as it is – rickety, ramshackle, heterogeneous – was ‘over-determined’, as they used to say in the 1970s, at every turn by the context and the circumstances in which it was written, and by the necessarily limited resources available to me at the time of writing. I should
TL;DR: MIA (real name: Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam) is one of the few British South Asian music artists who have crossed into the mainstream of western pop as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: MIA (real name: Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam) is one of the few British South Asian music artists who have crossed into the mainstream of western pop. The way in which she has attained this while foregrounding an explicit anti-racist and anti-imperialist message in her songs can be seen as a significant musical-political intervention, although the particular contestation of her work that has followed also highlights the challenges that Asian artists continue to face in gaining recognition within western popular culture. However, what is truly significant about MIA’s career is how she has managed to express a disavowed Asian identity without becoming trapped in the marginal space through which Asian culture is excluded. This has been the outcome of particular industry practice that has harnessed successfully the enabling features of commodification. In this way MIA represents an effective cultural politics of difference, the success of which is absolutely contingent upon an equally effective politics of production.
TL;DR: This paper used an empirically grounded historical case study of The Salvation Army's charity shops in Melbourne, Australia to review recent debates around the position and function of cultural and religious beliefs in the Salvation Army.
Abstract: This article uses an empirically grounded historical case study of The Salvation Army’s charity shops in Melbourne, Australia to review recent debates around the position and function of ‘cultural ...
TL;DR: The authors traces the shifts in German discourses about multiculturalism and the failed experiment of multiculturalism from the early 1990s into the 21st century by analyzing anxieties about emerging "ethnic ghettos" and "parallel societies" in Europe.
Abstract: This article traces the shifts in German discourses about multiculturalism and the failed experiment of multiculturalism from the early 1990s into the 21st century by analyzing anxieties about emerging ‘ethnic ghettos’ and ‘parallel societies’ in Europe. In these discourses, ‘Europe’ functions simultaneously as an example for the failures of multiculturalism and as a bastion of western values in need of protection. The second part of this article shifts to a discussion on creative political interventions that expose these tensions and contradictions and emphasize the historic dimension of racialized exclusion in Germany and the European context. They describe the effects of social exclusion and propose (often syncretic) translocal forms of solidarity and activism. In their irreverent, playful and performative interventions, activists and artists develop strategies to counter the essentialist culturalisms that underpin the debates about European integration, multiculturalism and the crisis of multicultural...
TL;DR: The authors examined young recreational drug users' identity constructions by combining a poststructuralist theoretical framework with focus group method, and investigated how the participants participated in the focus group.
Abstract: This article examines young recreational drug users’ identity constructions. Combining a poststructuralist theoretical framework with focus group method, the article investigates how the participan...
TL;DR: The ease with which the Republic of Ireland had moved from publicly articulating Irish racism during the 1997 European Year Against Racism, to employing euphemisms such as int....
Abstract: This article outlines the ease with which the Republic of Ireland had moved from publicly articulating Irish racism during the 1997 European Year Against Racism, to employing euphemisms such as int...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined censorship of religious elements in Turkish films of the 1960s and early 1970s based on the reports of the Central Film Control Commission in Ankara, responsible for inspecting domestic films from 1939 to 1977.
Abstract: This article extends the discussion of Turkish secularism from political history to cultural history. It examines censorship of religious elements in Turkish films of the 1960s and early 1970s based on the reports of the Central Film Control Commission in Ankara, responsible for inspecting domestic films from 1939 to 1977. The article argues that the censorship commission, as an extension of the state, functioned as a guard of Kemalist secularism and a ‘true’ Islam (a private, enlightened, apolitical, national and Sunni Islam). This ambivalent attitude towards religion underlines the complexity of Turkish secularism, which distinguish it from western models of secularism. The article concludes with a discussion of two inspection cases in 1970, which point to a significant shift in the commission’s attitude towards religion in films and prove that the founding principle of secularism and its later politics in the 1960s did not distance the country from its Islamic heritage.
TL;DR: For example, the authors explores the mythical Bedlam of popular imaginings in London's Bethlem Hospital and its alter ego 'Bedlam' influenced popula... and explores its effect on the modern world.
Abstract: This article explores the mythical Bedlam of popular imaginings. London’s Bethlem Hospital was for centuries a unique institution caring for the insane, and its alter ego ‘Bedlam’ influenced popula...
TL;DR: In this paper, a typology of constellations of nature and technology was developed through an analysis of car commercials, and three types of articulations were found: technology as a flexible and superior technological mimicry of nature; technological mastery as harmful to nature; and nature and technologies as two holistically connected realms.
Abstract: It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercials, this study develops a typology of constellations of nature and technology. Besides the well-known modern dichotomy of nature versus technology, with the latter being superior to the former, three types of articulations were found: technology as a flexible and superior technological mimicry of nature; technological mastery as harmful to nature; and nature and technology as two holistically connected realms. Implications for theories about the changing nature of nature and the restructuring of the relationship between nature and technology are discussed.
TL;DR: The authors analyzed hundreds of advertisements that appeared in Polish magazines at a pivotal historical juncture following the collapse of communism and at the rise of a capitalist market economy in the early 1990s, drawing out from the visual and rhetorical data emblematic themes and sociocultural undercurrents concerning entrepreneurial opportunism and financial reassurance, status envy and post-rationing excess and interconnected solidarity with the West through brands and the English language itself.
Abstract: This article offers a critical textual analysis of hundreds of advertisements that appeared in Polish magazines at a pivotal historical juncture: following the collapse of communism and at the rise of a capitalist market economy in the early 1990s. It draws out from the visual and rhetorical data emblematic themes and sociocultural undercurrents concerning entrepreneurial opportunism and financial reassurance, status envy and post-rationing excess and interconnected solidarity with the West through brands and the English language itself. By studying the anxieties and aspirations represented in this symbolic material, we might better understand how new consumers were ideologically shepherded through a moment of profound political transition. The study represents a starting point for future investigation into how advertising produces its subjects in the aftermath of communism.
TL;DR: For example, Beamish as discussed by the authors proposes to use the past as a bridge between the present and the industrial past to explain the rise of heritage with a loss of primary manufacturing, an association particularly resonant for industrial living history museums such as Beamish.
Abstract: Many critics have linked the rise of heritage with a loss of primary manufacturing, an association particularly resonant for industrial living history museums such as Beamish. In the context of pastoral heritage representations, the museum develops competing modernizing and industrial strains in English identity. Through its incorporation of industry, Beamish cuts against the suggestion that people and culture organically spring from native soil. Framing itself as ethnographic, the museum supposes a gap between the culture presented and those of its visitors. Yet this presentation inscribes comforting accounts of class and modernity. Through living history museum techniques, Beamish appeals for its visitors to identify with the represented past so as to suggest more firmly a gulf between present and industrial past. As a result, Beamish is less concerned with presenting the past then shoring up a notion of the present as advanced stage of modernity.