Poetics最新文献

In US K-12 education, the Spanish language is subject to practices and policies that limit its expression, especially among racialized Latinx students. However, higher education claims to view Spanish as a positive form of diversity. We therefore examine college admissions essays to analyze how students strategically deploy Spanish in light of these contradictions. We use two years of undergraduate application essays (n = 276,768) and metadata submitted to the University of California by every self-identified Latinx applicant and a racially representative random sample of non-Latinx applicants. To identify Spanish language usage in the text, we develop a computational mixed methods approach by combining machine translation and human reading. Spanish was used by 33% of Latinx and 15% of non-Latinx students with stylistic variation by class and ethnicity. We also find that lower income Mexican and Central American applicants were the most likely to use substantive forms of Spanish in their admissions essays as well as provide translations into English. We posit that this self-translation is an example of students identifying cultural mismatch between themselves and university admissions offices. This linguistic strategy, which we call strategic Spanish, sheds light on how language, culture, and ethnicity intersect in high-stakes evaluation and also helps surface the potential for machine translation as a method for social scientific inquiry.

While autonomy is a crucial concept in the sociology of culture, most scholars treat it as an objective feature of the cultural field or creative work. This article argues that autonomy is a subjective construct with ambiguous meanings that enable creative workers to flexibly justify their career paths. I draw on a case of Chinese visual artists in the postsocialist era (since 1979), where the institutional context of dual career path highlights the ambiguity of autonomy. Using interview data with two groups of Chinese artists in different institutional positions—state-affiliated artists employed by the official system and independent artists without official affiliation—I show that the two groups offer conflicting narratives of autonomy. State-affiliated artists claim freedom from market and art criticism, whereas independent artists assert autonomy from state and organizational duties. Both groups emphasize the kind of autonomy they have and downplay the kind they lack to justify their career over the alternative position. Based on these findings, I suggest a more interpretive analysis of autonomy in cultural fields, one that illuminates how workers use ambiguous meanings to justify career choices.

Hip-Hop as a music genre is a popular music genre both in commercial success and global impact and there is a variety of academic studies on the origins, creation, effects, and uses of hip-hop. What remains understudied, yet fundamentally important, is a perspective that takes hip-hop consumers and the way they give meaning to hip-hop as a musical genre. The current in-depth interview study (N = 20) aimed to understand how hip-hop listeners came to give meaning to hip-hop music in their own words and from the perspective of their everyday lived experiences. Results outlined four themes that are relevant in the meanings constructed around hip-hop music, 1) how listeners define hip-hop, 2) how they experience listening to hip-hop, 3) how hip-hop is used as a source in identity-formational practices, and 4) how listeners employed a societal perspective in evaluating hip-hop as a musical genre. As such, the current study provides a balanced empirical perspective on hip-hop music and sheds light on the meaningful role it has in the lives of its listeners.

This article advances understanding about book reading as a sociocultural phenomenon in the 2020s. We make a contribution to the cultural sociology of reading by investigating Finnish self-identified book readers by analysing the significance of sociodemographic variables (gender, education, age, and place of residence) in terms of reading activity and access to books. Our study is placed in the context of Finnish reading culture that is characterised by a particular appreciation of reading and measures promoting equal access to culture. Based on an online survey of 955 respondents conducted in 2021, our statistical analyses show that the social stratification of book reading activity that is prominent in population level does not recur within the specific group of people who identify themselves as readers. Among Finnish self-identified book readers, education, gender, and place of residence do not induce significant differences in reading activity. Our analysis that foregrounds inclination instead of quantity as a criterion for readers sheds light on reader equality from a different direction than previous research into nationwide reading habits or descriptive studies on avid readers.

Existing research has demonstrated that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to engage with online political disinformation that traffics in partisan conspiracies. However, little is known about why this asymmetry exists. This study proposes that exposure to conflicting accounts from conflicting authorities in a given knowledge domain is an under-appreciated mechanism that increases susceptibility to partisan conspiracies and helps drive such asymmetries. To examine this question, I test two pre-registered hypotheses using two survey experiments on Amazon Cloud Research. In experiment 1, Republicans were more open to conspiracies at baseline but exposure to conflicting accounts made strong Democrats more open, eliminating this gap. In experiment 2, the effect of exposure to conflicting accounts is weaker but still contributed to closing the partisan gap, while Democrats’(but not Republicans’) self-reported media consumption heavily moderated the effect of exposure to conflicting accounts on belief. Implications of these findings are discussed for research on political polarization and disinformation as well as non-political knowledge domains.

Sociologists usually conceptualize events as unexpected occurrences bringing about long-lasting transformations of social structures. Following this definition, most empirical studies of events focus on pre/post-measurement strategies. Yet not all events are unexpected (e.g., Eurovision, Oscar nominations, the Olympics). Moreover, pre/post-measurements cannot capture the temporality in which meaning-making processes unfold nor account for the overlap between various events. We address these shortcomings by introducing the concept of ‘recurrent events,’ defined as events occurring with regular and recurrent cadence, charging collective effervescence and anticipation among audiences. Drawing from resonance theory, we conceptualize constellations of cultural change happening around recurrent events. We provide an empirical proof-of-concept, focusing on the case of the Eurovision Song Contest. To do so, we build a unique dataset of Eurovision lyrics and public attitudes in 18 European countries between 1981 and 2021 to study the relationships between attitudes about sexual and gender identity and national identity and the corresponding narratives presented at Eurovision. Our findings complicate common assumptions about the duality of events, by highlighting six different configurations of cultural change. We demonstrate how the concept of recurrent events contributes to the literature on events, consider the theoretical and methodological implications, and provide recommendations for future research.

This article reports the findings of an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of ten interviews with participants aged 13 to 23 from international contexts on youths’ experiences of literary socialisation. Guided by affect theory and cultural geographies, the research examines the affective intensities arising from those experiences that render possible digital participation around books, reading and writing. Consequently, we aim to contribute to understanding youths’ literary socialisation dynamics and the role of digital media in young readers’ literacies. Through the notion of space as an interrelation of trajectories, we could analyse these participants’ experiences around spatial nodes of home, school, circle of friends and community. The findings led us to conceptualise four orientations of youth to digital literary participation: literary kinship, literary intuition, literary intimacy, and literary activism. Finally, we discuss digital algorithmic mechanisms in literary socialisation through the lens of critical literacies.

Much of the research on cultural and creative industries has been ‘Western-centric’, but recent interest into cultural and creative industries in the Global South confirms that this conceptual frame is not always directly transferable. This first comprehensive analysis of the last three decades of cultural and creative industries in Santiago de Chile is based on detailed participant observations and multiple in-depth interviews with cultural professionals in the city. The findings indicate that ‘Western’ economic narratives fail to capture the role of Chile's political and cultural context, and especially the socio-urban fabric of Santiago itself, in the eclectic mix of practices that has developed across various locales. The city's self-transformation can be seen to embody a process of autopoiesis, a concept first proposed by Chilean scholars. This cultural autopoiesis has been impacted by external shocks that include COVID-19. The study advances existing empirical and theoretical understandings of the development of cultural and creative industries in the Global South and beyond.

As we are now rounding up our second year with COVID-19, studies have provided insight into the pandemic's impact on news practices around the world. However, most of these accounts describe data from the early months of the outbreak. Further research is needed to explore the shapes that news repertoires might have settled into in the wake of the pandemic. By comparing data from a Latent Class Analysis of news repertoires using the Digital News Report 2020 and 2021, this paper contributes to extant knowledge of the pandemic's impact on news use in Flanders. We find that users were significantly more likely to adopt Casual rather than Limited news repertoires in 2021, pointing to a potential growth in news habits of users with a previously limited repertoire.

In Trentino and the Pyrenees, the population of bears has grown since the 1990s, when new specimens were released into the wild to recover this endangered species. The reintroduction generated a conflictive cohabitation with village dwellers, the shepherding sector, and rural initiatives in both areas. The aim of this research is to evaluate how local media and two audiovisual documentaries covered the bear issue in both regions. The researchers analysed the content of 86 articles from two newspapers in 2022, conducted a narrative analysis of the documentaries and interviewed their directors. The results reveal that the documentaries created a counter-narrative to politicisation, in the Italian case, and to environmentalisation, in the Catalan. Because both documentaries paid attention to rural communities, they contributed to increasing rural agency, an aspect aligned with the filmmakers’ motivations at the inception of both productions. The authors argue that the circulation of these narratives diversely expresses renewed imaginaries of rural societies in both contexts.