Pub Date : 2024-01-17DOI: 10.1177/13675494231223572
Nishant Shah
The emerging discourse catalyzed by the opening up of generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) applications for everyday usage often presents Gen-AI as radically and disruptively new. I revisit two moments in early conversations in computational history to offer a historicization of Chat GPT: the making of digital narratives through computational methods of storing, sorting and sequencing semantic units and the production of digital narratives through computational architecture of computability and stacks. I offer a framework of critical turns that unpack Gen-AI as a new form of digital narrative practice that challenges the future of meaning and function of narratives in everyday lives.
{"title":"The unbearable oldness of generative artificial intelligence: Or the re-making of digital narratives in times of ChatGPT","authors":"Nishant Shah","doi":"10.1177/13675494231223572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231223572","url":null,"abstract":"The emerging discourse catalyzed by the opening up of generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) applications for everyday usage often presents Gen-AI as radically and disruptively new. I revisit two moments in early conversations in computational history to offer a historicization of Chat GPT: the making of digital narratives through computational methods of storing, sorting and sequencing semantic units and the production of digital narratives through computational architecture of computability and stacks. I offer a framework of critical turns that unpack Gen-AI as a new form of digital narrative practice that challenges the future of meaning and function of narratives in everyday lives.","PeriodicalId":502446,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"56 19","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139527545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-17DOI: 10.1177/13675494231222855
Francesca Sobande
Foodwork is a political matter, and baking is no exception. Many messages are associated with the symbolic significance of baking, such as idealised notions of white, middle-class domesticity, femininity and visibility. The rise in home-baking during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a surge in social media content, which conveys much about the different meanings ascribed to baking. Relatedly, scholarship on ‘COVID-19 foodwork, race, gender, class and food justice’ highlights that intersecting oppressions are implicated in such matters. Drawing on different lines of research that specify and address structural power relations (e.g. gendered whiteness), I analyse the aesthetics and accompanying attitudes conveyed via Instagram posts about #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking. In doing so, I draw and build on critical studies of whiteness and digital food media, and connections between consumerism and COVID-19. This work considers what such online content suggests about the relationship between a ‘feminised, white, aestheticised ethos’ and digital discourse and depictions regarding food, family, domesticity, work and rest. Consequently, this research ponders over whether the labour and framing involved in documenting #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking on Instagram reflects a neoliberal form of entrepreneurial ‘freelance feminism’, which is animated by the tension between the ‘frequently polarized figures of “the feminist” and “the housewife”’. I examine the significance of three key themes related to #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking: (1) Gendered domestic labour and digital depictions and discourses of motherhood; (2) productivity, pausing and so-called ‘soulfulness’; and (3) domestic minimalism and aesthetics of whiteness. In turn, this article critically reflects on the relationship between mediated constructions of gendered whiteness and baking, while echoing calls for more research that explicitly addresses dynamics between digital whiteness, class, aesthetics, gendered racial capitalism, foodwork, feminism and online content creation.
{"title":"White and gendered aesthetics and attitudes of #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking","authors":"Francesca Sobande","doi":"10.1177/13675494231222855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231222855","url":null,"abstract":"Foodwork is a political matter, and baking is no exception. Many messages are associated with the symbolic significance of baking, such as idealised notions of white, middle-class domesticity, femininity and visibility. The rise in home-baking during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a surge in social media content, which conveys much about the different meanings ascribed to baking. Relatedly, scholarship on ‘COVID-19 foodwork, race, gender, class and food justice’ highlights that intersecting oppressions are implicated in such matters. Drawing on different lines of research that specify and address structural power relations (e.g. gendered whiteness), I analyse the aesthetics and accompanying attitudes conveyed via Instagram posts about #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking. In doing so, I draw and build on critical studies of whiteness and digital food media, and connections between consumerism and COVID-19. This work considers what such online content suggests about the relationship between a ‘feminised, white, aestheticised ethos’ and digital discourse and depictions regarding food, family, domesticity, work and rest. Consequently, this research ponders over whether the labour and framing involved in documenting #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking on Instagram reflects a neoliberal form of entrepreneurial ‘freelance feminism’, which is animated by the tension between the ‘frequently polarized figures of “the feminist” and “the housewife”’. I examine the significance of three key themes related to #pandemicbaking and #quarantinebaking: (1) Gendered domestic labour and digital depictions and discourses of motherhood; (2) productivity, pausing and so-called ‘soulfulness’; and (3) domestic minimalism and aesthetics of whiteness. In turn, this article critically reflects on the relationship between mediated constructions of gendered whiteness and baking, while echoing calls for more research that explicitly addresses dynamics between digital whiteness, class, aesthetics, gendered racial capitalism, foodwork, feminism and online content creation.","PeriodicalId":502446,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" 929","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139617589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-29DOI: 10.1177/13675494231212346
Brooke Erin Duffy, Anuli Ononye, Megan Sawey
While workers of all stripes are compelled to embrace uncertainty under conditions of neoliberalism, ideologies of risk assume a particular guise in the platform economy, wherein laborers are exhorted to ‘put yourself out there’. Given the attendant harms associated with public visibility – especially for women and other marginalized groups – it seems crucial to explore platform-dependent laborers’ experiences of ‘putting themselves out there’. This article draws upon in-depth interviews with 23 social media influencers and content creators, sampled from across platforms, content niches and subjectivities. Our analysis revealed that vulnerability is a structuring concept in the influencer economy – one that operates at multiple, often overlapping levels. First, the commercial logic of authenticity casts personal vulnerability as a strategy for building community and accruing followers. But influencers’ individual disclosures were often entangled with their social identities (e.g., gender, race, sexuality, ability and body type), which rendered them socially vulnerable to targeted antagonism from audiences. Interviewees experienced a range of harms, from identity-based hate and harassment to concerted take-down campaigns. These personal and social vulnerabilities were compounded by the vulnerabilities of platform-dependent labor: not only did participants identify the failures of platforms to protect them, some shared a sense that these companies exacerbated harms through a commercial logic that incentivizes antagonism. After examining the emotional labor necessary to manage such platform vulnerabilities, we close by reiterating the unique precarity of platform labor, wherein participants lack the social and legal protections typically afforded to ‘vulnerable workers’.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-29DOI: 10.1177/13675494231218167
Itoiz Rodrigo-Jusué
Despite recent calls for ‘ordinary’ citizens to become active and responsible as individuals in preventing and countering terrorism and radicalisation in the United Kingdom, little is yet known about how members of the general public make sense of political violence, or about how they think it should be dealt with. Using a bottom-up vernacular security studies approach, this article examines what lay citizens believe about the causes of terrorism and what responses they think are appropriate. Based on qualitative data from one-to-one interviews with members of the public and an analysis based on constructivist grounded theory methodology, the article discusses three key figures that emerged from interviewees’ accounts of terrorism: the vulnerable subject, the radicalised individual and the radicaliser. Overall, the results reveal that a radicalisation framework is dominant in participants’ discourses on terrorism. The article argues that the dominant imaginaries of terrorism identified in this research draw consent towards pre-emptive security practices such as the Prevent duty and de-radicalisation interventions. The discussion problematises the depoliticisation of political violence and the normalisation of illiberal security measures that this conceptualisation of terrorism entails, while stressing the discriminatory character of the social imaginaries of terrorism.
{"title":"‘It’s like almost hypnotised people’: An exploration of vernacular discourses and social imaginaries of terrorism in the United Kingdom","authors":"Itoiz Rodrigo-Jusué","doi":"10.1177/13675494231218167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231218167","url":null,"abstract":"Despite recent calls for ‘ordinary’ citizens to become active and responsible as individuals in preventing and countering terrorism and radicalisation in the United Kingdom, little is yet known about how members of the general public make sense of political violence, or about how they think it should be dealt with. Using a bottom-up vernacular security studies approach, this article examines what lay citizens believe about the causes of terrorism and what responses they think are appropriate. Based on qualitative data from one-to-one interviews with members of the public and an analysis based on constructivist grounded theory methodology, the article discusses three key figures that emerged from interviewees’ accounts of terrorism: the vulnerable subject, the radicalised individual and the radicaliser. Overall, the results reveal that a radicalisation framework is dominant in participants’ discourses on terrorism. The article argues that the dominant imaginaries of terrorism identified in this research draw consent towards pre-emptive security practices such as the Prevent duty and de-radicalisation interventions. The discussion problematises the depoliticisation of political violence and the normalisation of illiberal security measures that this conceptualisation of terrorism entails, while stressing the discriminatory character of the social imaginaries of terrorism.","PeriodicalId":502446,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":" 92","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139144684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-24DOI: 10.1177/13675494231216918
Simidele Dosekun
In this talk, I turn a Black and transnational feminist reflexive eye on the field of feminist media studies, to surface for critical consideration a certain ‘story that we tell’ about race, more specifically about the visibly dominant whiteness, in the global North, of the kinds of media texts and cultures that commonly comprise our objects of analysis. I show that there is a repeated critical claim to the effect that the texts and cultures ‘reify whiteness’. Interrogating and faulting some of the variously methodological, epistemological and ontological premises and effects of the claim, I argue that it is itself performative: it contributes to the very reification that it decries, not least by seemingly serving to explain and justify why, in a given piece of scholarship, further questions about race cannot really be attended to. I argue that we need to go beyond reifying whiteness in feminist media studies, so that we can attempt to offer more complete and rigorous consideration of the racial politics of what we study and how, and indeed who we are, our various positionalities, as not only scholars of media but also audiences, consumers and users ourselves.
{"title":"Beyond ‘reifying whiteness’ in feminist media studies","authors":"Simidele Dosekun","doi":"10.1177/13675494231216918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231216918","url":null,"abstract":"In this talk, I turn a Black and transnational feminist reflexive eye on the field of feminist media studies, to surface for critical consideration a certain ‘story that we tell’ about race, more specifically about the visibly dominant whiteness, in the global North, of the kinds of media texts and cultures that commonly comprise our objects of analysis. I show that there is a repeated critical claim to the effect that the texts and cultures ‘reify whiteness’. Interrogating and faulting some of the variously methodological, epistemological and ontological premises and effects of the claim, I argue that it is itself performative: it contributes to the very reification that it decries, not least by seemingly serving to explain and justify why, in a given piece of scholarship, further questions about race cannot really be attended to. I argue that we need to go beyond reifying whiteness in feminist media studies, so that we can attempt to offer more complete and rigorous consideration of the racial politics of what we study and how, and indeed who we are, our various positionalities, as not only scholars of media but also audiences, consumers and users ourselves.","PeriodicalId":502446,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"1999 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139160093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1367549418772168
E. le Grand
This article explores how representations of the ‘hipster’ in newspapers and on blogs are bound up with processes of class distinction in contemporary Britain. The analysis demonstrates that the hipster is a contested middle-class social type who is the object of both denigration and prestige. The hipster is typically represented as a young person associated with the middle-class fraction of the cultural intermediaries who is engaged in a particular set of reflexive and trendy consumption practices, often performed in gentrified urban spaces and linked to the creative industries. The article suggests that the disputed status of ‘hipster cool’ is indicative of shifting class distinctions in cultural taste and classificatory struggles within the middle class between generational groupings that involve questions of authenticity. Such contestations are reflected by the increasing legitimacy of emerging forms of cultural capital rooted in popular culture and embraced by young people, and the waning symbolic power of traditional highbrow culture associated with an older generation of middle-class people. It is also argued that the classificatory struggles over hipster tastes and lifestyles have a spatial dimension as bound up with the public controversies and social anxieties linked to gentrification in neoliberal Britain.
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Pub Date : 2020-04-01DOI: 10.1177/1367549418772168
E. le Grand
This article explores how representations of the ‘hipster’ in newspapers and on blogs are bound up with processes of class distinction in contemporary Britain. The analysis demonstrates that the hipster is a contested middle-class social type who is the object of both denigration and prestige. The hipster is typically represented as a young person associated with the middle-class fraction of the cultural intermediaries who is engaged in a particular set of reflexive and trendy consumption practices, often performed in gentrified urban spaces and linked to the creative industries. The article suggests that the disputed status of ‘hipster cool’ is indicative of shifting class distinctions in cultural taste and classificatory struggles within the middle class between generational groupings that involve questions of authenticity. Such contestations are reflected by the increasing legitimacy of emerging forms of cultural capital rooted in popular culture and embraced by young people, and the waning symbolic power of traditional highbrow culture associated with an older generation of middle-class people. It is also argued that the classificatory struggles over hipster tastes and lifestyles have a spatial dimension as bound up with the public controversies and social anxieties linked to gentrification in neoliberal Britain.
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