Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Family Dining: Food And Drink In The Sopranos – A Gastrocritical Approach, Lisa Davies

Dissertations

This thesis uses gastrocriticism to explore food and drink in the 86 episodes of the long-form narrative HBO television series The Sopranos. Gastrocriticism is an emerging branch of literary criticism that draws on scholarship from a range of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. A deeper understanding of the series was gained by using a structured framework of enquiry to explore narrative, setting, characterisation and genre through the lens of food and foodways. The Sopranos is a story of an Italian-American crime family and food is abundant in the series and bound up with the identity of …

An Investigation Of Therapeutic Rapport Through Prosody In Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Carolina De Pasquale, Charlie Cullen, Brian Vaughan

Conference Papers

Therapeutic alliance, a concept closely related to rapport, is one of the most important variables in psychotherapy. High degrees of synchrony/coordination in the therapeutic session are considered to contribute to rapport, and have received attention in the psychotherapy literature. Coordinative behaviours are observable in speech, and they manifest in phenomena such as prosodic accommodation, a dynamic phenomenon closely related to conversational success. A preliminary investigation of interpersonal prosodic dynamics in psychotherapy was performed on a database obtained in collaboration with the University of Padua, consisting of 16 recordings making up the entire course of a brief psychodynamic psychotherapy intervention for …

Tradition And Novelty: Food Representations In Irish Women’S Magazines 1922–73, Marzena Keating, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Articles

Based on a qualitative content analysis of selected Irish women’s magazines, this paper provides a brief overview of Irish food culture from 1922 to 1973. It illustrates how selected texts from women’s magazines, mainly recipes, food columns, practical suggestions for cooking and housekeeping, as well as articles on food topics mirrored social, cultural, economic, and religious characteristics of a particular period. The paper discusses various culinary trends apparent in the content and style of cookery pages focusing on a paired category of novelty and tradition adapted from the quantitative research conducted by Alan Warde.

Television In Ireland Before Irish Television: 1950s Audiences And British Programming, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

The first television broadcasts in Ireland were watched in the 1950s. These initial programmes were British. This history of these early viewers, however, has been ignored. A dominant narrative has addressed the history of television in Ireland as the history of the public broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). Thus, the history of Irish television often begins in 1961, overlooking Irish people’s experience of the medium in the preceding decade. This paper breaks with traditional historiography by employing life history interviews to explore the uses, rituals and feelings attached to television in the years before RTÉ.

Irish people who watched television …

Television In Ireland: A History From The Mediated Centre, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies and critiques a dominant narrative in the history of Irish television, which is too often passed off for, or accepted as, the history of television in Ireland. The his- tory of television in Ireland has been written within an institutional framework and depends on the cultural binary of tradition and modernity, ‘old Ireland’ and ‘new Ireland’. This dom- inant narrative fails to interrogate television as a medium. It provides an account of the Irish broadcaster RTÉ rather than an account of the arrival of a new medium. Ironically this nar- rative which hinges on the role of …

Why Does Film And Television Sci-Fi Tend To Portray Machines As Being Human?, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

This paper identifies, and attempts to explain, a lack of diversity in the way that cinema and television science fiction represents robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Through a qualitative content analysis of recent film and television portrayals, it is argued, that a limited and limiting vision predominates. This limitation may serve to ideologically reinforce the power of corporate elites. It may also hamper discussion and debate around technological possibilities and their relationship with society.

There has been a slew of entertainment productions since 2013 that represent AI and robotics. This work examines Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Interstellar (2014), Chappie (2015), …

Formations Of Indian Cinema In Dublin: A Participatory Researcher-Fan Ethnography, Giovanna Rampazzo

Doctoral

This thesis explores emergent formations of Indian cinema in Dublin with a particular focus on globalising Bollywood film culture, offering a timely analysis of how Indian cinema circulates in the Irish capital in terms of consumption, exhibition, production and identity negotiation. The enhanced visibility of South Asian culture in the Irish context is testimony to on the one hand, the global expansion of Hindi cinema, and on the other, to the demographic expansion of the South Asian community in Ireland during the last decade. Through varying degrees of participant observation in and across sites of film production and consumption, alongside …

The Production Of Ek Tha Tiger: A Marriage Of Convenience Between Bollywood And The Irish Film And Tourist Industries, Giovanna Rampazzo

Articles

This article examines a collaboration between the Irish and Hindi film industries, adopting the production of Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger (2012) in Dublin as a case study. It critically narrates the arc of the film’s production, foregrounding the intersecting concerns of Yash Raj Films and Irish creative and cultural institutions. Ek Tha Tiger represents Ireland through constructed idyllic images which proved to be successful in attracting tourists. Tracing the links between the production of the film and the promotion of tourism to Ireland, this article explains how the film was used to construct a ‘tourist gaze’ for audiences in …

Techno-Apocalypse: Technology, Religion, And Ideology In Bryan Singer’S H+, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This essay critically analyses the digital series H+. In the near future, adults who can afford them, have replaced tablets and cell phones with nanotechnology implants. The H+ implant acts as a medical diagnostic and can overlay the user's senses with a computer interface. The apocalypse comes in the form of a computer virus which infects the H+ network and instantly kills one third of humanity. The series represents the anxiety and religiosity that surrounds the possible social consequences of digital technology. It also explores the tensions and intersections between technology and faith. This essay makes the case, however, that …

Providing Objective Metrics Of Team Communication Skills Via Interpersonal Coordination Mechanisms, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Finnian Kelly, Alison Kay

Conference Papers

Being able to communicate efficiently has been acknowledged as a vital skill in many different domains. In particular, team communication skills are of key importance in the operation of complex machinery such as aircrafts, maritime vessels and such other, highly-specialized, civilian or military vehicles, as well as the performance of complex tasks in the medical domain. In this paper, we propose to use prosodic accommodation and turn- taking organisation to provide objective metrics of communica- tion skills. To do this, human-factors evaluations, via a coordi- nation Demand Analysis (CDA), were used in conjunction with a dynamic model of prosodic accommodation …

Tv Still Failing To Reflect Our Multicultural Society, Ian Kilroy

Articles

Irish television and media in 2015 still lacks diversity and does not reflect our multicultural society. An Op-Ed (opinion piece) in the Irish Times by a Dublin-based academic and lecturer in Technological University Dublin.

The Western Way: Democracy And The Media Assistance Model, Daire Higgins

Articles

International media assistance took off during a time where the ideological extremes of USA vs. USSR were set to disappear. Following the Cold War, international relations focused on democracy building, and nurturing independent media was embraced as a key part of this strategy. Fukayama called it the ‘End of History’, the fact that all other ideologies had fallen and Western style democracy was set to become the one common ideology. The US and UK led the way in media assistance, with their liberal ideas of a free press, bolstered by free market capitalism. America was the superpower, and forged the …

Visualising Migrant Voices: Co-Creative Documentary And The Politics Of Listening, Darcy Alexandra

Doctoral

This ethnography of media production explores the challenges of literally and figuratively visualising voice. The labour of a shared production and the distribution of the audio-visual documentary essays unfolded within a field of diverse, and at times, conflicting interests. For this reason, judicious attention to what I name ‘encounters’ of ‘political listening’ (Bickford 1996; Dreher 2009) provides one framework for theorising the challenges of researching with marginalised subjects and stories, and the contradictions of developing shared practices within proprietary contexts. These encounters reveal moments of listening and being heard, struggles over ‘veracity’ and ‘evidence,’ and the power relations inherent in …

Rationalizing Creativity—Rationalizing Public Service: Is Scheduling Management Fit For The Digital Era?, Ann-Marie Murray

Articles

In public broadcast organizations across Europe, scheduling has been transformed from a marginal, administrative activity to a highly strategic management tool (Hellman, 1999; Hujanen, 2002; Meier, 2003;Ytreberg, 2000) Ellis (2000)described it as “the locus of power in television,” organizing production and managing budgets (p. 26). The role of scheduling in public broadcast organizations today reflects the demands of increasing competition and political pressure for efficiency and accountability. However, new challenges have emerged in the transition from public service broadcasting to public service media (PSM). PSM providers must redefine their mission for the digital era and find …

Bullying In A New Ground: Cyberbullying Among 9-16 Year Olds In Ireland, Thuy Dinh, Brian O'Neill

Articles

This paper builds on the data collected in Ireland by the cross-national EU Kids Online II project- a large 25 country survey which investigated children’s experiences of the internet, focusing on issues of use, activities, risks, and safetyi . This article explores incidences, forms and consequences of cyberbullying among Irish children, as well as discussing possible prevention and intervention strategies.

Television In Ireland Before Irish Television: Nationalist Rhetoric And International Programming, Edward Brennan

Conference Papers

Typical of an international tendency, the history of television in Ireland has been framed by national boundaries. This paper argues that viewing the history of television solely through institutional sources and a nation state-bound perspective obscures transnational influences and homogenises diverse audience experiences. Moreover, such histories may serve to reproduce a limited range of types of nationalist rhetoric. The research presented here explores the history of television in Ireland through life story interviews. This reveals views of the nation, its global context and processes of social change quite different to those discussed in orthodox histories. Arguably, this shift in historical …

Not Seeing The Joke: The Overlooked Role Of Humour In Researching Television Production, Edward Brennan

Articles

This article argues that humour can provide researchers with a unique access point into the professional cultures of media producers. By reconsidering an earlier case study, and reviewing relevant literature, it illustrates how humour can fulfil several functions in media production. Importantly, humour is a central means of performing the ‘emotional labour’ that increasingly precarious media work demands. For production research, the everyday joking and banter of media workers can provide an important and, heretofore, overlooked means of accessing culture, meaning, consensus and conflict in media organizations. The article argues that humour’s organizational role should be considered as a sensitizing …

Media Effects In Context, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

The media effects tradition occupies a hugely influential and dominant role within mainstream communications research. It is unquestionably the longest running tradition within the field of audience studies, spanning nearly its entire history, yet it continues to divide opinion, both methodologically and with regard to its fundamental approach towards the study of media audiences. Its influence extends well beyond the academy, and the powerful influence exerted by its research agenda on public and political understanding of the impact of media is perhaps one of its most significant achievements.

The Future Of Audience Research, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

ECREA roundtable The future of audience research IAMCR conference @ BRAGA July 21 14:30-16:00 Convenor: Nico Carpentier Institutional and critical perspectives on audience representation This contribution focuses on institutional and critical perspectives on audience representation, i.e., how audience experience is formally accounted for through institutional processes of research (media literacy indices for instance) or through representative bodies such as Audience Councils. In other words, an area of overlap between audience studies and public policy debates, advocating that researchers should try to make their findings more widely available and understood in professional media environments.

Beyond Europe: Launching Digital Radio In Canada And Australia, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

Eureka 147 was, as we have argued throughout this volume, a European technology designed within the very particular context of European public service broadcasting (see also Rudin 2006; O'Neill 2009). At the same time, the consortitum behind DAB technology had the ambition that Eureka 147 would become the world standard for digital radio. DAB was indeed the first such technological system to achieve standardisation at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and be recommended as a global standard for digital terrestrial sound broadcasting by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Radio Broadcasting In Europe: The Search For A Common Digital Future, Brian O'Neill, Helen Shaw

Books/Book chapters

Europe’s radio is also characterised by a long history of being defined and driven by the state, in highly centralized fashion in the case of countries such as France (Meadel 1994), or indeed in former totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe (Paulu 1974), and along more federal or devolved lines in countries such as Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands (Kuhn 1985). The development of state broadcasting monopolies in most European countries, established in the early years of the twentieth century following the invention of sound broadcasting, has ensured that there is an enduring shared common ideological approach to radio broadcasting, which …

Sounding The Future: Digital Radio And Cd-Quality Audio, Brian O'Neill

Books/Book chapters

Central to the early effort to win acceptance for DAB in the early 1990s was an extensive process of promotion of the many claimed advantages of the new broadcasting technology. Digital radio broadcasting under the Eureka 147 DAB project offered many technical enhancements – more efficient use of the spectrum, improved transmission methods, and lower running costs – features that were attractive to industry professionals, broadcasting organisations, regulators and spectrum planners. But digital radio was also designed as a consumer proposition offering audiences a new and improved listening experience with ease of tuning, reliable reception, text and data services, interactive …

A Political Economy Of Formatted Pleasures, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This chapter argues that, by promoting audience pleasures based in the pursuit of individual and materialistic goals, most television formats are consonant with a dominant orthodoxy which sees markets as the only way to organise society . This elective affinity between format pleasures and free market ideology, however, does not come about through deliberate design. Rather it is an unintended consequence of television production’s response to economic and practical necessity. In their form, content and production practices formats are pre-adapted to the demands of a globalised media market place. This commercial logic has given formats a peculiar signature in terms …

Developing Digital Radio For Ireland: Emerging Approaches And Strategies, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Ireland’s experience of the transition from public service broadcasting to public service media has gathered pace within the last year with new legislative arrangements for media regulation, the awarding of digital terrestrial television licences and renewed attempts to introduce digital radio broadcasting on the DAB platform. The national public broadcaster, RTE, has played a central role in these developments as it attempts to manage a range of technology platforms and to provide media services for an increasingly diverse and complex market. This paper addresses the case of digital radio in Ireland and the prospects for a successful launch of DAB …

Dab Eureka-147: The European Vision For Digital Radio, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

The digitalisation of radio broadcasting has a long history and as a project has been under active consideration for at least 25 years. A number of different technical approaches to digital radio exist, the longest established of which is the so-called Eureka-147 or DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) system. This paper explores the ‘technological imaginary’ of DAB and its distinctly ‘European’ vision for new media and the future of broadcasting. It examines its origins in European R&D policy of the 1980s, and its affinity with European broadcasting practice, particularly within a public service tradition. Ironically, it was DAB’s failure to capitalise …

Back To The Future: The Emergence Of Contrasting European And Us Approaches To Digital Radio, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

Digital radio has been in development for over 25 years and yet is no nearer a point of successful adoption. This paper explores the emergence of contrasting European and American approaches to digital radio. The most established of these, Eureka-147 or Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), which originated in Europe, is contrasted with the so-called IBOC or /HD Radio approach, as alternative collective conceptualizations of how technology can bridge contemporary broadcasting practice to an ̳imagined‘ digital future. Drawing on the concept of ̳symptomatic technology‘ (Williams 1974), DAB‘s origins in European R&D policy of the 1980s and its affinity with established European …

Media Literacy And The Public Sphere: A Contextual Study For Public Media Literacy Promotion In Ireland, Brian O'Neill, Cliona Barnes

Reports

This research documents the background to the development of media literacy as a matter of public policy, both within the European Union and internationally, and examines considerations that may be important in the emerging Irish debate on media literacy.

Digital Technologies And The Future Of Radio: Lessons From The Canadian Experience., Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

This paper examines the position of digital radio in Canada. It examines the Canadian experience of digital radio development from its introduction in 1995 to the present and asks whether the approach adopted and the lessons learned provide useful models for application elsewhere. Three main strands form the background to digital radio’s current stage of development: firstly, the introduction and early support for Digital Audio Broadcasting or (DAB) in the mid 1990s; secondly, the response of the radio industry to the internet and new media as complementary to traditional radio broadcasting provision; and thirdly, the more recent experience of the …

Digital Radio Policy In Canada: Fragmentation Or Evolution Of The Medium, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

In December 2006, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) issued its review of Digital Radio Policy. This replaced the transitional digital radio policy of 1995, and sought to implement a framework designed to support multi-platform digital radio broadcasting in an increasingly complex technological environment for the medium. Drawing on policy analysis, interviews and expert group perspectives, this paper traces the background to the legislative provision for digital radio development in Canada. While Canada was an early adopter of the Eureka-147 or Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), the policy of DAB as a replacement technology approach proved to be mistaken. Subsequent …

Digital Radio In Canada: From Dab To Multi-Platform Approaches., Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

This paper examines the position of digital radio in Canada. It examines the Canadian experience of digital radio development from its introduction in 1995 to the present and asks whether the approach adopted and the lessons learned provide useful models for application elsewhere. Three main strands form the background to digital radio’s current stage of development: firstly, the introduction and early support for Digital Audio Broadcasting or (DAB) in the mid 1990s; secondly, the response of the radio industry to the internet and new media as complementary to traditional radio broadcasting provision; and thirdly, the more recent experience of the …