Digital Commons Network^™

Making Over Myth: The Rhetorical Use Of The Puritan Conversion Narrative In Kitchen Nightmares, Joseph Bowling

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

John Rodden, in his analysis of the rhetoric of narrative in 1984, argues that the characters in the story are secondary to the narrative, which itself participates in and provides support for larger cultural myths (155). Though Rodden discusses overtly fictive literature, the same can be said for the simulacra of reality TV: a genre of television in which each episode follows a formula that obscures the individual contestants. The Fox reality television show Kitchen Nightmares is such a formula-driven show, one with rhetorical narrative structure. The show, which portrays a struggling restaurant owner saved by a professional …

Editors’ Introduction: What Is Outsider Criticism?, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard published the results of a study he was commissioned to write for the Conseil des universités du Québec in which he made the claim that, in a university system devoted to functionalism rather than experimentation, “it is safe to assume that responsibility for [experimentation] will devolve upon extrauniversity networks.” This proclamation may have been shocking to university administrators, who have often equated the university with knowledge as if such a linking were inevitable, but from Lyotard’s perspective of a growing, capitalist-fueled technocracy, and now ours, in which this technocracy has grown in size and …

Constructing The Shitting Citizen, Deanna Grant-Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Art activism uses visual and performance art to promote social and environmental agendas. In this paper, I explore attempts to raise awareness of sanitation issues at the global, local and personal level using scatological art. I focus on the successes of the open-air public art exhibition set up in the Brisbane (Queensland, Australia) central business district to celebrate World Toilet Day in 2008. The art in this exhibition featured included one hundred toilets decorated to raise awareness of global sanitation issues and the distribution of promotional materials featuring scatological images including postcards and stickers. Given the subject matter and intent, …

Politicising Queer Issues And Activism: Disciplinarity, Biopolitics And The Means By Which Activist Issues Enter The Public Sphere, Rob Cover

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper explores ways of understanding how an activist 'issue' is politicised by examining and analysing lesbian/gay and queer community politics. The paper focuses on the contrast between (1) the wyas in which queer political activism has taken up and politicised the issue of same-sex marriage rights as one of seeking equality and foregrounded as the queer issue of the 2000s; and (2) the issue of queer youth suicide and self-harm which is arguably one of the most under-represented yet ethically most urgent issues within GLBT discourse carrying greater risk and impact on the most marginal and least visible of …

Activism As Fetishism: A Pamphlet Essay For Activists, Ann Deslandes

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

15-page, tri-fold pamphlet created by the author to present research she did for her dissertation on the ethics and politics of solidarity.

Review Of The Mc5 And Social Change: A Study In Rock And Revolution, By Mathew J. Bartkowiak, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When I saw the announcement for Mathew Bartkowiak’s book, The MC5 and Social Change, I had two immediate thoughts: a) damn, somebody beat me to it and b) I just hope it is not a book done by some kid who only just discovered the MC5 and thinks he invented them. After opening the book I discovered that Bartkowiak had probably anticipated this sort of reaction from people like me. First, he does not write yet another biography or history of the band but instead offers a critical look at the MC5's controversial position among politically-charged music and …

Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Expertise As Knowledge And A Technocratic Generation, Marc A. Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This project stems from two intersecting strands. The statement, "I can always find out," neatly summarizes the intersection. Not surprisingly, it has two distinct but simultaneous meanings. The first, in which "always" means "every time," considers the ways in which the ability to find knowledge has become synonymous with expertise and examines the elements that have fostered this situation. In this regard, factors such as the range of software and hardware--from Wikipedia and FAQs to cellphones and Ipods--which anticipate or "think" for the user but also require constant updating are both rationale and outcome for their youthful consumers. When combined …

Contributors, Marc A. Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 10, issue 2 of Reconstruction.

Arcadian Rhythms: Gaming And Interaction In Social Space, Jason Tocci

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Based on research conducted in four locations, this article describes the social organization of the neighborhood arcade. While cognitive and neuropsychological strains of game studies describe selection of and engagement with games in terms of innate dispositions, the playing styles and social behaviors of arcade patrons suggest strongly culturally-informed motives in selecting games, potentially understood through Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Though the arcade potentially represents an open, social environment, arcade patrons erect social boundaries between hobbyist gamers and "casual" visitors who game less frequently. The games that arcade visitors select may be informed less by spatial reasoning skill or attraction/aversion …

Concealing Screens: Consent, Control And The Desiring User, Kirsty Best

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article traces the contemporary cultural history of consent to information control. It argues that in order to begin to understand why people consent to the loss of control over their digital devices we need to see users as desiring subjects positioned at a cultural moment where the digital information screen has been enlisted as a central driver of both utility and pleasure, but where its architectural ability for additional functional control remains obscured.

Contributors, Nate Hinerman, Michael Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 10, issue 1 of Reconstruction.

Gaming At The End Of The World: Coercion, Conversion And The Apocalyptic Self In Left Behind: Eternal Forces Digital Play, Deborah Wills, Erin Steuter

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Left Behind: Eternal Forces is a real-time strategy game based on Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' best-selling eschatological novels, an immensely popular series featuring embattled Christians fighting evil at the world's end. The spin-off game allows players to "wage a war of apocalyptic proportions" against the Antichrist's minions. The players defend themselves with prayer and hymn-singing; if spiritual means fail, however, more violent tactics are invoked as Christian alliances evolve into the military units of the "Tribulation Force." This merging of what the game's website calls "physical and spiritual warfare" has generated among critics the label "kill or convert"; the …

Editors' Introduction, Nate Hinerman, Michael Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

At a time when many in the U.S. and around the world encounter religion as a polarizing subject, one especially revered by some and utterly contested by others, this special issue of Reconstruction explores questions arising at the intersection of religious experience and popular culture. To engage the relationship of religion and popular culture requires discipline-based, trans-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approaches in order to interpret these broad ranges of human experience. As a result, the articles in this issue demonstrate a myriad of methodological approaches.

Contributors, Alan Clinton, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 9 issue 3 of Reconstruction.

Transmaturities: Gender Trouble As Tentative Analogue For Maturity Trouble, Diederik F. Janssen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Recent contributions to queer studies have been marked by what can provisionally be called a turn toward time, specifically time's various normative condensations around issues of community formation, most notably with respect to the family and the subculture. While the specter of time often seems suspended between elite contemplation and public imagination, the emergent rubric of temporalities, explored in GLQ's special issue (2007;13/2-3), announced a possibly radical moment in which genders can be analyzed as breaking down "over time" politically and taxonomically, perhaps to the effect that deconstructive momentum realized in the context of gender/sexuality may facilitate …

Mutating Masculinity: Embodying The Hu(Man) In The Hills Have Eyes, Rebecca Hawkins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Discussing gender identity in the female warriors of kung fu films, critic Kwai-cheung Lo asks, "Does maleness automatically produce masculinity? Is there a kind of masculinity independent of the biological male? Can the women who kill in action cinema occupy a position that has been historically thought of as exclusively masculine" (138)? In this paper, I am asking similar questions regarding the construction of masculinity in the male victim of a horror film. Since the slasher film genre rose to popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, horror films have often been accused of reveling in voyeuristic misogyny (a …

Review Of Extreme Metal: Music And Culture On The Edge, By Keith Harris-Kahn, Scott Inniss

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Since the appearance in the early 1990s of Deena Weinstein’s Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology and Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, there has been a relative dearth of serious, book length inquiries into this often maligned musical form. Keith Harris-Kahn’s Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge offers not only to rectify this situation but more specifically to perform a cultural analysis of those much more aesthetically radical and socially marginalized metal subgenres—death, doom, and black metal as well as grind and metalcore—that have emerged since the …

Icons And Genre: The Affordances Of Livejournal.Com, Jennifer Grouling Cover, Tim Lockridge

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The proliferation of Internet discourse - texts ranging from personal publishing platforms to comment-driven conversations - has led to the explosion of new genres. But will this explosion of genre also lead to the implosion of genre theory? In this paper, we seek to play with genre theory, to explore its relevance and test its limits by dealing with one particular type of online text: the blog. We ask not only what are the affordances of the blogging medium, but also what are the affordances of genre theory? What view of these texts does it offer us, and …

The Genealogy Of Electracy: An Interview With Gregory L. Ulmer, Gregory L. Ulmer, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Fieldwork And Interdisciplinary Research, Vibha Arora, Justin Scott-Coe

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Central to ethnographic construction and production of knowledge(s) is the fieldwork experience and the location of the knower. Anthropological fieldwork conventionally privileged knowing the Other and the going elsewhere. As a spatial practice, fieldwork refers to "a specific style, quality, and duration of dwelling"; that is distinguished from travel (Clifford 1997: 22). Territoriality of the field and prolonged immersion in the locality defined this fieldworker conducting fieldwork in the field (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). The growing acceptance and recognition of mobility among communities and the interface of the local and the global in everyday life of an individual …

Technology And Women's Lives: Queering Media Ethnography, Irmi Karl

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article offers a re-examination and re-articulation of ethnographic approaches towards the study of media audiences and the consumption and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). In particular, it aims to highlight the challenges faced by researchers undertaking fieldwork in so-called familiar cultural settings. Based on insights gained from a longitudinal study into the ICT consumption practices of female-headed households in Brighton, UK, it seeks to re-vitalize the ethnographic imagination by asking: how can we, in an age of mobile media cultures, consolidate on- and offline encounters and overcome anxieties around boundary crossings expressed through the prevailing heteronormative frameworks …

Object Knowledge: Researching Objects In The Museum Experience, Elizabeth Wood, Kiersten F. Latham

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper investigates an interdisciplinary perspective on museum research, offering a new orientation and methodology for fieldwork. It begins from the stance of "object knowledge", which describes the ways of knowing that come from human interaction with and study of physical objects. Next, is the documentation of the power of objects to define the lived experience of time, place, and identity, presented with an applied and theoretical perspective on tangible objects and their relationship to lived experience. Through object knowledge we argue that museums can better understand their impact and influence on visitors and define the ways that objects and …

Contributors, Vibha Arora, Justin Scott-Coe

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about editors and contributors to articles in volume 9, issue 1 of Reconstruction.

Complicated Conversations Between Interviewing And Psychoanalytic Theory, Rachel Hurst

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The lyrebird is an endangered Australian creature, almost a strange peacock with a steely grey body and tail feathers flanked on either side with an ostentatious whorl. What makes this bird unique is that in order to attract a mate, the lyrebird sings a song that consists of every notable birdsong, forest noise, or human-generated sound the bird has ever heard, sung in a sequence composed by the bird. The lyrebird faithfully mimics these noises in timbre and resonance, and repeats them exactly as they were originally heard: the impersonation is so good that it fools practically all …

On S. Nutall And A. Mmembe, Eds. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Sandy Marshall

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In their edited volume, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, offer their readers a glimpse of contemporary Johannesburg from multiple vantage points, combining to create a singleness of vision that reveals a fractured and layered modern metropolis. However, the cohesiveness that binds this book should not be mistaken for theoretical fixity of the African metropolis. Recognizing that city forms "outpace the capacity of analysts to name them" (25), the editors of Johannesburg seek to unfix rather than fix the meanings of African modernity. As promised in the title, Johannesburg is depicted as elusive, uncontainable and …

Searching For Conscientização: Mentoring Fieldwork In International Service-Learning, Lauren Jones, Jonathan Arries

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The article discusses the methodology of the College of William and Mary's Modern Language and Literature's Summer Institute in Nicaragua, a service-learning course designed for current and prospective teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language. The leaders of the course were a doctoral student in Social Sciences and Comparative Education and an associate professor in Hispanic Studies with a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction. The multidisciplinary training of the course leaders and Paulo Freire's concept of conscientização informed both the academic content of the three-week course and their process approach to mentoring students' independence as they conducted their …

Practice In Mediated Space: Engaging 'Hobbiton' And Its Visitors Through A Constructivist Media Anthropology, Robert Moses Peaslee

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper calls for a (re)emphasis in site-specific, open-ended investigation of individual experience as a viable and valuable strategy across disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities, especially in the face of ongoing trends toward globality, hybridization, convergence, and destabilization of symbolic and material culture. The paper is particularly interested in reporting on the application of such methodologies toward investigating the media-tourism complex, a constellation of government, industrial, and personal activity which relies on globally mediated conceptions of place and practice and which represents a dynamic and ever-present field of symbolic and actual capital within which consumers operate and …

Syncretism In Narrativity, Visuality And Tactility: A Case Study Of Information Visualization Concerning A News Media Event, Ashley Holmes

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article re-examines the appropriateness of a conceptual framework based on the semiotic scholarship of Greimas and Courtés which Margaret Morse championed as being suitable for analysis of television and new media. That framework is supplemented with the suggestion that narrative, visual and tactile modes of communication involve syncretism. In a case study of information visualization examples produced for Australian news media during a mine collapse tragedy and rescue at the Beaconsfield Gold Mine in Tasmania in 2006 this idea is used to identify communicative qualities potentially inherent in traditional print and television and emergent new media visualization techniques.

On Davin Heckman's A Small World: Smart Houses And The Dream Of The Perfect Day, Mike Dubose

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In A Small World, Heckman traces the evolution of the smart house, starting with the narratives of futurism inherent in the influx of electrical appliances into the early twentieth century, through the competing futuristic visions of the "house of tomorrow"in Disney's EPCOT and Celebration, into the introduction of computers and new technologies of home control in the 1980s, culminating in the latest version of the smart house characterized by a high level of media saturation. The contemporary smart home, Heckman argues, culminates in the Perfect Day, "an attempt to institutionalize everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice...[which] …

Suspended Animation: Meditations On The Time And Space Of The Moving Image, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

An appropriate introduction to a cultural studies journal's special issue on cartoons should begin with two things: 1) A rough overview of the material and cultural processes of animation at its creation, and 2) and a rough overview of the cultural and material frames in which cartoons are consumed.