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2016

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill Apr 2016

Aboriginal Australian And Canadian First Nations Children's Literature, Angeline O'Neill

Angeline O'Neill

In her article "Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" Angeline O'Neill discusses Canadian First Nations and Australian Aboriginal children's picture books and their appeal to a dual readership. Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. Each appeals to Indigenous and non-Indigenous, child and adult readerships, thus challenging two assumptions in Western scholarship on literature that 1) the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and 2) that traditional Indigenous stories are, similarly, best suited to children. O'Neill considers the ways …

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Structural Pluralism And The Community Context: How And When Does The Environment Matter?, Leo Jeffres, Edward Horowitz, Cheryl Bracken, Guowei Jian, Kimberly Neuendorf, Sukki Yoon Mar 2016

Structural Pluralism And The Community Context: How And When Does The Environment Matter?, Leo Jeffres, Edward Horowitz, Cheryl Bracken, Guowei Jian, Kimberly Neuendorf, Sukki Yoon

Guowei Jian

Several long-standing theories intersect in discussing the impact of community characteristics and of the mass media. The structural pluralism model popularized by Tichenor and his colleagues says that social structure influences how mass media operate in communities because they respond to how power is distributed in the social system, whereas the linear model says that the increasing size of a community's population leads to more social differentiation and diversity and corresponding increases in subcultures with their own beliefs, customs, and behaviors. Recently, there has been a concern about how changes in society have led to a decline in organizational activity …

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Lifestyle Drugs And The Neoliberal Family, Kristin Swenson Feb 2016

Lifestyle Drugs And The Neoliberal Family, Kristin Swenson

Kristin Swenson

Since 1997, advertisements for lifestyle drugs have saturated the U.S. airwaves, print media, and the Internet. Viewers are asked to see their children’s difficulty in school as attention deficit disorder, their worry as anxiety, and their flagging sex life as dysfunction. And for each disorder, there is a corresponding pharmaceutical solution. Through the lens of these advertisements, Lifestyle Drugs and the Neoliberal Family unpacks our contemporary obsession with obtaining easy solutions for difficult problems. The ads’ discourse illuminates the experience of living within a society increasingly affected by the policies of neoliberalism, one that requires us to invest and manage …

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Capital, Consumption, Communication, And Citizenship: The Social Positioning Of Taste And Civic Culture In The United States, Mark Rademacher Jan 2016

Capital, Consumption, Communication, And Citizenship: The Social Positioning Of Taste And Civic Culture In The United States, Mark Rademacher

Mark A. Rademacher

In this paper, we analyze the field of cultural consumption in the United States, drawing on the methods of correspondence analysis employed by Bourdieu (1979/1984). Using the 2000 DDB Lifestyle Study, we analyze a cross section of Americans (N=3,122) in terms of their occupational categories, media usage, consumption practices, social behaviors, and indicators of civic and political engagement. In doing so, we find many parallels to the determinants of taste, cultural discrimination, and choice within the field structure observed by Bourdieu in 1960s French society, though there are also some notable differences, consistent with Peterson and Kern's (1996) concept of …

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Downshifting Consumer = Upshifting Citizen?, Mark Rademacher Jan 2016

Downshifting Consumer = Upshifting Citizen?, Mark Rademacher

Mark A. Rademacher

Critics suggest that contemporary consumer culture creates over-worked and over-shopped consumers who no longer engage in civic life. We challenge this conventional criticism against consumption within an individualistic lifestyle and argue instead that consumers who are "downshifting" do engage in civic life. In particular, this research examines downshifting attitudes among members of freecycle.org, a grassroots "gift economy" community. Results of an online survey show that downshifting consumers are indeed less materialistic and brand-conscious. They also tend to practice political consumption (e.g., boycotts, buycotts). Most importantly, they tend to engage in a digital form, but not a traditional form, of civic …

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Fashion And The College Transition: Liminality, Play, And The Structuring Power Of The Habitus, Mark Rademacher Jan 2016

Fashion And The College Transition: Liminality, Play, And The Structuring Power Of The Habitus, Mark Rademacher

Mark A. Rademacher

Fashion has long been a signifier of social divisions within the education system as well as society at large. This paper seeks to examine how young people’s use of fashion varies in two distinct social milieus – the high school and college peer cultures. Interviews with 19 college freshmen were conducted to ascertain how fashion contributed to, or hindered, social divisions within each milieu. While informants recognized numerous social divisions marked by fashion choices within the high school milieu, during their initial weeks on campus no social divisions were identifiable. In this new milieu it appears fashion contributed to a …

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