European Journal of Cultural Studies recent issues

Political culture and television fiction: The Amazing Mrs Pritchard

Corner, J., Richardson, K. — 2008-10-21

Recently, the study of politics has expanded its scope by recognizing the constitutive power of `political culture' at the same time as cultural studies has become more interested in formal political processes and their relationship to popular culture. This article is a case study of political culture in the United Kingdom, focusing on one example of fictional expression, a television drama series broadcast in 2006: The Amazing Mrs Pritchard . The premise of the article is that the imaginative work of political fiction provides an opportunity to explore the cultural mediation of uncertainties and tensions in contemporary politics and political values. The framing of the series involves a generic mixture of realism and fantasy unusual in the British context and the key themes, which include political trust and the limits of political action, are discussed in relation both to their fictional articulation and their wider reference.

The musicalization of `reality': Reality rap and rap reality on Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet

Danielsen, A. — 2008-10-21

A recurring theme in the theorizing of documentary film is the nature of the relation between image and reality. This article deals with reality effects and documentary aspects in reality rap, focusing on Public Enemy's album Fear of a Black Planet (Def Jam, 1990). Specific attention is given to the use of samples from `real life' locations, the inclusion of mass media debates and the use of sonic montage. The article discusses the exchange of music and reality in Public Enemy's music, arguing that the musicalization of reality both enhances the expressive power of their music and makes it possible to produce new meanings in an informational sense.

Othering through genderization in the regional press: Constructing brutal others out of immigrants in rural Sweden

Elsrud, T. — 2008-10-21

By far, most of the research into processes of discrimination and ethnification in Sweden considers urban settings. This article focuses on how the regional press in a rural area of south-east Sweden represents immigrants in a residential area in the outskirts of the Kalmar township. It points at the urgent need for researchers and decision-makers to take into account both subtle and palpable stigmatizing processes that meet immigrants who reside the countryside. An analysis of two local newspapers shows a continuous construction of `otherness' through pictures and texts, in which the identities of minority ethnic groups are stereotyped and subverted. One of the most persistent themes in this work of representation is the brutalization of the masculinity of `others', stressed even further by a `traditionalization' and feminization of a weak, caring female other. Both these gendered images serve a higher purpose, that of maintaining a positive image of a taken-for-granted Swedishness.

Descendants of Slaves: The articulation of mixed racial ancestry in a Danish television documentary series

Marselis, R. — 2008-10-21

The aim of the Danish television documentary series Slavernes Slægt (Descendants of Slaves, 2005) has been to enhance public awareness of Danish colonial history. As is typical of contemporary mediated memories, the account of national history is combined with `small histories' that focus on live stories of individuals and their families. Participating in the series are present-day descendants of enslaved Africans who, as a result of an interest in family historical research, have found information about their black ancestry. The series challenges the supposed historical homogeneity of Nordic nation-states by pointing out the historical presence of black individuals. However, this article will show how discourses of family history (e.g. the focus on bloodlines) converge with old `race' theory; the result of which is that the series inadvertently reproduces processes of visual Othering.

National media events: From displays of unity to enactments of division

Mihelj, S. — 2008-10-21

Despite the conspicuous presence of nationhood and nationalism in existing studies of media events and rituals, explicit conceptualizations of the link between these media phenomena and nationhood remain scarce. Drawing on existing literature and research on the topic, this article proposes to shift attention away from ceremonial occasions primarily aimed at celebrating national unity, towards the more distressing events and mobilization marathons enacting partition and instituting divisions among nations, ethnicities, cultures, races or religions. It provides a series of propositions regarding the involvement of media events in the transformation of audiences into nations, and discusses two categories of media rituals that are linked closely to contemporary forms of national mobilization: rituals of partition and mobilization marathons. Given the disentanglement of nations and states and the multi-ethnic nature of modern states and media spaces, such media occasions ought to receive more sustained attention in the future.

The nation has two `voices': Diforia and performativity in Athens 2004

Tzanelli, R. — 2008-10-21

This article explores the contemporary conditions of national self-presentation, inviting students of national identity to reconsider the nature of national self-narration through new conceptual tools. It is argued that contemporary nations have two `voices': one is addressed to their members, another speaks to the nation's external interlocutors. Both voices contribute to the performance of identity: for nations which are the product of colonial and `crypto-colonial' encounters, narration is characterized by a negotiation of the boundaries between private and public voices and slippage in utterance. The article introduces a new concept in the study of culture, `diforia', which accounts for both this split meaning of utterance and national performativity in public. The concept is mobilized to examine and deconstruct a recent case of Greek diforia enacted in the context of the opening and closing ceremonies of Athens 2004.

Book review: Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham, Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. xiv + 247 pp. ISBN: 9781403985347, {pound}50.00 (hbk)

Rowe, D. — 2008-10-21

Editor's Introduction: Anti-policy and anti-politics: Critical reflections on certain schemes to govern bad things

Walters, W. — 2008-07-22

This article proposes a concept of anti-policy along with some propositions concerning how we might research this new topic. It also introduces the four articles which make up this special issue on anti-policy and anti-politics. Anti-policy is a way of registering an undertheorized feature of the contemporary political culture of many western countries, as well as the domain of international politics. This is the ubiquity of discourses, schemes and policies whose stated objective is to combat or negate bad things. Anti-policy includes, but is not limited to, anti-terrorism, anti-racism, anti-trafficking, anti-corruption, anti-poverty and the war on crime. Observing that anti-policy can become a terrain of political struggle in its own right, the article cautions against the assumption that anti-policy can be simply equated with depoliticization.

Money, media and the anti-politics of terrorist finance

de Goede, M. — 2008-07-22

This article offers a critical analysis of the anti-politics of terrorist finance, understood as the particularly depoliticized governing practices enabled in its name. The article conceptualizes 'terrorist finance' not as an unproblematic reality which has elicited a state response, but as a practice of government that works through a number of political or discursive moves. The article begins with an examination of the media battles over the names, numbers and definitions of terrorism finance. It then argues that the 'war on terrorist finance' is not so much about regulating global money flows as it is about governing practices of mediation and social affiliation.

After anti-racism?

Lentin, A. — 2008-07-22

Anti-racism as a political discourse and a form of collective social action has long been ignored as a serious field of research. In contrast, I envision the study of anti-racism as a vital lens on both 'race' and racism. First, the heterogeneity of anti-racism is demonstrated, spanning both pro- and anti-state-based analyses of the origins of racism. Second, a parallel discourse of 'anti-anti-racism' within the radical Left reveals the reluctance of many on the Left to identify the anti-racist project with anything other than its officialized, state-endorsed version. This raises important questions about the possibility for autonomy from paternalist control in the construction of radical anti-racisms. The article examines the relationship to anti-racism within these three shifts from anti-racism, to anti-anti-racism, to post-anti-racism. It asks what conclusions can be drawn about the status of anti-racism today: has it indeed exceeded its political utility, or is it a political project that is, in fact, yet to be born?

In solitary, in solidarity: Detainees, hostages and contesting the anti-policy of detention

Nyers, P. — 2008-07-22

This article assesses the challenges to a key 'anti-policy' within anti-terrorism: the detention of terror suspects. It analyses the global response to the 2005 kidnapping of a Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq. Particular focus is given to how detainees in the 'War on Terror' emerged as key spokespeople in the attempt to influence the actions of the kidnappers. So-called 'terror detainees' in the UK and Canada made several appeals for mercy and wrote letters establishing their solidarity with the CPT hostages. Drawing on the political theory of Jacques Ranciere, the article analyses examples of detainee or hostage solidarity as acts of political subjectification. Detention is analysed as a site where key political dynamics are enacted. For detainees to articulate a grievance as an equal or enact an international solidarity is a radical political moment that serves to disrupt the routines and normalizations of the anti-policy of detention.

War on!: Why a 'war on cancer' should replace our 'war on crime' (and terror)

Simon, J. — 2008-07-22

'War on' is the leading form of anti-policy in the United States. Since the late 1950s we have seen wars on cancer, poverty, drugs and terror. Thus far, the most far-reaching of these, the war on crime, has transformed American democracy since the 1960s. The deformation of our population and institutions now requires not simply an end to that war and its extension (the 'War on Terror'), but the deployment of a new 'war on' to stimulate change in the governmentalities which have been established by the war on crime. A renewed 'war on cancer' offers great promise in this regard when analyzed in terms of the history of disease as a stimulus to change in governmentality, and specifically to the rise of biological citizenship.

Review article: Mitchell Dean, Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2007. xii + 228 pp. ISBN-13 9780335208975, {pound}22.99 (pbk)

Muller, B. J. — 2008-07-22

Review article: Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 417 pp. ISBN-10 1405986525; ISBN-13 9781403986528, {pound}19.94 (pbk)

Rantanen, P. — 2008-07-22

Book review: Elsbeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 197 pp. ISBN 0816627215, {pound}14.00 (pbk), {pound}37.00 (hbk)

Husso, M. — 2008-07-22

Book review: Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. xii + 508 pp. ISBN: 9780748616428, $25.95 (pbk)

Gallardo, X. — 2008-07-22

Book review: Richard Butsch (ed.), Media and Public Spheres. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 250 pp. ISBN 9780007215 $85.00

Howley, K. — 2008-07-22

What is game studies anyway?

Nieborg, D. B., Hermes, J. — 2008-04-15

In this introduction, game studies is argued to be a force of innovation for cultural studies. While game studies, as it has developed over the last 10 years, fits well within cultural studies' methodology and theory, it does more than benefit from cultural studies as a 'mother discipline'. Game studies proves itself to be a strong force, especially in its productive use of political economy to analyse games and gaming as a (new) cultural form. Building on a descriptive taxonomy of games and gaming by both genre and 'platform', this is an introduction to games and gaming for those with a cultural studies background. While ideally, game studies will develop also as cultural critique, this is a far cry from dominant practice in the gamer community. Gamers tend to be 'hand-in-glove' with the industry. It is high time for game studies to turn a critical eye on itself.

Ruling the virtual world: Governance in massively multiplayer online games

Humphreys, S. — 2008-04-15

This article explores governance and control in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). It examines areas where tactics of control are mobilized: by developers through design processes, by publishers through community management and legal practices and by players through participatory practices. As people with access to online technologies come to live more of their social lives (and work lives) in online environments, and to construct identities and communities in proprietary spaces, the terms under which they do so become increasingly important. In a context where economic value resides in intellectual property and immaterial labour, and where social networks have economic value extracted from them, the corporate practices which harness this value and the responses of participants become interesting for sociocultural and economic reasons. Using EverQuest and World of Warcraft as case studies, this article traces the flows of power between publishers, developers and players in the networked production of MMOGs.

Review: T.L. Taylor, Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 264. pp. ISBN-10: 0262201631 (hbk) {pound}19.95; ISBN-13: 9780262201636 (hbk) {pound}19.95

Kerr, A. — 2008-04-15

The mod industries? The industrial logic of non-market game production

Nieborg, D. B., van der Graaf, S. — 2008-04-15

This article seeks to make the relationship between non-market game developers (modders) and the game developer company explicit through game technology. It investigates a particular type of modding, i.e. total conversion mod teams, whose organization can be said to conform to the high-risk, technologically-advanced, capital-intensive, proprietary practice of the developer company. The notion 'proprietary experience' is applied to indicate an industrial logic underlying many mod projects. In addition to a particular user-driven mode of cultural production, mods as proprietary extensions build upon proprietary technology and are not simple redesigned games, because modders tend to follow a particular marketing and industrial discourse with corresponding industrial-like practices.

Review: Aphra Kerr, The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay. London: Sage, 2006. 177 pp. ISBN 1412900476 (pbk) {pound}21.99; Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006. 171 pp. ISBN 055521557X (pbk) {pound}19.99

Deuze, M., Martin, C. B. — 2008-04-15

Digital Arabs: Representation in video games

Sisler, V. — 2008-04-15

This article presents the ways in which Muslims and Arabs are represented and represent themselves in video games. First, it analyses how various genres of European and American video games have constructed the Arab or Muslim Other. Within these games, it demonstrates how the diverse ethnic and religious identities of the Islamic world have been flattened out and reconstructed into a series of social typologies operating within a broader framework of terrorism and hostility. It then contrasts these broader trends in western digital representation with selected video games produced in the Arab world, whose authors have knowingly subverted and refashioned these stereotypes in two unique and quite different fashions. In conclusion, it considers the significance of western attempts to transcend simplified patterns of representation that have dominated the video game industry by offering what are known as 'serious' games.

Review: Diane Carr, David Buckingham, Andrew Burn and Gareth Scott, Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. 210 pp. ISBN 0745654001 (hbk) {pound}16.99; ISBN 074563401X (pbk) {pound}50.00

Klevjer, R. — 2008-04-15

Do you believe in magic? Computer games in everyday life

Pargman, D., Jakobsson, P. — 2008-04-15

Huizinga's concept of a 'magic circle' has been used to depict computer games and gaming activities as something separate from ordinary life. In this view, games are special (magical) and they only come to life within temporal and spatial borders that are enacted and performed by the participants. This article discusses the concept of a 'magic circle' and finds that it lacks specificity. Attempts to use the concept of a magic circle create a number of anomalies that are problematic. This is not, as has been suggested earlier, primarily a matter of the genre of the game, or a discussion of what an appropriate definition of a 'game' might be. Rather, in this study with hardcore gamers, playing computer games is a routine and mundane activity, making the boundary between play and non-play tenuous to say the least. This article presents an alternative theoretical framework which should be explored further.

Review: Jesper Juul, Half-Real. Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 255 pp. ISBN 0262101106 (hbk) {pound}22.95: Ian Bogost, Unit Operations. An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 245 pp. ISBN 026202599X (hbk) {pound}22.95

Kucklich, J. — 2008-04-15

Open invitation: mapping global game cultures. Issues for a sociocultural study of games and players

Mayra, F. — 2008-04-15

Simultaneously lacking some fundamental data about the role of digital games in culture, while being faced with the challenge of games' near global presence, cultural game studies is in need of collaborative research efforts. This article discusses some starting points for cultural and social-psychological study of games and digital play, while inviting participation into an international, comparative research project.

'Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV': How methods make class in audience research

Skeggs, B., Thumim, N., Wood, H. — 2008-02-11

One of the most striking challenges encountered during the empirical stages of our audience research project, `Making Class and the Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios' (funded as part of the ESRC's Identities and Social Action programme), stemmed from how the different discursive resources held by our research participants impacted upon the kind of data collected. We argue that social class is reconfigured in each research encounter, not only through the adoption of moral positions in relation to `reality' television as we might expect, but also through the forms of authority available for participants. Different methods enabled the display of dissimilar relationships to television: reflexive telling, immanent positioning and affective responses all gave distinct variations of moral authority. Therefore, understanding the form as well as the content of our participants' responses is crucial to interpreting our data. These methodological observations underpin our earlier theoretical critique of the `turn' to subjectivity in social theory (Wood and Skeggs, 2004), where we suggest that the performance of the self is an activity that reproduces the social distinctions that theorists claim are in demise.

Media audiences, ethnographic practice and the notion of a cultural field

Athique, A. — 2008-02-11

This article will consider in detail the implications of a diffuse social imagination for existing paradigms of ethnographic audience research. The notion of a 'cultural field research model will be offered here as an alternative structure for locating media communities as sites of social practice. This is a theoretical framework that reformulates the conception of media audiences as 'imagined communities by replacing a demographically constituted ethnographic model with an emphasis on surveying the diverse inhabitants of a cultural field constructed around participation in particular instances of media practice.

Property TV: The (re)making of home on national screens

McElroy, R. — 2008-02-11

This article explores how home is made and re-made on national television screens by reference to new domestic lifestyle genres. Through a comparative analysis of the property TV of English-language broadcasters in the UK and US, as well as the minority-language Welsh broadcaster S4C, this article examines the inter-relationship of domestic scenes of private homes with the formation of national constructions of homelands and national belonging. The aestheticization of everyday home life is tied both to distinct material cultural practices and to the politics of taste in the formation of cultural identities within distinct national locales.

Looking good: Consumption and the problems of self-production

Maguire, J. S., Stanway, K. — 2008-02-11

This article considers the anxieties and risks that attend the process of self-production in the context of consumption. Drawing from interviews with a small sample of British young adults — white, middle-class, university-educated — the article examines how material practices and discursive strategies resonate with theoretical accounts of the nexus of consumption, identity and individualization. The analysis highlights how respondents discursively cope with anxieties and risks associated with the question of style, the problem of conformity, the desire for confidence and the negotiation of gender. In doing so, the article indicates ways in which the process of self-production in contemporary consumer societies may be less reflexive, and more socially conservative, than some accounts of individualization would suggest.

The beautiful in the commonplace

Skatvedt, A., Schou, K. C. — 2008-02-11

During fieldwork in a rehabilitation institution for drug abusers, I¹ became aware that certain, apparently commonplace, informal interaction situations between residents and staff appeared to constitute emotionally moving and identity-constructing situations which apparently had a great impact on the residents. These situations seem, on the surface, to be trivial, minor, superficial and very common. Still, and perhaps because of their 'smallness , they show qualities that suggest authentic interaction, immediate and unfeigned, by participants. This article draws upon an analysis of what I have called 'love-bearing interaction situations (Skatvedt, 2001) and connects this with theoretical insights drawn from the work of Erving Goffman and Johan Asplund, and from Howard Becker s labelling theory.² Of particular interest is a notion touched upon by Goffman, namely, the expression of love in commonplace interaction.

Meetings: Gifts without exchange

Metcalfe, A., Game, A. — 2008-02-11

This article examines the different theories of meeting offered by Durkheim, Mauss, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Bohm, Levinas and Buber. Through this examination we question the common assumption that social life, and more particularly the gift, is based on exchange — on the sequence of giving, receiving and reciprocating — which is fundamentally a Hegelian logic of subjects and objects. While many aspects of social life take this form, true meeting is characterized by a quality of grace; it occurs only when the Hegelian world gives way to a presence that has a different temporality, spatiality and ontology. This world is glimpsed, but inadequately conceptualized, in Durkheim s theory of religious congregation, which is characterized by a tension between identity and relational logics.

Book review: Robert Hariman and John Luis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Democracy. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007. 419 pp. ISBN-13 9780226316062, ISBN-10 0226316068 (hbk) $30.00

Corner, J. — 2008-02-11

Book Review: Sherrie A. Inness, Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender and Class at the Dinner Table. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 246 pp. ISBN 1403970084 (hbk) $45.00

Hollows, J. — 2008-02-11

Book review: Rajinder Kumar Dudrah, Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006. 212 pp. ISBN 9780761934615 (pbk) {pound}19.99

Thakur, M. — 2008-02-11

Book review: Thomas Johansson, The Transformation of Sexuality: Gender and Identity in Contemporary Youth Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. ISBN 9780754649403 {pound}55.00

White, C. — 2008-02-11