147 EIGHT Parenting ideologies, infant feeding and popular culture Abigail Locke Introduction Infant feeding is an emotive and politicised topic with various conflicting perspectives. This chapter takes a critical social and health psychological perspective to bring together different strands of the contemporary debate around infant feeding, drawing on ideas across the social and health sciences to explore key points of tension. These include media representation of infant feeding, health promotion discourse in a ‘neoliberal’ society, and the impact of
237 Breastfeeding and popular culture: reflections for policy and practice Nicki Symes, Elizabeth Mayo and Emma Laird Introduction This commentary is informed by personal written reflections as well as ideas from a conversation, both of which sparked our engagement with the chapters and the meaning of the seminar series to us. Quotes within the chapter are from these conversations and reflections; we decided not to identify ourselves in relation to these. Something about us We each came to the seminar series with different experiences of society, as women
Media technologies for play have become major industries in Japan and South Korea. Even in North Korea, citizens bypass the state to enjoy popular culture. At the same time, corporations and governments encourage people to produce economic values through play.
The first comparative study of media technologies in Japan and the two Koreas, this book illuminates the peculiar geopolitical relations between the three countries through their development and use of digital technologies. Drawing from political economy, cultural studies and technology studies, this book will be essential reading for researchers and students of media technologies and popular culture in Northeast Asia.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Ongoing conflicts between neoliberal and post-neoliberal politics have resulted in growing social instability in Latin America. This book explores the cultural dynamics of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal resistance in Latin America as a complex set of interrelated cultural forms, examining the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed public discourses of self and social relationships, popular cultures and modes of everyday experience.
Contributors from an international range of different disciplinary perspectives look at how Latin Americans construct subjectivities, build communities and make meaning in their everyday lives in order to analyse the discourses and cultural practices through which a societal consensus for the pursuit of neoliberal politics may be established, defended and contested.
Since the election in 2008 of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States there have been a plethora of books, films, and articles about the role of race in the election of the first person of color to the White House. None of these works though delves into the intricacies of Mr. Obama’s biracial background and what it means. Obama and the Biracial Factor is the first book to explore the significance of mixed-race identity as a key factor in the election of President Obama and examines the sociological and political relationship between race, power, and public policy in the United States with an emphasis on public discourse and ethnic representation in his election .
Jolivette and his co-authors bring biracial identity and multiraciality to forefront of our understanding of racial projects since his election. Additionally the authors assert the salience of mixed-race identity in U.S. policy and the on-going impact of the media and popular culture on the development, implementation, and interpretation of government policy and ethnic relations in the U.S. and globally.
Obama and the Biracial Factor speaks to a wide array of academic disciplines ranging from political science and public policy to sociology and ethnic studies.
Since the ‘migration crisis’ of 2016, long-simmering tensions between the Western members of the European Union and its ‘new’ Eastern members – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary – have proven to be fertile ground for rebellion against liberal values and policies.
In this startling and original book Ivan Kalmar argues that Central Europe illiberalism is a misguided response to the devastating effects of global neoliberalism which arose from the area’s brutal transition to capitalism in the 1990s.
Kalmar argues that dismissive attitudes towards ‘Eastern Europeans’ in the EU as incapable of real democracy are a form of racism, and connected to recent racist attacks on migrants from the area to the West.
He explores the close relation between racism towards Central Europeans and racism by Central Europeans: a people white, but not quite.
Bad parenting is so often blamed for Britain’s ‘broken society’, manifesting in sites as diverse as the government reaction to the riots of 2011, popular ‘entertainment’ like Supernanny and the discussion boards of Mumsnet.
This book examines how these pathologising ideas of failing, chaotic and dysfunctional families are manufactured across media, policy and public debate and how they create a powerful consensus that Britain is in the grip of a ‘parent crisis’.
It tracks how crisis talk around parenting has been used to police and discipline families who are considered to be morally deficient and socially irresponsible. Most damagingly, it has been used to justify increasingly punitive state policies towards families in the name of making ‘bad parents’ more responsible.
Is the real crisis in our perceptions rather than reality? This is essential reading for anyone engaged in policy and popular debate around parenting.
Criminology has been reluctant to embrace fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm.
In this philosophical enquiry, McGregor uses examples from films, television, novels and graphic novels to demonstrate the extensive criminological potential of fiction around the world. Building on previous studies of non-fiction narratives, the book is the first to explore the ways criminological fiction provides knowledge of the causes of crime and social harm.
For academics, practitioners and students, this is an engaging and thought-provoking critical analysis that establishes a bold new theory of criminological fiction.
Comedy and Critique explores British professional stand-up comedy in the wake of the Alternative Comedy movement of the late twentieth century, seeing it as an extension of the politics of the New Left: standing up for oneself as anti-racist, feminist and open to a queering of self and social institutions.
Daniel Smith demonstrates that the comic sensibility pervading contemporary humour is as much ‘speaking truth to power’ as it is realising one’s position ‘in’ power. The professionalisation of New Left humour offers a challenge to social and cultural critique. Stand-up comedy has made us all sociologists of self, identity and cultural power while also resigning us to a place where a comic sensibility becomes an acknowledgment of the necessity of social change.
