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This chapter examines four episodes of The Simpsons, paying particular interest to one, The Days of Wine and D’oh’ses to connect the notion of pastiche with a symbolic interactionist view of media representation. We use The Simpsons and episodes pertinent to alcoholism and alcoholic imbibing to show that pastiche, which does not deny the resolute qualities of a serious social issue, nevertheless provides ironic and fantastic imagery to merge the serious and even tragic with the comedic. We use the four episodes to depict alcoholism as a disease but also as focal point for humor, making the contrast between The Days of Wine and D’oh’ses and its classic alcoholism-film counterpart, The Days of Wine and Roses, central to the tragic-comedic connection. We further draw upon Denzin’s notions of the comedic drunk and the alcoholism alibi to discuss how pastiche both inspires attention to alcoholism as a serious medical disease and disease of the self and to alcoholism as pivotal to comedic character development and the emergence of pragmatic and creative selves.

This study aims to reconsider Chinese tourist gaze studies, examining the extent to which extant studies and theoretical models relating to the Chinese tourist gaze have overcome the Eurocentric limits of John Urry’s concept of the tourist gaze and elaborated the complexity of Chinese tourists’ gazes and visual practices.

Content analysis is carried out, examining research articles, books, book chapters and PhD and MSc theses collected from multiple English and Chinese databases.

The research results manifest that, overall, the previous studies, mobilise cultural essentialism, with an overestimation of the “Chineseness” of Chinese tourists’ behavioural patterns, which are widely believed to be framed by, but also constituting of, unique Chinese culture. Overdependence on Chinese cultural values and traditional philosophies as sources for rationale has resulted in a handful of theoretical frameworks, which appear to be of insufficient magnitude both in terms of their contribution to the original tourist gaze model and in their manifesting of the complexity of Chinese tourists’ visual behaviour. Indeed the divide that once deliberately set apart West and East, or more precisely Western and Chinese tourist gazes, seems to become accentuated in most attempts to study and write about Chinese tourist gaze(s). The previous studies thus largely serve to mirror the Eurocentrism of Urry’s gaze, rather than challenging it.

This study has a few limitations, especially, as this study only reviews and analyses the studies of the Chinese tourist gaze. It means that the conclusion might not well be generalised to either the investigation of the tourist gaze in another culture or the Chinese tourist studies, at large, which might exhibit a different pattern deserving more academic attention in future. Moreover, the authors recommend the future researchers, who are eager to probe Chinese tourists’ behavioural pattern, to seek for new pathways and alternative paradigms, which would be useful in overcoming the limits of cultural representations and in reducing the problematic Sino-Western divide.

Despite not aiming to reconceptualise the Chinese tourist gaze, this review paper contributes to the field of tourist gaze studies by engaging critically with the bias and theoretical insufficiencies that have emerged, while this concept is appropriated and re-formulated to explain Chinese tourists’ gazes and visual practices. On this basis, the authors suggest a critical redirection of the extant Chinese tourist gaze studies, which would be rather significant to those researchers in future with an interest to research what the Chinese tourists prefer to see in travel and how they engage with the gazee.

中国性与行为复杂性：反思中国游客凝视研究

本文重新检视有关中国游客凝视的研究, 审视现有研究和理论模型在多大程度上克服了约翰·厄里提出的游客凝视概念所蕴含的欧洲中心主义的局限, 并阐述中国游客凝视和视觉实践的复杂性。

本研究进行了内容分析; 资料来源于多个渠道的期刊论文、书籍、书章和博硕论文。

总体而言, 以往研究调动了文化本质主义, 过分强调了中国游客行为模式的“中国性”–被广泛认为受制于中国文化, 且也是中国文化一部分。对作为基本理论来源的中国文化价值观和传统哲学的过度依赖产生了一系列理论框架, 但它们在对最初的游客凝视模型的贡献上, 以及在对中国游客视觉行为的复杂性的阐释上, 都是不够的。在大部分中国游客凝视研究中, 以往对西方游客和中国游客的凝视的刻意区分都得以凸显, 从而映照出厄里的游客凝视概念所蕴含的欧洲中心主义。

虽然本评述论文并不致力于对中国游客凝视进行重新概念化, 但依旧对游客凝视研究领域做出了贡献。当游客凝视这一概念被挪用且重新定制以解释中国游客凝视和视觉实践时, 本文对涌现其间的偏见和理论上的缺陷进行了批判性的揭示。在此基础上, 我们认为, 有必要对有关中国游客凝视的研究做出批判性的重新定向。这对于未来有志于研究中国游客视觉偏好以及他们如何与被凝视者互动的研究人员而言, 尤其重要。

本研究有一些局限, 特别是, 因为我们只评价和分析了有关中国游客凝视的研究。这意味着, 我们的结论可能不能被推广至对其他文化情境下的游客凝视的调查, 也不能推广至中国游客研究整体。我们建议, 对中国游客行为模式感兴趣的研究人员需要寻求新的路径和替代性的范式, 以克服文化表象的局限并减少中西分歧带来的问题。

Carácter chino y la complejidad de comportamiento: repensar los estudios de la mirada del turista chino

Este artículo reconsidera los estudios de la mirada del turista chino para investigar hasta qué punto los estudios y los modelos teóricos existentes sobre la mirada del turista chino han superado los límites eurocéntricos del concepto de la mirada del turista de John Urry y explicado la complejidad de la mirada del turista chino y las prácticas visuales.

Se lleva a cabo el análisis de contenido investigando artículos de investigación, libros, capítulos de libros y las tesis de PhD y de MSc provenientes de las diversas bases de datos tanto en inglés como en chino.

Los resultados de la investigación manifiestan que, en general, los estudios anteriores movilizan el esencialismo cultural con una sobrestimación del “carácter chino” del modelo del comportamiento de turistas chinos, se cree en gran medida que el cual es motivado por la cultura china mientras forma parte de ella. Lo que la fuente de los fundamentos básicos sobredepende de los valores culturales y la filosofía tradicional de China resulta una pequeña cantidad de marcos teóricos, que no son suficientes tanto para la contribución al modelo original de la mirada del turismo como para manifestar la complejidad del comportamiento visual de turistas chinos. De hecho, se destaca la intención de la separación del Occidente y el Oriente, o hablando de forma precisa, de la mirada del turista occidental y la del turista chino al estudiar y escribir sobre la mirada del turista chino. Los estudios anteriores reflejan el eurocentrismo de la mirada de Urry en vez de ponerlo en duda.

A pesar de que el artículo no tiene la reconceptualización de la mirada del turista chino como su objetivo, contribuye al ámbito de la investigación de la mirada del turista a través de revelar de manera crítica el prejuicio y la insuficiencia teórica que ya ha existido cuando se usa y se reformula este concepto para explicar la mirada del turista chino y las prácticas visuales. Con lo que hemos mencionado, planteamos una redirección crítica de los estudios existentes de la mirada del turista chino, lo cual sería significativo para aquellos que tienen la intención de investigar qué prefieren ver los turistas chinos durante el viaje y cómo van a interactuar con los mirados en el futuro.

Esta investigación tiene varios límites, sobre todo, como solo revisamos y analizamos los estudios de la mirada del turista chino, lo cual significa que nuestra conclusión no se podría generalizar tanto a la investigación de la mirada del turista de otras culturas como a los estudios del turismo chino, que mostrarían un modelo diferente que merece más atención académica en el futuro. Al mismo tiempo, recomendamos a las personas que se interesen por investigar el modelo del comportamiento de los turistas chinos buscar nuevos caminos y paradigmas alternativos, los cuales serían útiles para superar los límites de las representaciones culturales y reducir la división problemática sino-occidental.

Analyses the “dumbing down” syndrome highlighting main quotes from BBC online, Kirkus Reviews and an interview between Roan Hoag of Amazon.xom and Pete Hamill whose book “News is a Verb” which attempts to unmask US journalism’s dumbing down. Looks at various tabloid‐style choices of sensational headlines giving examples of these. Concludes that unlike the technology world, newspaper and broadcasting world is full of dreamers staring only at their own reflection!.

Based on interviews with 27 victims’ family members and survivors, this chapter explores how memory of the Oklahoma City bombing was constructed through participation in groups formed after the bombing and participation in the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. It first addresses the efficacy of a collective memory perspective. It then describes the mental context in which interviewees joined groups after the bombing, the recovery functions groups played, and their impact on punishment expectations. Next, it discusses a media-initiated involuntary relationship between McVeigh and interviewees. Finally, this chapter examines execution witnesses’ perceptions of communication with McVeigh in his trial and execution.

Ethnographers in the field aim to familiarise themselves with processes and practices of local cultures in their chosen research setting. This usually means that they collect a wide range of data using diverse, multiple methods such as participant observation, interviewing and document collection. As we have suggested previously, the gaze of ethnographers often tends to be drawn to visible and audible activities; therefore, we also wanted to ask how to observe, record and analyse silence. We argued that it is more difficult for participant observers to focus on mundane everyday practices and stillness and silence than it is to record the use of voice and movement during lessons and breaks (Gordon, Holland, Lahelma, & Tolonen, 2005). Here, I shift the focus and examine how a researcher looks at what is eventful and striking in the field. Usually, in the course of a school day there are numerous incidents that are clearly visible to the ethnographer's gaze or loudly audible to her ears. I ask what strikes the researchers as particularly symptomatic among the many observations they make in the course of the day; why and how are some incidents interpreted as laden with significant meanings.

Analyzing the trajectory of atypical bosses does not mean denying the existence of the mechanisms of both reproduction and global domination, but instead necessitates a heightened interest in the minority phenomena that splinter these individuals. This approach relies on the principal that a system is never transformed by its center, but always by its margins.

Atypical bosses do not consider the working world in the same way that regular bosses tend to. The experience of difference instead leads them to understand the company as a world in which their place is not given, but that rather has been acquired. They have learned to be relatively foreign in the professional world in which they act. But being strangers – i.e. not mobilising that which is implicit in the dominant culture – also leads them to adopt a posture altogether rare within normal managers: they look on, not just in order to see, but to question the meaning, utility and purpose of social practices that the majority has taken for granted.

The domain of study on mediated suffering is ensconced within an Orientalist paradigm which ideologically structures our visuality and gaze. The consignment of suffering through bodies of alterity and the geo-politics of the Global South encodes the coloniality of power as a dominant reading. It then naturalizes the West as the voyeur in its consumption of the abject bodies of the Global South. Creating a binary through this East-West polarization in the oeuvre of suffering as a realm of study, it creates the hegemony of the West as the moral guardian of suffering, imbuing it with the right to accord pity and compassion to the lesser Other. Beyond elongating the Orientalist trajectory which lodged the body politic of the Global South as a sustained ideological site of suffering, it hermeneutically seals the East as irredeemable, ordaining it through the gaze over the Other as a mode of coloniality. In countering this Eurocentric proposition, this chapter contends that this coloniality of gaze needs further rumination and new sensibilities in the study of mediated suffering, particularly following 9/11 and the shifting of the geo-politics of suffering in which the West is dispossessed through its own manufactured ideologies of the ‘War on Terror’ such that it is under constant threat of terrorist attacks and through the movement of the displaced Other into the Global North. Besieged and entrapped through its own pathologies of risks and threats, the West is projected through its own victimhood and the politics of the Anthropocene within which risks are seemingly democratized by environmental degradation as an overarching threat for all of humanity. Despite these shifts in the global politics, the scholarship of suffering is locked into this polarity. The chapter interrogates this innate crisis within this field of scholarship.