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It is widely recognized by scholars that superhero stories tend to glorify vigilante justice; after all, these stories often maintain that extralegal acts of violence are necessary for combatting existential threats to personal and public safety. This scholarly common sense fosters a widespread dismissal of superhero stories as uncomplicated apologia for an authoritarian politics of law and order that is animated by hatred of unpopular people and ideas. However, some prominent contemporary Batman stories, including those told in the graphic novels of Grant Morrison and in the blockbuster movies of Christopher Nolan, are ambivalent: in their portraits of Batman and Joker as dark twins and secret colleagues, these stories both legitimize and challenge the countersubversive politics of American law and order.

Purpose – This chapter explores the commercially successful and critically acclaimed motion picture The Dark Knight as a cultural artifact that both reflects and influences popular notions of crime and justice in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Design/methodology/approach – From a cultural criminological perspective, this chapter examines ideological messages pertaining to crime and justice presented in the film, including the framing of conflict as one between good and evil, justifications for extralegal violence, and reliance on absolute power as a means of social control. This chapter assesses reactions to the film as a “ritual moral exercise” in which viewers assuage their anxieties and insecurities in a post-9/11 world.

Findings – This chapter investigates representations of justice in the film, including the construction of the villain as “other,” the perception of constitutional procedures as impediments to justice, the embrace of vigilantism, and the willingness to sacrifice transparency of government authorities while accepting widespread surveillance in a time of crisis. Such themes resonated with some viewers who interpreted the film as offering explicit vindication for many of the questionable tactics used in the war on terror.

Originality/value – This chapter argues that popular media, specifically fictional entertainment media, play a role in reflecting and informing collective sentiments of justice. It offers an analysis of The Dark Knight as celebrating individualized, American-style retributive justice in a post-9/11 context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a possible way for service providers to learn from their customers' experiences and bridge gaps between their and their customers' perspectives. The research question is as follows: how can users' experiences be transformed through research‐based theatre, in particular Forum Theatre, into a utilizable format in the front‐end of interpretative, user‐driven service innovation in public health care organisations?

Research‐based theatre (RBT) is introduced in the study as both an artistic intervention technique – aiming to develop public health care services – and as a qualitative research method for interpretative user‐driven innovation processes.

The study provides a path for the application of Forum Theatre in interpretative user‐driven innovation and highlights the role of “the Joker” as a host of the interpretation.

Further studies could be based on international longitudinal participatory research and combine qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The study contributes to the discussion on the potential of innovation triggered in practical contexts. The potential itself seems to be relatively widely understood, but practical measures to exploit it still seem to be missing to a great extent. This study provides an example of a Finnish application of RBT as it explores the role of Forum Theatre as a sensemaking process in a fuzzy front‐end of innovation.

The study improves the understanding of the implementation of artistic interventions within a user‐driven service innovation in public health care services.

In this chapter, the authors studied cognitive biases such as certainty effect, isolating effect, and overconfidence effect in the Turkish version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” TV show. The research was carried out by watching the show during different dates between September 2013 and April 2015 and filling in a questionnaire, which consists of 25 questions. A total of 408 contestants were observed and evidence was found for both certainty and isolation effects.

Purpose – This chapter examines the role of the media, guns, and violence in the social construction of masculinity in today's mediatized American culture.

Methodology – The chapter draws on critical theory and cultural studies to address crises of masculinity and school shootings. It applies and further develops Guy Debord's (1970) theory on spectacle in the contexts of contemporary violent media spectacles.

Findings – In the chapter it is argued that school shooters, and other indiscriminate gun killers, share male rage and attempts to resolve crises of masculinity through violent behavior; exhibit a fetishism of guns or weapons; and resolve their crises through violence orchestrated as a media spectacle. This demands growing awareness of mediatization of American gun culture, and calls for a need for more developed understanding of media pedagogy as a means to create cultural skills of media literacy, as well as arguing for more rational gun control and mental health care.

Originality/value of paper – The chapter contributes to the contemporary debate on mediatization of violence by discussing it within critical theory and cultural studies. The theoretical framework is applied to analysis of a range of different empirical cases ranging from school shootings to the Colorado movie theater massacre at the first night of the latest Batman movie in the summer of 2012.

Presents the three winning entries from the 1998 Scottish Schools Essay Competition, organized by the University of Paisley Library and sponsored by John Smith & Son Bookshops Ltd. Victoria Catterson’s first prize winning entry discusses Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which explores the major themes of the novel: self‐identity, love and betrayal. Angela Robb discusses the theme of avariciousness, and the misfortunes that befall a family as a result of it, from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Catriona Semple discusses Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery where a Magic Island, Rainbow Fizz, the indigenous dwarfs and a pack of cards are found to be more akin to life on earth than you might at first expect.

March 7, 1969 Master and servant — Vicarious liability — Course of employment — Onus of proof — Deliberate act of practical joker causing injury to fellow workman — Foreseeability — No evidence of previous danger from practical joker's acts — Events not prima facie arising out of or in course of employment — Whether principle of res ipsa loquitur applicable — Whether onus on plaintiff to establish acts within scope of employment — Possibility that crucial act outside scope of employment — Whether onus discharged — Liability of employer.

Through the use of the concept of the parasite, a new way of thinking about communication and our sociality is presented. Communication can be seen as the mutual effort of excluding the unwanted third, that is the noise, the parasite. Sociality is to be conceived of as the circulation of a general equivalent (the quasi‐object) that functions as a marker of subjectivity.

In the introduction to Beyond Bombshells, Jeffrey A Brown lists examples of blockbuster films with leading female heroines and proclaims that they have ‘challenged the assumption that action movies are a strictly male domain’ (2015, p. 6). His examples include, but are not limited to, the Kill Bill films (2003, 2005), The Hunger Games (2012), Brave (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), all of which demonstrate the rise in popularity of the woman-led action film. However, these films also demonstrate a reluctance of the action film to detach itself from masculinity. Despite their female leads, these action films still foreground masculinity. The films have darker colour palettes and their female leads tend to have masculine coded traits and hobbies, suggesting that women can succeed within this genre only by distancing themselves from femininity.

This chapter analyses the subversion of the genre conventions of action by exploring the use of feminine objects in director Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020). Written and directed by women, Birds of Prey is a notable turn in the action genre as it makes use of feminine objects (hair ties, glitter, fashion, jewellery) within action sequences that don't just allow a female presence within the action, but centre feminine power. By relocating femininity and masculinity to objects rather than bodies, new ways of understanding how genre conventions are not fixed but fluid are opened up for further exploration.