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While horror film is hardly new to Latin America, film scholars have largely emphasized the paradigms of socially engaged, ‘serious cinema’ over exploring how genre, cult or other transgressive film-making modes have developed in and reflect the region (Tierney, 2014). To characterize Latin American horror, it is typified by the supernatural, which indeed contradicts serious cinema. Since about 2010, however, Latin American film-makers have revisited the ‘abduction’ subgenre of horror film. This chapter analyses three such films – Scherzo Diabolico (García Bogliano, 2015), Luna de Miel (Cohen, 2015) and Sudor Frío (García Bogliano, 2010) – to suggest how their representations of gender and class complicate assumptions about everyday life in the region. The chapter also interrogates how this revived mode of horror film-making reconfigures gender ideologies to challenge the Latin American sociopolitical structures of machismo and patriarchy. By integrating conceptualizations of hybridity with transnational views on horror film-making and Freeland’s (1996) reworked feminist strategy for analysing horror texts, this chapter argues that, in tandem with new means of accessing and viewing Latin American horror globally, we should rethink how the abduction subgenre reflects new realities of Latin American society.

Gloria Pritchett – the fiery and caring Latina mother in Modern Family – is believed to recreate cultural and gender stereotypes. This audience study was interested in situating her as an intersectional representation to recognize that numerous social categories coproduce her characterization not just one. Textual analyses of open-ended questions reveal that participants tend to explicitly and exclusively discuss her stereotypes in ethnic and gender terms, with an emphasis on the former. However, a semantic analysis of the words/adjectives used to describe Gloria Pritchett suggested these share meaning across multiple social categories. Some aspects of her representation, like those based on ethnicity and gender (her Latina wisdom) or ethnicity and social class (her social mobility from Colombia to the United States), were found commendable, respectable, and likable. Eventually, the social identities encompassing Gloria Pritchett are taken apart and compounded, which in turn, suggest that her intersectionality was malleable for viewers.

News, as one of many forms of newspaper output, has long been synonymous with journalism. The “crisis of journalism” is primarily a crisis of the news as a cultural form. Drawing on Carey (2008), this chapter argues that news has lost its monopoly as a source of global experience and everyday drama, and, thus, has lost its commodity value. The decline of traditional forms of news is transforming journalism, and its democratic function as vehicle of public conversation, toward long-form, long-term, and affective narratives.

Given the increasing use of social media and other digital technologies, critical theorists argue that social life has become increasingly structured by neoliberal market logics. Little research has empirically tested these claims.

This study is the first to examine whether the use of digital technologies in the avant-garde literary field is accompanied by neoliberal logics. Developing a cultural logics approach to neoliberalism, which allows for the identification of the independent logics of entrepreneurship, market-faith, profit-maximization, efficiency, and individualism, I draw on archival data and interviews with editors and writers to explore the relationship between digital technologies and neoliberalism.

Editors and writers legitimate some neoliberal logics and reject others. Entrepreneurship and efficiency are strongly legitimated. Profit-maximization is generally rejected. Market-faith and individualism are legitimated differently by editors and writers who occupy different positions within the field, drawing attention to the importance of field position, organizational affiliation, and career exhaustion in the use of digital technologies in the avant-garde literary world. Many of these findings are surprising given the historically non-economic orientation of the field.

Future research should explore neoliberal logics in other aspects of literary production and in other social domains.

This study provides a novel approach to the study of neoliberal logics as well as their relationship to digital technologies. Such an approach complements recent agendas in economic sociology and contributes to debates about the relationship between new technologies and capitalism.

Drawing on sociolinguistics, this chapter proposes an encoding–decoding perspective on evaluation, conceptualizing codes as interpretive schemas that are encoded by firms and decoded by audiences. A key element in this process is code complexity, denoting combinations of interdependent elements. We demonstrate that the evaluation of code complexity depends on the type of audience (professionals and laypersons) and the type of complexity (technological and aesthetic). We analyze the attribution of awards by professionals and the public in luxury watchmaking, featuring three mechanisms: the social embeddedness of audiences, their motivation for evaluation and supply-and-demand matching. The results attest to significant differences in the evaluation of technological and aesthetic code complexity by professionals and laypersons. There is a premium attributed to aesthetic code complexity by professionals and a premium attributed to technological complexity by laypersons. Finding the right type and level of code complexity to pursue in their offerings is a key strategic challenge for producers.

This chapter is concerned with examining Pokémon Go in light of the digital economy and surveillance capitalism. The chapter begins by developing the theoretical framework underpinning this undertaking, which includes Bauman and Lyon (2013) ‘liquid surveillance’ and Zuboff's (2019) ‘surveillance capitalism’. Following this, we outline the various implications involved in the playing of Pokémon Go, when the production of locative data is not framed as leisure but labour. While Pokémon Go might be suited to the machinations of surveillance capitalism, as we establish, little research has examined this topic from the position of familial locative play or joint-media engagement. As a corollary to this, then, one of the aims of this chapter is to understand how issues of surveillance are perceived by the parents who play this hybrid reality game (HRG) with their children. Consequently, the chapter is driven by the following research questions. First, are families cognisant of the data they produce by playing this HRG, and how these data might be used? Second, do families think critically about the gamic mechanics of this HRG, such as the spawning locations of Pokémon and the reasoning behind these decisions? Third, are participants concerned about the potential application of their gamic data, and if so, how are these concerns reconciled? Fourth, do participants use the familial playing of Pokémon Go as an opportunity to discuss the production of data and its multifaced uses with their children?