Search results

This chapter contains a case study analysis on a song by the Spanish heavy metal group Desafío or ‘Challenge’. The lyrics of the song are treated as a poem, and I will thus progress toward a linguistic and poetic analysis (Leech, 2013). Songs include many poetic devices, such as personification, metonymy, paradox, tautology, antithesis, and hyperbole (cf. Hewitt, 2000, p. 189). During the aforementioned linguistic and poetical analysis, it will be seen that the song Muerte en Mostar ‘Death in Mostar’ abounds with poetic features. The song begins with personification, for example: ‘The moon reflects in her face the shadows of evil’. Liturgical lexis and bellicose vocabulary also proliferate. Especially active in the song is the notion of an almost religious crusade. For example, one liturgical aspect found in the chorus is where an unnamed protagonist is described within the context of an almost holy war: ‘To his squadron's flag he promised his loyalty / His heart of love would be called by God’. The song goes on to recount the subsequent events and, therefore, this song in fact seems to be a mini-narrative. Finally, I will show how so much literary allusion reveals, in the end, that the song is not about Spain at all but about events that took place during the war of Bosnia–Herzegovina.

Cyprus, a small island state in the far eastern corner of the Mediterranean, is an appropriate example of modernising states faced with the influx of Media pluralism and all the boons of a rich age of information communication systems, while its indigenous political problems remain unsolved. The invasion of Cyprus by Turkish troops in 1974 and the dichotomy of the land, with Turkish-Cypriots occupying and living in the Northern part and Greek-Cypriots living in the southern part of the island, has created a state in transition, from nationalism to internationalism, from the stage of ethnic cleavage to the stage of modernisation and globalisation. Media pluralism with the proliferation of imported programmes is another dimension in the life of the island. The ethnic/national issues, together with the content of television programmes, were the subject of the present study among youth. The discourses in these issues are presented through the three stages of the research conducted: the statistical research survey, the discourse analysis of 5 out of the top 10 programmes popular among the sample and the 23 interviews and 2 group discussions conducted with members of the sample. The results establish a relationship between television and national/ethnic issues and opens areas of research on television/media discourses about human rights, identity and nationality in an age of globalisation. The world may be sharing images, but individual countries are called upon to face internal national and political realities.

Based on a 15‐country study in western Europe, examines management and communication styles through a wide‐ranging interview schedule. In the context of national and business cultures, explores the dimensions of communications beliefs and practices, and draws out their interrelationships with managerial style. Conclusions indicate some unexpected cultural clusters and point to future research directions.

State and national education initiatives have significantly increased expectations of students’ non-fiction reading and writing. These initiatives provide the space for potential interdisciplinary units in English/language arts and social studies/history centered on content area reading and writing. To do so, teachers must locate age-appropriate, historically representative curricular materials and implement discipline-specific writing prompts. To guide elementary teachers’ instruction, we select a novel, underused topic: the birth of the Republic of South Sudan. Age-appropriate children’s trade books are coupled with diverse informational texts—oral histories, current event news articles, and artwork—to extend the trade books’ narratives into the realm of current events. We suggest content area literacy strategies, share anecdotes from their application in the classroom, and recommend engaging, inquiry-based writing prompts that induce students to revisit understandings derived from close readings of the trade books and informational texts. In doing so, all texts and tasks explicitly are connected to different elements of the state and national initiatives in order to help teachers meet the rigorous standards.

Conspicuous consumption refers to the competitive and extravagant consumption practices and leisure activities that aim to indicate membership to a superior social class. Studies examining the symbolic role of luxury brands and status symbols, and the importance of interpersonal relations and upward social mobility via consumption choices, have been widely discussed in the marketing and consumer behaviour literature. There is, however, limited research on how the all‐encompassing concept of “conspicuous consumption” has evolved since the introduction of the term by Thorstein Veblen in 1899 in The Theory of the Leisure Class. This paper seeks to review some of the issues.

Using a chronological periodization the paper examines and discusses the impact of wider institutional and socio‐economic forces on the evolution of conspicuous consumption phenomena. The paper adopts a historical framework related to economics and marketing.

The paper shows how the concept of “conspicuous consumption” has been reinvented with different terminology during the twentieth century by marketing and consumer behaviour theorists.

The paper discusses and examines the socio‐economic factors behind the changing consumption patterns of “conspicuous consumers” throughout the twentieth century. It is valuable for marketing academics, students and marketing practitioners interested in the evolution of status symbols.

The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the paradoxes of mainstream French anti- racism regarding Islamophobia. The authors focus on the driving role played by French republican values in the recurring inability of anti-racist activism, and anti-islamophobia in particular, to act upon the structural character of racism in France.

The authors’ analysis draws on a longitudinal and qualitative investigation of the “Sud-Education 93” controversy (SE93). The authors use the analytical framework provided by controversy studies in order to focus on the aftermath, in the public sphere, of the organisation by a French labour union of a minority-only workshop designed to provide teachers with a space for expression and purposeful guidance, in order to face Islamophobia and racism issues within French public schools. The authors collected an exhaustive set of data about the comments, criticisms and debates that emerged in the public sphere as a reaction to the workshop. The authors drew on situational analysis methodology, providing controversy analysts with several power-mapping techniques, in order to conduct a discursive analysis of the statements and claims made by the protagonists of the controversy.

First, the authors’ insights point out that French Islamophobia relies on the myth of the universal republican citizen that acts as a context-specific form of colour-blindism. Second, the authors shed light on the discursive and relational mechanisms that characterise the denial of Islamophobia undertaken by political actors who use “reverse racism” arguments as a form of backlash, i.e. a strategy of “fragility” (DiAngelo, 2018) consisting in maintaining artificially a never-ending controversy over Islamophobia. Finally, the authors discuss the role played by these strategies of fragility in the recurring rejection of anti-islamophobia activism in France and the limitations and prospects they embody for future forms of anti-racist strategies.

The Latourian perspective adopted in the paper focuses on the implications of the controversy over Islamophobia within the public sphere. The authors’ fieldwork suggests, however, that the internal dynamics of minority-only organisations embodies sites and répertoires of micro-contestation capable of bypassing on the short run, and perhaps overthrowing, the power of French hypocrisy about anti-racism and the backlash processes the authors observed in the public sphere.

The authors’ contribution lies in the in-depth analysis of “reverse racism” rhetorics as a strategy of fragility and its implications in terms of colour-blindism and backlash.