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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.

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.

This study illuminates how organizational actors use images in their struggle to define a contested industry. By leveraging social semiotics and visual rhetoric, we examine how multimodal texts (combining words and images) are used to label and reframe an industry using technical, environmental, human-rights, and preservation-of-life criteria. Building on theories of legitimation, we find that for this industry, contesting attempts at legitimacy work are escalated along a moral hierarchy. We offer an approach for examining how actors draw from broader meaning systems, use visual rhetoric in multimodal texts, and employ dual processes of legitimation and de-legitimation.