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The research on Black underachievement is well documented. But the explanations posited as causes for this failure are problematic. They are reductive and fail to explain adequately the reasons for Black children’s underperformance. The wealth of research into Black underachievement is not matched by research into Black achievement, and explanations for this are equally flawed, as are policies designed to curtail underperformance. I argue in this paper that underachievement is the product of social and cultural forces, and success is dependent on all concerned in the educational development of the child, including the child, overcoming those forces and accommodating each other in order to provide the knowledge and skills necessary for success.

This chapter presents two cases in which the coupling between products and destinations generates distinct variations of possibilities for on-site consumption of mythologies of product implacement. Product–place dyads represent significant enabling potential to convey experiential authenticity in the form of enacted narratives, which are in turn based on product myths and the role of a place on the continuum of a productionscape–consumptionscape. Through the illustrative use of cases, a symbolic order of product geography is revealed. Destinations that leverage product associations are invariably engaged in a struggle to claim symbolic authority produce an authentic product–origin narrative. This chapter bridges critical tourism and international marketing literatures and proposes product geography as the mythomoteur of worldmaking.

The main aim of the chapter is to examine the prevalence of Slavic and, more specifically, Slovenian mythological elements in Slovenian heavy metal music. No such analysis had previously been attempted, so a database had to be established anew. Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives (MA) was chosen as the most comprehensive available source on metal music, supplemented by information gleaned from other sources. All 290 bands listed as Slovenian on MA were inspected for evidence of Slavic and Slovenian mythological content. Each band's name, genre, lyrical themes as listed in their profile, song titles, and lyrics were taken into account. The compiled corpus was then analysed in terms of information availability, prevailing languages used by the bands, and, subsequently, their relation to Slovenian mythological heritage. The search for Slavic and Slovenian mythological content began with keyword-based computer-assisted analysis followed by manual annotation. Elements directly concerning the Slavic mythos, Slovenian legends, and folk tales, were featured in a ‘Slavic content database’, their suitability ascertained through inclusion in prominent publications on the topic, e.g. Mikhailov (2002), Ovsec (1991), and Šmitek (2004, 2006). The acquired results were then divided into seven categories in order of prevalence, namely, deities, mythical creatures, history, nature, literary references, mythical places and phenomena, and idiosyncratic folklore. Our intention was to also present the contents of each category in a short overview aimed at acquainting the reader with individual phenomena, yet only the most prominent two categories could be presented here due to spatial constraints. The remaining categories will be dealt with in more detail in a follow-up paper. The findings featured will also enable the commencement of the second part of the research, a qualitative analysis of the afore-mentioned ‘Slavic content database’.

This paper argues that the revolution in intellectual property rights is not forward-looking, but backward looking, and that it is not consonant with the purposes of the patent and copyright clause. It is animated by the theory of common law copyright, which deliberately reconceptualizes social relations in order to recast them as property, and which has been with us for centuries. This paper investigates the “mythology of common law copyright,” showing how this reconceptualization has worked both historically and in the present day to push the law in a direction that is ostensibly author-centered, but is actually focused on the rights of intermediaries.

We aim to understand what happens when larger social and cultural myths become the incarnate understanding of consumers within the firm. This paper uncovers the varied myths at play in one Finnish company’s status as an inadvertent cultural icon.

Through a qualitative inquiry of Finland’s largest dairy producer and by employing the theoretical lens of myth, we conceptualize the entanglement of broad cultural, social, and organizational myths within the organization.

Macro-mythic structures merge with everyday employee practice giving consumer understanding flesh within the firm (Hallet, 2010). Mythological thinking leaves organizational members inevitably bound up in a form of consumer knowing that is un-reflective and inadvertently effects brand marketing management.

Working through a nuanced typology of myth (Tillotson & Martin, 2014) provided a deeper understanding of how managers may become increasingly un-reflexive in their marketing activities. This case also provides a cautionary tale for heterogeneous communities where ideological conflict underscores development and adoption of contemporary myths.

Through the prism of intimacy, this chapter discusses how experiences of pain and loss in relation to bereavement by suicide is expressed in the black metal music and lyrics by Danish band Orm. Orm's 2019-album Ir ‘verdigris’, entangles the emotional complex and personal relations to the local, natural surroundings of the island Bornholm, including a named tree and lake, as well as local folklore and Norse mythology. As part of fieldwork, the author muddles with intimacy to define an approach sensitive enough to deal with strong and unspeakable emotions, including the idea of cultural intimacy and public embarrassment related to the issue of suicide. The author also reflects on how my participation in the pain of others informs the interpretation. The chapter suggests that Orm's black metal is doing important pain work, opening to listeners a path towards disembarrassment.

This chapter argues that Eminem and Rihanna's 2009 “Love the Way You Lie” is a cultural artifact representing contemporary attitudes about domestic violence; thus, this chapter models a trauma-informed methodology for guiding students through analysis and discussion of these narratively violent texts. In so doing, instructors can help students recognize the discursive strategies through which stories about gender violence are constructed and examine what is at stake in telling and circulating these stories. The chapter begins by defining trauma-informed pedagogy and critical pedagogy, arguing that when used together in the classroom, they can promote empathy, self-advocacy, resistance, and resilience. The chapter then contextualizes the song and music video within the context of the #MeToo movement, encouraging instructors to validate the perception of students who experience allyship with Rihanna as a survivor. The chapter moves on to provide instructors with a model for guiding students both through semiotic analysis and close reading of the song's and video's narrative and visual discourses. This model pays attention to the lyric's reliance on the point of view of the unreliable narrator and pronoun shifts to interpellate listeners into the abuser's world view while also truncating the victim's testimony; this model also examines the content of the lyrics to identify gender violence mythologies constructed within both the abuser's and victim's narratives. Equipped with these insights, instructors can help students deconstruct the visual discourses of the video, which repeat the gender violence mythologies of the song lyrics.

The Slender Man, an online monster born to the internet in 2009, loves to live in the boundaries, specifically the boundary between the digital and the non-digital worlds. This chapter seeks to explore the full engagement of the community with the myth, analysing it structurally to understand the way, in which the narrative’s construction reflects the relationship of monster to society and society to itself. The sincerity in which the narratives are told, at first appearing intense, is actually a form of play, revealing a boundary blurring between play and non-play as well. While fully engaging in play, the community’s structured narrative is more than this: pulling them into a trapped world in which they play with death in the digital. The triadic structure of the Slender Man narratives reveals an anxiety to the community and their place within broader non-digital worlds.