scholarly journals The politics of age and generation at the GAZE International LGBT Film Festival in Dublin

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Binnie ◽  
Christian Klesse

Despite their global proliferation, queer film festivals, like film festivals more broadly, are somewhat understudied within the social sciences. This is despite scholarship within film studies that argues that they are significant sites of queer collectivity and sociality. This article examines queer film festivals as sites for the production of community and queer bonds. The authors argue that questions of age, temporality and intergenerationality are central to discourses of community mobilized by festival organizers. The article draws on empirical material from a qualitative study of the GAZE International LGBT Festival in Dublin – which formed part of a larger comparative study of the cultural activist politics of queer film festivals in Europe. Ken Plummer has argued for a greater appreciation of the role of time and generation within sexuality studies. Age, temporality and intergenerationality emerged as important issues within interviews conducted with organizers and volunteers at the festival. The analysis of these issues focuses on three key themes: (1) GAZE as a site of intergenerational community; (2) GAZE as a site of remembrance; and (3) demography and the sustainability of the festival. The article argues that the festival provides a distinctive site of intergenerational queer bonds; and that despite the creation of transnational spaces and discourses, references to the nation and national identity remain central to bonding experiences at the festival.

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-34
Author(s):  
Melody J. Devries

With the onset of 2015, globalization is perhaps one of the most dynamic issues concerning the social sciences. It is critical to map all fields of the human/cultural experience that are susceptible to manifestations of globalization in the growing international tourism industry. In this study I have focused on the evolution of the Peruvian Andean highlands’ massive tourist industry, including a specific analysis on the Paz Y Luz Healing Centre, in order to address spiritual tourism and its appropriation and commodification processes. In my exploration of Andean mysticism and the concept’s effect on local cultural heritage, I have found it essential to consult Foucauldian understandings of the gaze, as well as several other perspectives on the role of ritual elements in the construction of spiritual realities. Subsequently I have been led to perhaps a predictable conclusion: spiritual tourism is a living relic of colonialism. It dilutes the cultural and spiritual heritage of peoples like the Q’ero for consumption by tourists, who use the gaze and its created ‘other’ to validate their own construction of spiritual realities. 


2013 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Moses Peaslee ◽  
Jessica El-Khoury ◽  
Ashley Liles

In this initial attempt to bring volunteering, or what we call on-ground fan labor, into the ongoing discussion of fan productivity, we examine volunteer motivations as elicited through interview and participant observation data collected at a 2012 genre film festival, Fantastic Fest, held in Austin, Texas. This case study is a first step toward integrating the volunteer and fan labor literatures and interrogating the role of social capital and civic engagement in volunteerism. We conclude that the media festival (a term intended to encompass such sites as film festivals and fan conventions) is a site of particular and emergent importance for those studying the audience's increasing delivery of free labor.


Author(s):  
Carrie Figdor

Chapter 10 provides a summary of the argument of the book. It elaborates some of the benefits of Literalism, such as less conceptual confusion and an expanded range of entities for research that might illuminate human cognition. It motivates distinguishing the questions of whether something has a cognitive capacity from whether it is intuitively like us. It provides a conceptual foundation for the social sciences appropriate for the increasing role of modeling in these sciences. It also promotes convergence in terms of the roles of internal and external factors in explaining both human and nonhuman behavior. Finally, it sketches some of the areas of new research that it supports, including group cognition and artificial intelligence.


Author(s):  
Lexi Eikelboom

This chapter proposes a framework for approaching the theological significance of rhythm through phenomenology, prosody, and the social sciences. In accordance with the general categories of phenomenology established by Merleau-Ponty and the “rhythmanalysis” of Henri Lefebvre, the chapter investigates two experiences of rhythm: approaches to analysing the human encounter with rhythm in the reading of poetry and the role of rhythm in social interactions introduced through commonalities between rhythm in conversation and in jazz performance. These explorations establish two features of rhythm that are of analytical importance for the chapters that follow: (1) the synchronic and the diachronic as two necessary but distinct theoretical perspectives on rhythm, each of which emphasizes different features of rhythm and (2) the importance of interruption for understanding rhythm’s significance.


Author(s):  
Ann Kumar

This chapter discusses Indonesian historical writing after independence. At the time Indonesia became independent, knowledge of academic history-writing was virtually non-existent. Indonesian elites then faced the postcolonial predicament of having to adopt Western nationalistic approaches to history in order to oppose the Dutch version of the archipelago’s history that had legitimized colonial domination. Soon after independence, the military took over and dominated the writing of history in Indonesia for several decades. Challenges to the military’s view of history came from artistic representations of history, and from historians—trained in the social sciences—who emphasized a multidimensional approach balancing central and local perspectives. However, it was only after 2002 that historians could openly criticize the role of the military.


Postcolonial studies, postmodern studies, even posthuman studies emerge, and intellectuals demand that social sciences be remade to address fundamentals of the human condition, from human rights to global environmental crises. Since these fields owe so much to American state sponsorship, is it easier to reimagine the human and the modern than to properly measure the pervasive American influence? Reconsidering American Power offers trenchant studies by renowned scholars who reassess the role of the social sciences in the construction and upkeep of the Pax Americana and the influence of Pax Americana on the social sciences. With the thematic image for this enterprise as the ‘fiery hunt’ for Ahab’s whale, the contributors pursue realities behind the theories, and reconsider the real origins and motives of their fields with an eye on what will deter or repurpose the ‘fiery hunts’ to come, by offering a critical insider’s view.


Author(s):  
Yusra Ribhi Shawar ◽  
Jennifer Prah Ruger

Careful investigations of the political determinants of health that include the role of power in health inequalities—systematic differences in health achievements among different population groups—are increasing but remain inadequate. Historically, much of the research examining health inequalities has been influenced by biomedical perspectives and focused, as such, on ‘downstream’ factors. More recently, there has been greater recognition of more ‘distal’ and ‘upstream’ drivers of health inequalities, including the impacts of power as expressed by actors, as well as embedded in societal structures, institutions, and processes. The goal of this chapter is to examine how power has been conceptualised and analysed to date in relation to health inequalities. After reviewing the state of health inequality scholarship and the emerging interest in studying power in global health, the chapter presents varied conceptualisations of power and how they are used in the literature to understand health inequalities. The chapter highlights the particular disciplinary influences in studying power across the social sciences, including anthropology, political science, and sociology, as well as cross-cutting perspectives such as critical theory and health capability. It concludes by highlighting strengths and limitations of the existing research in this area and discussing power conceptualisations and frameworks that so far have been underused in health inequalities research. This includes potential areas for future inquiry and approaches that may expand the study of as well as action on addressing health inequality.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Nadia Ruiz

Brian Epstein has recently argued that a thoroughly microfoundationalist approach towards economics is unconvincing for metaphysical reasons. Generally, Epstein argues that for an improvement in the methodology of social science we must adopt social ontology as the foundation of social sciences; that is, the standing microfoundationalist debate could be solved by fixing economics’ ontology. However, as I show in this paper, fixing the social ontology prior to the process of model construction is optional instead of necessary and that metaphysical-ontological commitments are often the outcome of model construction, not its starting point. By focusing on the practice of modeling in economics the paper provides a useful inroad into the debate about the role of metaphysics in the natural and social sciences more generally.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidney Tarrow

Movements and parties have given rise to two largely separates specialties in the social sciences. This Element is an effort to link the two literatures, using evidence from American political development. It identifies five relational mechanisms governing movement/party relations: two of them short term, two intermediate term, and one long-term. It closes with a reflection on the role of movement/party relations in democratization and for democratic resilience.


Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAIN TAYLOR

ABSTRACT:This article looks at how and why Bonfire Night celebrations became more peaceful in the later nineteenth century in some smaller Kent towns and what this process reveals about local civic cultures and identities. The drive towards respectability is seen both in the changing business relationships between participants, spectators and local tradesmen and in the evolving role of satire within processions. The ‘social energy’ visible at these events was channelled such that earlier class and other vertical conflicts within these towns were superseded by horizontal rivalries without, as they competed against each other (an important local variant of civic boosterism) to build free public libraries, for example. Moreover, more peaceful ‘Fifths’ and better reading facilities were linked, since both formed part of the much-altered prevailing civic cultures in these towns – their comprehensive, continuous, identity-driven efforts to present themselves in the best possible light against their rivals.


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