Why do policy actors create branded policy ideas like Big Society and does launching them on Twitter extend or curtail their life? This book reveals how policy analysis can adapt in an increasingly mediatised to offer interpretive insights into the life and death of policy ideas in an era of hashtag politics.
It is thought that every work of art possesses multiple interpretations, depending on each viewer. Analyzing personal assessments of artwork can help enable us to gain an understanding of one another, as well as broaden our own opinions and views. Interpretation of Visual Arts Across Societies and Political Culture: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a detailed reference source that breaks down the ways art can be evaluated, and addresses how this type of analysis can influence an array of social groups and regions. Highlighting relevant topics such as artistic impression, modern art, culture wars, and freedom of expression, this publication is an ideal resource for artists, academics, students, and researchers that are interested in expanding their knowledge of the arts.
This collection investigates the publics of the hashtag. Taking cues from critical public sphere theory, contributors are interested in publics that break beyond the mainstream - in other publics. They are interested in the kinds of publics that do politics in a way that is rough and emergent, flawed and messy, and ones in which new forms of collective power are being forged on the fly and in the shadow of loftier mainstream spheres. Hashtags are deictic, indexical - yet what they point to is themselves, their own dual role in ongoing discourse. Focusing on hashtags used for topics from Ferguson, Missouri, to Australian politics, from online quilting communities to labour protests, from feminist outrage to drag pop culture, this collection follows hashtag publics as they trend beyond Twitter into other spaces of social networking such as Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr as well as other media spaces such as television, print, and graffiti.
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of new research on constitution making. Comparative Constitution Making provides an up-to-date overview of this rapidly expanding field. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Arial}
This volume examines the impact of wealth on quality of life and subjective well-being (SWB). As wealth is related to economic, environmental and social features of societies, this volume serves as an important resource in understanding economic and SWB. It further discusses a variety of experiences and consequences of inequalities of wealth. Through the availability of wealth data in recent international surveys, this volume explores the multiple relations between wealth and SWB. Structured around four main pillars the book presents analysis of the topic at various levels such as theoretical and conceptual, methodological and empirically, ending with a section on distribution and policies.
This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which digital communication facilitate and inform discourses of legitimization and delegitimization in contemporary participatory cultures. The book draws on multiple theoretical traditions from critical discourse analysis to allow for a greater critical engagement of the ways in which values are either justified or criticized on social media platforms across a variety of social milieus, including the personal, political, religious, corporate, and commercial. The volume highlights data from across ten national contexts and a range of online platforms to demonstrate how these discursive practices manifest themselves differently across a range of settings. Taken together, the seventeen chapters in this book offer a more informed understanding of how these discursive spaces help us to interpret the manner in which digital communication can be used to legitimize or delegitimize, making this book an ideal resource for students and scholars in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, new media, and media production.
This is a short book about the most prominent sign of our times. The simple # sign is now used so widely that it is easy to overlook the fundamental effects it has had in the structuring of public debate. With its help, statements are bundled together and discourse is organized and amplified around common buzzwords. This method enables us to navigate more easily the huge volume of online utterances, but it also increases the risk of leveling statements and extinguishing difference, as exemplified by the #MeToo debate. Andreas Bernard traces the young and spectacular career of the humble hashtag. He follows the history of the # sign, documenting its use by Twitter and Instagram, and then examines the most prominent contemporary domains of the sign in socio-political activism and in marketing – two apparently very different fields which are united in their passion for the hashtag. Theory of the Hashtag shines a bright light on a small but pervasive feature of our contemporary digital culture and shows how it is surreptitiously shaping the public sphere.
Looking at discretion broadly as the exercise of controlled freedom, this edited volume introduces insights from a range of social sciences perspectives. Traditionally, discussions of discretion have drawn on legal notions of the appropriate exercise of legitimate authority specified by legislators. However, empirical and theoretical studies in the social sciences have extended our understanding of discretion, moving us beyond a narrow legal view. Contributors from a range of disciplines explore the idea of discretion and related notions of freedom and control across social and political practices and in different contexts. As this complex and important topic is discussed and examined, both total control and unconstrained freedom appear to be illusions.
With recent advances and investment in artificial intelligence, are we on the verge of introducing virtual public servants? Governments around the world are rapidly deploying robots and virtual agents in healthcare, education, local government, social care, and criminal justice. These advances not only promise unprecedented levels of control and convenience at a reduced cost but also claim to connect, to empathise, and to build trust. This book documents how—after decades of designing out costly face to face transactions, investment in call centres, and incentivising citizens to self-service—the tech industry is promising to re-humanise our frontline public services. It breaks out of disciplinary silos and moves us on from the polarised hype vs. fear discussion on the future of work. It does so through in-depth Q-methodology interviews with a wide range of frontline public servants, from doctors to librarians, from social workers to school receptionists, and from police officers to call handlers. The first of its kind, this book should be of interest across the social sciences and to anyone concerned with how recent measures to digitise and automate our services are paving the way for the development of full-blown AI in frontline work.
Introduces key ideas and offers a sense of the new frontiers and questions in the emerging field of disability media studies Disability Media Studies articulates the formation of a new field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability studies. Necessarily interdisciplinary and diverse, this collection weaves together work from scholars from a variety of disciplinary homes, into a broader conversation about exploring media artifacts in relation to disability. The book provides a comprehensive overview for anyone interested in the study of disability and media today. Case studies include familiar contemporary examples—such as Iron Man 3, Lady Gaga, and Oscar Pistorius—as well as historical media, independent disability media, reality television, and media technologies. The contributors consider disability representation, the role of media in forming cultural assumptions about ability, the construction of disability via media technologies, and how disabled audiences respond to particular media artifacts. The volume concludes with afterwords from two different perspectives on the field—one by disability scholar Rachel Adams, the other by media scholars Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne—that reflect upon the collection, the ongoing conversations, and the future of disability media studies. Disability Media Studies is a crucial text for those interested in this flourishing field, and will pave the way for a greater understanding of disability media studies and its critical concepts and conversations.