Search results for " Capital"
showing 10 items of 1008 documents
Cultural activism as a counter-discourse to the European Capital of Culture programme: The case of Turku 2011
2013
Each year the European Union designates one or more cities with the competed-for city brand of European Capital of Culture (ECOC). In several recent ECOCs, such as in Turku, Finland, the management and organisation of the events have caused tension among the citizens regarding decision-making, financing and power over use of the urban space. The focus of the article is on analysis of the discursive dynamics of local activists and their project ‘Turku – European Capital of Subculture 2011’. By emphasising the cultural analysis of activism, the article indicates how the counter-discourse of the activists was produced through cultural production. The project produced a strong movement culture…
Semiotics of pride and profit: interrogating commodification in indigenous handicraft production
2014
This study investigates the shifting terrain of pride, profit and power relations in minority language communities under contemporary globalisation. While “pride” associates linguistic-cultural heritage with identity and preservation, “profit” views these as sources of economic gain. In contemporary late capitalism, “pride” seems to be increasingly giving way to “profit”. Arguing that this transformation needs to be interrogated in terms of complexity and that a detailed, multilayered semiotic analysis can open a privileged window for such an inquiry, this study combines critical multimodal discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach to analyse processes of semiotic commodification in h…
East Asia in the Global Economy: Theoretical and Empirical Questions for Marxism
2019
As Marxism and socialism pass through watershed years it is important to reflect on the abiding questions of Marxist theory and empirical analysis. This article takes up this task in the context of East Asia under the impetus of globalisation and neo-liberalism, introducing a collection of five articles collected in the special issue. The article shows that questions Marx posed about the global economy more than a century ago remain prescient and continue to animate cutting-edge research, as shown in the articles in this special issue.
The rhetoric of love in religious peacebuilding
2020
Religious leaders involved in peacebuilding initiatives often refer to the religious value of love to encourage groups in conflict to live peacefully together. In this article, I suggest that references to love as a religious value might contribute to bridging social capital, meaning social bonds between groups who have experienced conflict. However, without simultaneously addressing questions of justice, which is often necessary in violent conflicts, creating social bonds through references to love constitutes a weak contribution to peace. The article uses the study of a religious peacebuilding project in Ethiopia as an example and illustrates how religious leaders failed to make a substan…
Net-Strikes: A Proposal for Re-orienting Social Struggles in the 21st Century
2020
The globalisation of the economy and the slow but steady loss of Nation-States’ power to global enterprises and financial capital force us to redefine strikes as a weapon for advancing social causes. The institutions legitimising this form of protest have changed greatly in the 21st Century. They must recoup their ability to change things if they are to remain an effective tool. The following paper reveals the reasons behind the decline of strikes in the modern world and proposes the ‘net-strike’ concept (or networked strike): a formula for bringing strikes up to date to meet today’s challenges.
Rhetoric of unity and cultural diversity in the making of European cultural identity
2011
The fundamental aim of the cultural policy of the European Union (EU) is to emphasize the obvious cultural diversity of Europe, while looking for some underlying common elements which unify the various cultures in Europe. Through these common elements, the EU policy produces ‘an imagined cultural community’ of Europe which is ‘united in diversity’, as one of the slogans of the Union states. This discourse characterizes various documents which are essential to the EU cultural policy, such as the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Agenda for Culture and the EU’s decision on the European Capital of Culture program. In addition, the discourse is applied to the production of cultural events in Europ…
A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Privacy Calculus
2017
The “privacy calculus” approach to studying online privacy implies that willingness to engage in disclosures on social network sites (SNSs) depends on evaluation of the resulting risks and benefits. In this article, we propose that cultural factors influence the perception of privacy risks and social gratifications. Based on survey data collected from participants from five countries (Germany [ n = 740], the Netherlands [ n = 89], the United Kingdom [ n = 67], the United States [ n = 489], and China [ n = 165]), we successfully replicated the privacy calculus. Furthermore, we found that culture plays an important role: As expected, people from cultures ranking high in individualism found i…
Critical educational praxis in university ecosystems: enablers and constraints
2018
Universities serve several important functions in society today through research, education, and community engagement, not least helping people to live meaningfully in society, and helping to create a world worth living in. A kind of practice that seems particularly important in fulfilling such responsibilities is critical educational praxis, a social-justice oriented, educational practice/praxis, with a focus on asking critical questions and creating conditions for positive change. Yet, the contemporary university is not exactly a niche for critical educational praxis. There are many practices and arrangements within higher education that make the enactment of critical educational praxis v…
: Looking through the gaps of the digital divide in Higher education
2007
A partir de una muestra de 719 estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile en 2004, este artículo analiza las diferencias existentes respecto de capitales culturales materiales e incorporados relacionados con el acceso y uso de las nuevas tecnologías de la información y comunicación (NTICs). Bajo diferentes métodos de análisis cuantitativo se pone de manifiesto la existencia de niveles de brecha digital para tales herramientas, brecha que estaría relacionada especialmente al género pero también a la condición socioeconómica. Esta última variable, aunque presente, muestra efectos más bien indirectos no pareciendo influir en las actitudes y disposiciones de los estudiantes respecto al uso de las N…
The culture in the era of clutural capitlaism: Trends and Controversies
2014
[EN] This article offers a reflection on the way in which the evolution of capitalism towards a cultural capitalism phase is propitiating the emergence of a new regime of production and reception of cultural products. To approach this task it is examined one of the most clearly observable trends in the evolution that western societies have experienced in the past decades, that is, the transformation of the market in the general pattern of the social activities and the entrance of capitalist patterns in the cultural sphere. The article finishes with a critical analysis of the most frequently consequences attributed to the evolution of capitalism in the cultural domain: the degradation of the…