Search results for "61"
showing 10 items of 3634 documents
Dialogicality and spiritual quest in Christian metal lyrics
2013
Abstract: Christian metal (CM) music provides a good example of how religious discourse is undergoing change in today’s world. CM merges religion with popular cultural forms and ways of expression, thereby also transforming the meaning of religion and religious practice. However, the phenomenon has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention; most writers have treated CM as yet another example of North American Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). The present article takes a detailed look into what is “said” by Finnish CM groups with a particular focus on religious ideology in a context outside the original national and religious context of the genre. Drawing on the sociology of langu…
“I be da reel gansta”—A Finnish footballer’s Twitter writing and metapragmatic evaluations of authenticity
2015
This article explores the ways in which ‘gangsta’ English features are deployed, evaluated and adopted in two types of social media, the web forum and Twitter, within the domains of hip hop culture and football (soccer) culture, from the dual perspective of authenticity and normativity. Empirically, we aim to break new ground by investigating the intricate interconnections between two social media formats and combining two highly popular but previously seldom connected cultural forms—football and hip hop. Our theoretical aim is to contribute to the current debate on authenticity, normativity, popular culture and social media, and the complex ways in which they are connected. We focus, first…
Multimodal accomplishment of alignment and affiliation in the local space of distant meetings
2017
Technology-mediated (i.e. distant) meetings are complex settings that involve distributed participation frameworks and the coordination of actions in multiple interactional spaces. This paper examines how problems with hearing, speaking, or understanding in the overall meeting space enable the negotiation of alignment and affiliation by co-present participants in the same local meeting space. Conversation analysis is used to investigate the local accomplishment of alignment and affiliation achieved through the sequential and temporal organization of verbal, embodied, and material resources of interaction in three types of situations: during technological trouble, silences, and disagreements…
“Not Only for a Celebration of Competitive Overwatch but Also for National Pride”: Sportificating the Overwatch World Cup 2016
2020
While the most popular forms of organized competitive digital gaming, also known as eSports, have begun finding their place within and in relation to both mainstream entertainment culture and the field of traditional sports, their history is one of struggling to be accepted as “true sports.” Partly because of this history, great effort has been put into the sportification of eSports by presenting competitions in familiar ways adapted from traditional sports. In this article, we examine the process of sportification of eSports in the context of tournament broadcasts. We analyze the Overwatch World Cup 2016 tournament, comparing its final broadcast to the 2014 FIFA World Cup’s final broadcast…
An exploratory study on the attitudes of elderly Finns towards Russian-speaking minorities
2018
Research has shown Russian speakers in Finland are often victims of prejudice and discrimination. Utilizing integrated threat theory, this study investigated the extent to which threats are signifi...
The foreign language teaching profession in Finnish and Japanese society: a sociocultural comparison
2016
The social basis of a teaching profession is created through behavioural and cultural patterns, specific artefacts, and their connection to certain institutional practices. The purpose of this study is to discover the conditions that structure the teaching profession in a cultural context and to find out what it is to be a foreign language (FL) teacher in Finland and Japan. Both countries have high educational equality but with contrasting patterns of management policies that are manifested in their teacher education curricula. Educational policy documents as well as teacher interviews and classroom observations were conducted in both countries and the findings compared by one Japanese and …
Psychology and Management of the Workforce in Post-Stalinist Hungary
2019
Over recent years, there has been a growing academic interest in the history of psychological disciplines and mental health in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. This article explores psychological sciences and social planning in post-Stalinist Hungary after 1956. The focus is on the psychology of work as a socially- and historically-situated discourse. The article demonstrates how psychologists started to promote their expertise to reform the practices of management and to “humanize” the conditions of work. They suggested practical remedies for everyday problems of worker motivation and social adjustment and introduced concepts from social psychology to improve the state of interpersonal…
Politics of Cultural Marking in Mini-Europe: Anchoring European Cultural Identity in a Theme Park
2012
Mini-Europe—a theme park in Brussels morally supported by the European Commission and the European Parliament—consists of around 350 models of different buildings and heritage sites from all the member states of the European Union. In addition the park includes an exhibition named the Spirit of Europe. The article explores how the European cultural identity is constructed and ‘sold’ in Mini-Europe, and how history, geography and local and regional traditions are intertwined into a politics of cultural marking, an ideology of European integration and a creation of shared symbols. European cultural identity has often been generated through appeals to an ancient or classical past, which is pro…
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…
The Many-Voiced Factory Community
2018
Maria Vanha-Similä 2017. Yhtiöön, yhtiöön! Lapsiperheiden arki Forssan tehdasyhteisössä 1950–1970-luvuilla. [To the firm, to the firm! The everyday life of families who worked in the Forssa textile industry from the 1950s to the 1970s.] Kansatieteellinen Arkisto 58. Helsinki: The Finnish Antiquarian Society. 250 pp. Diss. ISBN 978-952-6655-05-5 (print). ISBN 978-952-6655-06-2 (electronic). ISSN 0355-1830.