Blackface – instances in which non-Black persons temporarily darken their skin with make-up to impersonate Black people, usually for fun, and frequently in educational contexts – constitutes a ...postracialist pedagogy that propagates antiblack logics. In Performing Postracialism, Philip S.S. Howard examines instances of contemporary blackface in Canada and argues that it is more than a simple matter of racial (mis)representation. The book looks at the ostensible humour and dominant conversations around blackface, arguing that they are manifestations of the particular formations of antiblackness in the Canadian nation state and its educational institutions. It posits that the occurrence of blackface in universities is not incidental, and outlines how educational institutions’ responses to blackface in Canada rely upon a motivation to protect whiteness. Performing Postracialism draws from focus groups and individual interviews conducted with university students, faculty, administrators, and Black student associations, along with online articles about blackface, to provide the basis for a nuanced examination of the ways that blackface is experienced by Black persons. The book investigates the work done by Black students, faculty, and staff at universities to challenge blackface and the broader campus climate of antiblackness that generates it.
The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue or candidate specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political ...life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fundraising, and at the same time adapts their organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.
Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news ...sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives-including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down.
Nearly every day brings news of another merger or acquisition involving the companies that control our food supply. Just how concentrated has this system become? At almost every key stage of the food ...system, four firms alone control 40% or more of the market, a level above which these companies have the power to drive up prices for consumers and reduce their rate of innovation. Researchers have identified additional problems resulting from these trends, including negative impacts on the environment, human health, and communities. This book reveals the dominant corporations, from the supermarket to the seed industry, and the extent of their control over markets. It also analyzes the strategies these firms are using to reshape society in order to further increase their power, particularly in terms of their bearing upon the more vulnerable sections of society, such as recent immigrants, ethnic minorities and those of lower socioeconomic status. Yet this study also shows that these trends are not inevitable. Opposed by numerous efforts, from microbreweries to seed saving networks, it explores how such opposition has encouraged the most powerful firms to make small but positive changes.
Recent years have seen a substantial increase in alternative agrifood initiatives that attempt to use the market to curtail the negative social and environmental effects of production and trade in a ...globalized food system. These alternatives pose a challenge to capital accumulation and the externalization of environmental costs by large agribusiness, trading and retail firms. Yet the success of these alternatives also makes them an inviting target for corporate participation. This article examines these dynamics through a case study of the two most significant such food system alternatives—organics and fair trade—focusing on corporate involvement in establishing and renegotiating the standards undergirding these initiatives. We compare the development of and contestation over the standards for both certified organic and certified fair trade, with particular attention to the U.S. context. We provide a brief history of their parallel processes of rapid growth and market mainstreaming. We examine claims of cooptation by movement participants, as well as the divergences and similarities between the organic and fair trade cases. Analyzing these two cases provides useful insights into the strategic approaches that corporate firms have deployed to further capital accumulation and to defuse threats to their profit margins and to status quo production, pricing, labor, trading and retailing practices. It can also offer valuable lessons regarding the most effective means of responding to such counter-reforms and of protecting or reasserting the more transformative elements at the heart of these alternative systems.
This introductory essay highlights the key findings, methodological tool kit, and production process of this Special Issue. We argue that communication researchers are uniquely positioned to analyze ...the relationships between social media and political change in careful and nuanced ways, in terms of both causes and consequences. Finally, we offer a working definition of social media, based on the diverse and considered uses of the term by the contributors to the collection. Social media consists of (a) the information infrastructure and tools used to produce and distribute content that has individual value but reflects shared values; (b) the content that takes the digital form of personal messages, news, ideas, that becomes cultural products; and (c) the people, organizations, and industries that produce and consume both the tools and the content.
THE ROLE OF DIGITAL MEDIA Howard, Philip N; Hussain, Muzammil M
Journal of democracy,
07/2011, Letnik:
22, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
During the 'Arab Spring,' young tech savvy activists led uprisings in a dozen countries across North Africa and the Middle East. At first, digital media allowed democratization movements to develop ...new tactics for catching dictators off guard. Eventually, authoritarian governments worked social media into their own counter-insurgency strategies. What have we learned about the role of digital media in modern protest? Digital media helped to turn individualized, localized, and community-specific dissent into structured movements with a collective consciousness about both shared grievances and opportunities for action. Adapted from the source document.
The goal of this study was to identify commercial chemicals that might be persistent and bioaccumulative (P&B) and that were not being considered in current Great Lakes, North American, and Arctic ...contaminant measurement programs. We combined the Canadian Domestic Substance List (DSL), a list of 3059 substances of “unknown or variable composition complex reaction products and biological materials” (UVCBs), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) Inventory Update Rule (IUR) database for years 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2006 yielding a database of 22263 commercial chemicals. From that list, 610 chemicals were identified by estimates from U.S EPA EPISuite software and using expert judgment. This study has yielded some interesting and probable P&B chemicals that should be considered for further study. Recent studies, following up our initial reports and presentations on this work, have confirmed the presence of many of these chemicals in the environment.
Forensic researchers often assume that the widely used area under the curve (AUC) predictive validity statistic can be readily compared across risk assessment instruments and between studies. From ...risk distributions for 224,771 convicted English and Welsh offenders, I quantify the extent to which the AUCs of two continuously scored actuarial instruments are dependent upon sample heterogeneity and risk categorization. Sample composition can cause predictive validity to vary by 10% to 20% over chance between subpopulations, with higher AUCs for female subgroups whose scores have high variability, and lower AUCs when sampling is restricted by index offense and/or sentence type. Risk categorization has a potentially large effect on AUCs, which fall when few categories are used, especially when those categories contain unequal numbers of offenders. An improved understanding of how these factors can affect AUCs will inform professionals using risk assessment instruments and researchers comparing the validity of multiple instruments.
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