Biopolitics is the organizing theme for a three-essay section, including Joy Knoblauch's consideration of community mental health centers, their architectural design, and their role in communities. ......H. Fernando Burga chronicles efforts to plan Miami-Dade County in the face of changing demographics, immigration trends, and refugee flows, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the Cuban-American political dynamics at the local scale. First is Delia Duong Ba Wendel's work on the 2004 radio program Musekeweya.
Delta’s Sky magazine claims to be an influential outlet for entities trying to promote places to investors and tourists. Claiming nearly 6 million readers monthly, the magazine’s profiles of cities, ...states and regions have the potential to reach the niche audiences that shape the spatial practices of firms and influence individual decisions on tourism expenditures. This paper explores how Sky promotes places in the text of these profiles through the dual use of digital humanities tools and close reading-based interpretation to address the following questions. First, we ask how is the South represented in the Sky profiles? Second, what themes are present in the profile texts, given that all places seek to address both unique elements while addressing common themes of importance to business? We find that place promotion practitioners use very similar themes that have been identified in the literature since the 1980s, primarily accessibility. Efforts to attract the creative class are also present in the Sky profiles. The South poses unique challenges to place marketers, and our findings show a convergence in how profiles tackle the concept of southern culture and identity as it is leveraged in many of the profiles.
La revista Sky de Delta Airlines afirma ser una fuente importante para las entidades que intentan promover varios lugares para la inversión económica y también para el turismo. Con más de seis millones de lectores mensuales, los perfiles Sky de las ciudades, los estados y las regiones tienen el potencial de llegar a audiencias específicas que dan forma a las prácticas espaciales de empresas e influyen las decisiones personales sobre los gastos en el turismo. Este artículo explora cómo el texto de Sky promueve varios lugares tras el uso dual de herramientas de humanidades digitales y una interpretación cercana basada en la lectura para abordar las siguientes preguntas. Primero preguntamos ¿cómo se representa el sur estadounidense en los perfiles Sky? Segundo, ¿cuáles son los patrones en el texto de los perfiles, dado que todo lugar trata de presentarse como único pero también importante para el negocio? Encontramos que profesionales de la promoción usan temas similares que se han identificado en la literatura desde los años 1980—sobre todo la accesibilidad. Los esfuerzos para atraer la clase creativa también se presentan en los perfiles Sky. El sur estadounidense plantea desafíos únicos para el marketing. Nuestros hallazgos muestran una convergencia en la forma en que muchos de los perfiles abordan el concepto de cultura e identidad del sur estadounidense.
Objective. The role of popular culture, particularly humor, is of increasing importance in critical geopolitics and international relations scholarship. This article examines how humor is used to ...frame the events described as the Arab Spring and U.S. government response. Methods. Sifting through the jokes for references to places, events, and significant actors, the selected jokes were interpreted through critical discourse analysis to identify the themes invoked by the comedians. Results. The Arab Spring countries most mentioned were Libya, Egypt, and Syria. The majority of the jokes about these can best be understood through the lens of incongruity theory and the exploitation of extant caricatures of leaders. Additionally, the jokes reflected concerns over U.S. actions in the region and, simultaneously, U.S. leadership’s seeming inability to craft a coherent plan to address the events. Conclusions. We establish the link to humor and geopolitical imagination noting that the themes of American policy, American leadership, regional corruption, and caricatures of leaders composed many of the jokes, reflecting a particular worldview of the region as intractable.
The critical geopolitics literature has engaged popular culture and media in many forms, usually focused on mass media or elite-produced niche media. The issue of humor as a form of popular culture ...with geopolitical content has been explored only recently by geographers. This paper utilizes disposition theory, with its emphasis on social context, to link humor and geopolitical analyses of humor. The analysis of two Jeff Dunham comedy skits centering on the character Achmed the Dead Terrorist demonstrates the utility of disposition theory as a construct to situate humor in the context of its original production and as a fluid, global phenomenon that is shared through various social networks via the Internet.
The military in the noosphere Purcell, Darren
Information, communication & society,
06/2005, Letnik:
8, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Websites are often used by governments to articulate particular views on international affairs, and even to lobby for a particular position. Using work by Arquilla and Ronfeldt
(1999)
, Castells
...(2001)
and Chadwick
(2001)
as a theoretical framework for understanding the importance that cyberspace holds for governments and states, the author analyzes the efforts of the Slovenian Ministry of Defense (MoD) to adopt the Internet to communicate with publics it defined as important. Through this website, the MoD literally served as a combatant in the noosphere, while displaying tendencies that Chadwick argues serves particular purposes in maintaining domestic political legitimacy. The analysis is based on a socio-semiotic approach (Hodge & Kress
1988
) dependent on a well-developed understanding of the context within which signs and symbols exist. The paper outlines the role of the military in Slovenia, incorporates interview data with public relations staff in and then links these to a descriptive analysis of website content. The paper concludes that it is important for non-hegemonic states to actively contest cyberspace images in the noosphere, if only to serve the domestic public the state needs for legitimacy. Further directions in comparative work are proposed.
A comment on Saul B. Cohen's paper, "Geopolitical Realities and United States Foreign Policy" (2003) focuses on his inadequate exploration of the consequences of US political & economic policy. Cohen ...concentrates on guiding US foreign policy at the expense of reasoned analysis, which makes his maps & descriptions of new regions "terra incognita." Although many of his assessments of specific regions are accurate, structural difficulties related to mapping result in an unclear & inconsistent basis for the realms he describes as well as no identification of global linkages that bind particular places. Other problematic issues include his categorization of gateway regions; neglect of Africa's prominence; & failure to indicate the causes, processes, & bases of operations related to "hotspots." The important function of the text that accompanies maps is discussed, & it is suggested that Cohen's text is weakened by only including the US role in the regions discussed. Suggestions are made for improving the maps & consideration is given to alternative mappings, such as those drawn by an Arab. 9 References. J. Lindroth
Recent legislative efforts to protect credit unions against unfavorable legislation reflect the growing importance of credit unions in the U.S. financial services sector. Efforts to address new ...technologies, combined with deregulation in financial services, have led changes in the field of membership rules governing how credit unions are chartered and how they may grow. These regulations have clear geographic implications for defining communities and for offering financial services and education to particular segments of the population. This paper briefly reviews the history of credit unions, then examines the Credit Union Membership Access Act of 1998 (CUMAA) and the National Credit Union Administration's (NCUA) interpretation and implementation. A case study of two Florida locales is used to analyze the changes in credit union charters and their expansion in the rapidly changing market. The results point to the possibility that credit union expansion as currently legislated may be an effective way to insure access to financial services. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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