Where is Amarildo? – Who killed Marielle? – state-sanctioned circulations, online memes and black presence in the cityscape of Rio de Janeiro

Using two post-9/11 films set in New York City, Cloverfield (2008) and The Visitor (2008), this article interrogates the urban space of pre-emptive security practice in the United States. Putting these two films together, and tracing their characters’ paths through the city, offers insights into the relationship between threat imaginaries, security practices and the complex cities within which they are interwoven. While pointing to some of the continuities with longer-standing socio-spatial tactics of urban control, this analysis also draws attention to the particular spatio-temporal landscape of pre-emption, which has come to define post-9/11 security stances. It is argued that pre-emptive security imaginaries and practices are stretched across urban spaces in ambiguous and uneven ways as attempts are made to render urban complexity, uncertainty and circulation visible and knowable. The cinematic paths of the characters in Cloverfield and The Visitor offer points of micro-visibility onto post-9/11 urban security practice as a circulatory process that is not ultimately fixed or fully competent. In this way the article complicates the imagination of a seamless, fully rendered urban battlespace and instead stresses the active process of securitizing potentialities and acts that slip in and out of the innumerable spatial stories that compose the urban fabric.

Due to technical advances, old ways for securing DevOps software development have become obsolete. Thus, researchers and practitioners need new insights into the security challenges and practices of DevOps development. This paper reviews the data extraction and analysis phase and results of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study that was carried out in 2019. The outcome is an updated list of security challenges and practices for DevOps software development. Both reviews shows that the most essential challenges for the DevOps security deal with the complexity of the development pipelines and the overall complexity of the cloud and microservice environments. The security activities identified were classified by using the BSIMM maturity model for software security as a framework. Our review shows that DevOps security research focuses mostly on deployment phase and technical aspects of software security. We compared the security activities identified in our study with the ones identified by the BSIMM development company in their 2020 review of 128 practitioners’ security practices and found matching practices and similar trends. KeywordsDevOpsSecuritySystematic Literature Review

In August 2011 organisers of the London 2012 Olympics staged rehearsals for the Opening Ceremony due to commence exactly one year hence. Meanwhile, other parts of the city were experiencing rioting and looting on a scale not seen for 30 years. Whilst these two events were largely distinct, their simultaneous occurrence underscored an important point. For all the attention to the enclosure, artificial urbanism and contrived spaces that hosting sporting mega events create, they are accommodated in complex and often contested urban settings. Two years later, the links between the politics of the street and the sporting mega-event spectacle became cemented elsewhere. Echoing protests against Mexico City's profligate Olympic spending at a time of austerity in 1968, June 2013 saw more than a million people take to the streets across 100 Brazilian cities. Although activist causes were manifold they unmistakably coalesced around the social and pecuniary impacts of Brazil's staging of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. As mega-event spectacles, replete with promises of 'regeneration' and 'legacy', continue to encroach further into the urban realm, so different levels of action, activism, governance and policy necessarily become drawn together. For sporting mega-events, it is in the realm of security practice where the heat generated by internationally focused agendas abrading with local practices, processes and priorities is greatest. Here, the promise of stringent security guarantees is a precondition for hosts who operate under a constant risk of catastrophic reputational damage should they not be met. Of course, it is rare that, in such a broad sense, 'security' can ever be guaranteed and, for planners, its pursuit results in dwindling levels of acceptable risk. When applied to the complex, dynamic and unpredictable realm of the global city, the contemporary stage for sporting mega events, such promises are even harder to keep. The result is uneasy coalitions of international, national, regional and local security practice; a merger of civil, military and criminal justice techniques and technologies of social control; and a proliferation of security priorities. Yet whilst some of these measures may be exceptional for the cities that host them, they often represent very familiar elements of mega-event security programmes. During the 1970s and 1980s foundations were laid down that would subsequently support the architecture of Olympic and other sport mega-event security programmes. The Summer Games that followed Munich, at Montreal in 1976, saw an unprecedented investment in security infrastructure, with particular emphasis placed on the padded bunkers of fortified Olympic architecture, a highly visible military presence and the isolation of Olympic-related transportation from the everyday movements of the city. Four years later, Moscow's Games were played out amid cold war apprehensiveness and saw an intensification of military intervention, particularly the mass deployment of infantry, alongside blanket zero-tolerance style clampdowns on variously imagined and defined forms of 'disorder'. The violence at Munich, penury of Montreal and totalitarian pageantry of Moscow led to a nadir in the International Olympic Committee (IOC)'s international standing. In a reversal of the quadrennial spectacle of aspirant cities beseeching the IOC for the right to stage the Games, willing and capable hosts were in short supply. Denver had relinquished their right to hold the 1976 Winter Olympic Games and, after Tehran had pulled out, Los Angeles remained the only candidate for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Thus, the IOC had little choice but to allow managers of the Californian city to shape the Games in their own image. Accelerated corporate sponsorship and private financing of the Games ensued. 'Celebration capitalism' (Boykoff 2013) was born. This moment set a tone that would reverberate through host cities for decades and permanently alter the political economy of sporting mega-event security. The ascendancy of private security provision henceforth assured – with private security assets augmenting and, in some cases superseding (e.g. Seoul 1988, Athens 2004), extant policing structures – Olympic security became refocused towards supporting the needs of private capital. It became wedded to the protection of sponsor's privileged access to the Olympic marketplace. In the post-9/11 context of the 'war on terror', sport mega events not only focus on major business and policy opportunities, but also evoke increased local, national and international security concerns. Spiralling budgets and security planning predicated on elevated threat levels has, in recent years, seen the strongest realm of mega-event expansion, in terms of cost and personnel, centring on security and risk management. Indeed, the first post-9/11 sporting mega-event, the XIX Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, saw an intensification of traditional security measures – with rapid escalation of human and financial resources – combined with novel technological initiatives. The latter included a progenitor of the NSA's programme of colossal data harvesting, mining and matching, where the FBI and NSA employed US telecommunications carrier Qwest Communications International to intercept and monitor all email and SMS traffic in the Salt Lake City area during and around the time of the Games (Wall Street Journal 2013). Yet for all the standardisation and international curation of mega-event security motifs, attendant security programmes are not reducible to simple colonial impositions of externally defined practice. Nor, despite initial appearances, do they comfortably sit in simple neo-liberal political-economic models of governance or, conversely, linear neo-Marxist conceptions of power. Deeper analysis reveals transnational governance to be just one of many scales of action exerting agency, institutional practice and operational orthodoxy upon mega-event security practice. Particularly important here are the governance and security practices operating at local and regional levels which serve to accommodate, filter and shape these broader transnational processes. Moreover, for local hosts, the carnival of sporting mega-events enables a temporary suspension of external realities such as recession and unemployment. Exorbitant budgets are lavished on a broad cluster of developments in contemporary security practice and governance, ranging from the increased militarisation of public safety to the criminal prosecution of formerly civil infractions. At the same time, mega-events have been used as testing grounds for new techniques of social control and configurations of urban governance, leaving behind legacies of finessed security infrastructure (Fussey et al. 2011) and bounded networks of security experts (Klauser 2011). As Massey (2007) observed, despite ageographical appearances, globalisation is also produced locally. In the case of mega-event security, the deployment of innovative surveillance and social control measures at one event may stimulate their broader commercialisation, globalisation and technologisation. In other respects, locally derived security practices become formalised and then transmitted through a process of global policy transfer. Mega-event security also penetrates multiple local domains previously unconnected to the spectacle. Since the 1950s mega events have catalysed the valorisation of the city, most consistently through improved transport infrastructures and, since the 1990s, with the 'regeneration' of wider host neighbourhoods. The realisation of such regeneration schemes has seen soaring property prices, property speculation and the displacement of incumbent populations. In turn, the arriviste anxieties of more affluent populations have stimulated programmes of urban bunker padding across areas as diverse as gentrified Barcelona, London and Rio. Thus, broader event-related objectives such as the 'regeneration' of wider geographies become increasingly yoked to broader processes of securitisation and a refocusing of urban governance towards this end. Sport mega events have become global occasions of enormous importance and implication and affect seismic change on the cities and nations that host them. Today, these dynamics give rise to new and profound social questions and preoccupations. Yet, given the scale and controversy of these processes it is perhaps surprising that only recently has significant critical scholarly attention turned towards the security practices accompanying sport mega events. Given the aforementioned importance of – and impact upon – the local sphere, much of this burgeoning literature has correctly adopted both empirical and case study based approaches. Among these, recent studies have empirically examined Olympic Games in Athens (Samatas 2007), Turin (Fonio and Pisapia 2011), Vancouver (Molnar 2011; Haggerty and Boyle 2009) and London (Fussey and Coaffee 2011). Others have provided analyses of international football tournaments, including FIFA World Cups in Germany (Baasch 2011; Eick 2011) and South Africa (McMichael 2013) and the UEFA European Championships in Austria and Switzerland (Klauser 2013). Other studies have emphasised more transnational features of mega-event security, including the modes of professional knowledge transfer among practitioners (Klauser 2011) and the transportation of coercive techniques across temporal, territorial and ideological borders (Fussey et al. 2011). The global span, multiplicity of actors and unprecedented scale of mega-event security has provided a fecund arena for conceptual analysis. For example, Giulianotti and Klauser draw on Bourdieusian concepts of the field, to propose a composite theoretical framework for understanding sporting mega-event securitisation comprising 'the security field … [denoting] a specific, security-defined social space, which contains objective, game-like relationships that are played out between various [capital possessing] "players" ' (Giulianotti and Klauser 2010, 57 emphasis in original). Others have drawn on the work of Foucault, particularly his circulatory models of 'security' (Klauser 2013; Fussey 2014), which superseded his thinking on 'sovereignty' and 'discipline' and their implicit associations with, and specific understandings of, territorial control. Other research draws on established political-economic approaches to frame the analysis. Examples of these include Samatas' (2007 2011) work on the 2004 Athens Olympics and Eick's (2011) deployment of Jessop's (2002) notion of neo-communitarianism as a means of conceptualising FIFA's activities. Whilst this all represents a diverse and growing literature, a number of unifying tendencies exist. These include an accent upon the establishment of territorial enclosure, enhanced social control, repurposing and securitisation of urban governance arrangements, issues of spatial justice and the militarisation of civil policing. Not all citizens are willing recipients of such processes. Despite this, studies detailing the resistance and activism that sporting mega events and their attendant security programmes inspire (Lenskyj 2000; Boykoff and Fussey 2013) are less common. Within these broader thematic areas of analysis there has been particular focus on the potential of mega-event security to catalyse and amplify a number of existing urban-centred processes and, similarly, the 'laboratory character' of mega events in terms of generating novel best practices or technological deployments. A further area of concentration has been on the security legacies left behind by large-scale sporting events, such as novel legislation, high-tech surveillance technologies, and new partnerships of security practice. As extant case study research has revealed, these processes exert themselves unevenly. Deployments of novel technologies permeated security practices at the 1994 FIFA World Cup, 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and 2004 Athens Olympics, but were less widespread at the London Games. Nor are legacies the same. Whilst remnants of mega-event security often remain – such as private policing arrangements in Tokyo (1964) and Seoul (1988), and over-elaborate surveillance architectures in Athens – there is not always an inexorable drive towards an apotheosis of securitisation. The redeployment of military assets after the London Games, a relief to the dystopian imaginings of many activist groups, is one example. Whilst some networks of security practice remain in situ and transfer knowledge to other domains, many other actors and agencies recede back into the murk and fog of the urban governance structures they initially emerged from. Thus, the harvesting of differential urban experiences of mega-event security are vital, not least to avoid overstated synechdocal assumptions of the endurance and generalisability of particular tendencies, trends and practices. In the coming years, issues of security and surveillance at sport mega events will further increase in importance and popular attention, most notably with Brazil and Russia both holding four consecutive FIFA World Cups and Olympic Games between 2014 and 2018. These spectacles are then set to head east with Olympic Games in Korea and Japan and the 2022 FIFA World Cup to Qatar. However, despite recent pullulation, arguably the analysis of sport and security remains under-developed. This collection seeks to address this gap and further advance understandings of the relationships between ageographical processes and territorial specificities of sporting mega-event security. Each of the papers is founded upon extensive primary research in multiple locations spanning the globe. With five papers analysing events in three separate continents, the collection thus provides multifaceted and truly international insight into the world of sport mega-event security, which we hope will further galvanise this emerging field of research. The papers of this collection touch on a very wide range of themes and issues, relating to at least three broad levels of analysis: the complex spatial imprints and articulations of sport mega-event security; the mediating rationalities, actor networks and driving forces underpinning event security; and the socio-spatial implications and legacies of the security and surveillance apparatus deployed at the events. Together, the three levels add both empirical depth and theoretical nuance to our understanding of how sport mega-event security, in its logics, functioning and implications, interacts with the host cities of the events. The first paper, written by Jon Coaffee, offers a powerful account of the uneven geographies of security and surveillance that emerge at sport mega events. Drawing upon literatures on urban security and carceral geography, combined with Agamben's work on exceptionality, the paper emphasises in particular the coercive techniques of enclosure, cleansing, incarceration and exclusion that permeate the fabric of the event cities before, during and after the tournament. Security lockdown, urban fragmentation and punitive approaches to control, the paper argues, today become the 'default' option for hosting cities of sport mega events. Empirically, this argument is based on ethnographic research on the experiences of security preparation for, and post-event legacy of, the London 2012 Olympics. Furthermore, the paper also highlights how lessons from the military-carceral security strategies deployed in London have been transferred to subsequent host cities of Sochi (2014) and Rio de Janeiro (2016). Pete Fussey also investigates the logics and functioning of event security at London 2012, albeit from a different analytical and conceptual viewpoint. Rather than focusing on the carceral impetus of enclosure and cleansing inherent in sport mega-event security, Fussey foregrounds the logics of control aimed at the flexible and highly differentiated management of differing types of mobilities and flows across and between the event's host cities. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of 'security', as opposed to 'discipline', the paper is thus concerned not so much with how mega-event security relates to fixity and rigid urban fragmentation, but with how – and to what effects – event-related surveillant assemblages coalesce around people and objects on the move. This analysis also underscores the functional and spatial complexity that characterises sport mega-event security. Relevant measures and actor networks operate at multiple scales, across different temporalities and spatialities, and for diverse, often conflicting purposes. This renders unrealisable simplistic ambitions for complete territorial control, or regimes of total proscription and prohibition. Thus mega-event security is not so much a question of universal principles, than of everyday negotiations and micro-adjustments between various actors, needs, driving forces and rationalities. The third paper, written by Francisco Klauser, further pursues this discussion. It explores the multiple interests, forms of expertise and sources of authority involved in the planning and instauration of Olympic venue security at Vancouver 2010. On these grounds, the paper critically studies the manifest and latent functionalities and ambitions that shape the functioning of mega-event security in its relationship to space. There are various questions addressed in this investigation, but three key issues stand out, relating to the public–private interactions of expertise and coalitions of authority, the interactions of scale (local, national, global), and (3) the related processes of policy imitation and transfer that shape the functioning of contemporary mega-event security. Whilst Klauser foregrounds the role and importance of IT companies' technical know-how in security governance at sport mega events, Adam Molnar's paper turns its main attention to the military involvement in event security. The paper shows how military expertise and technologies have been carefully interwoven into the exercises and security preparation for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, thus contributing to, and reflecting, wider processes of 'military urbanism' and 'militarised urban policing'. The field of sport mega-event security, in this light, also appears as a catalyst for the development of novel inter-organisational relationships that blur the traditional distinctions between civilian–military, war-law enforcement, and internal–external security. Talking about the security legacy of sport mega events also requires critical attention to such developments and dynamics. The last paper, written by Chiara Fonio and Giovanni Pisapia, rounds off the present collection with a study of the inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics and implications of the security measures deployed at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Focusing in particular on the city of Johannesburg, discussed security measures range from crime mapping and analysis to stadium security rings and larger, security-driven urban regeneration projects. Crucially, this analysis also incorporates questions regarding the role, authority and commercial agendas of non-state actors in providing event security, which are of heightened relevance in the South African, post-apartheid context. Together, the five papers not only make a significant contribution to existing scholarly literatures dealing with the opportunities and problems of sport mega-event security, but also draw wider conclusions with regard to some of the most salient contemporary developments in security governance, ranging from the increased militarisation of public safety to the commercialisation, globalisation and technologisation of contemporary surveillance practices and strategies. Today, these developments give rise to profound social questions and preoccupations that reach far beyond the world of sport mega-event security. Yet, as the papers in the present collection show, the mega-event field indeed offers a particularly worthwhile analytical lens through which to lay bare the driving forces and power relationships that shape these trends, whilst also, ultimately, pointing at the need for a broader theoretical project that challenges the imbrications of power, space and surveillance in the contemporary world more generally.

Antiurbanism takes many forms, economic as well as social, political as well as cultural. One way that antiurbanism—defined perhaps as an opposition to the publicness of the city—has become manifest in the spaces of the city itself is through an overweening concern with safety and security. One ideal of urbanism is precisely that it is there, in the city, that chance, serendipity, the unexpected, has the best chance to flourish, and out of chancy, serendipitous, and unexpected encounters new social, cultural, and political formations might arise. Rarely achieved in practice, this ideal of urbanism is nonetheless critical to contemporary theories of citizenship—as something to be struggled toward.1 Control over city space, practices of safety and security, that is, has never been stronger to the production of urban space; but in recent history (and not just since 9/11) certain practices of security (separating out “strangers,” mechanical and human surveillance, defensive design), have become, in many ways, defining. Discourses of safety have become dominant in discussions of “good” urban space. There is nothing wrong with being concerned with, and seeking to design in relation to, security, especially bodily security, or the safety of urban space users. But, I want to suggest in what follows, that when security and safety are defining, a certain antiurbanism rooted in fear—what I call “social agoraphobia”—comes to be the primary structuring force of urban life.

The article analyzes modern Internet memes, which, due to their precedent, are able to be phraseologized in mass communication. Memes are considered intertextual polycode units that arise as a verbalized reflection on the dynamic development of events and actively function in the virtual media space. It has been proven that the language of Internet memes is built on irony and sarcasm using stylistic puns and "word games", oxymorons and gradation techniques, as well as aphorisms, precedent quotes, established constructions. A special emphasis is placed on war memes, which are characterized, in our opinion, by a set of primary features: (a) a catchy word, expression, verbal / non-verbal sign must be precedents; (b) spontaneity in appearance; (c) flexibility to modifications in order to interpret different events and phenomena; (d) appeal to the background knowledge of recipients; (e) semantic unity in form and content; (e) reproduction of cultural memory and response to the digital challenges of modernity. All this enables Internet memes in language communication to phraseologize and be able to be widely replicated in the information space. It is emphasized that communicators can independently create Internet memes and distribute them on their own media resources, which emphasizes the ability of memes to be constantly modified. For illustrative material, we turned to the information of the "Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online" (SUCHO) portal, which has more than 10,000 memes as cultural markers of Ukraine. Having analyzed the memes of 2023, we can state that most Internet memes are precedent phenomena of the modern media space, and therefore have the ability to phraseologize. Therefore, Internet memes are a powerful source of new phraseology, have the ability to stylistically transform and help to strengthen the impression of a relevant informational message.

In her article ‘Gendering Insecurities, Informalization and “War Economies” ’, V. Spike Peterson identifies the too-often overlooked links between ‘the political’ and ‘the economic’, and outlines the connections between political violence and economic practices. Focusing on the uneven and contradictory logics and practices of neoliberalism, she illustrates how the local and global inequalities produced by neoliberal global restructuring create insecurities that lead to militarized conflict and war. Peterson’s discussion of gender, development, economic restructuring and security illustrates that expanding economic inequalities are inextricably linked to expanding political insecurities. In this chapter I explore these ideas with a specific focus on the ways in which racialized and gendered discourses of security and development enable the militarized conflicts that have contributed to the development of informal economies in post-war contexts. In doing so I provide an overview of how dominant discourses of development, democratization and security are interconnected along gendered and racialized lines, in order to show how development discourses fit into broader (historical and contemporary) gendered and racialized discourses of global politics (especially in terms of security and global order); how these discourses are militarized, thus enabling and perpetuating violence; and their gendered and racialized effects. I thereby draw on discourses of development, security and intervention related to what has been called, in these discourses, the ‘third’ or ‘developing world’, with a specific focus on the contemporary Middle East.

This paper sheds light to the crucial role being played by army officers not just in the site of interest which is Philippines but also in almost all countries taking into consideration security practices and Incident Command System on safety procedures. In effect, as to the significant differences in the assessment of the respondents on the internal security practices of the Philippine Army considering variables of the present study where p values are generally higher than the level of significance, has resulted to the acceptance of the null hypothesis of no significant difference. This presupposes that intervening variables move in a somewhat the same direction but different magnitude. In the context of the current academic piece, this implies that respondents are performing satisfactorily their functions in acquiescence to the commanding authority and is compliant with ICS. After careful scrutiny of data, researchers recommend that Philippine Army shall issue relevant policies for authorization of its personnel to visit other offices nationwide. On operational security, the P.A.’s treasury office or finance office shall be secured properly by security personnel or military police. For future researches, relevant studies may be conducted to a widened scope to improve the internal security practices of the P.A. exploring other relevant variables and its compliance to the security management system. As for international security standards, benchmarking on safety practices and procedures among allied countries be cultivated and reinforced to ameliorate its treaty and ensure its international resiliency against potential threat both natural and man-made.

The article deals with the problems of reflecting memorial wars in Internet memes. The authors consider memorial wars to be a special type of information wars related to memory policy. The politics of memory causes a struggle of interpretations of various versions of the Past within the framework of discursive practices of myth-making and leads to memorial wars. Political actors introduce ideas about the Past into the mass consciousness. Images of the Past are not always clearly perceived by society, which leads to conflicts. These conflicts have a media nature and take place in the virtual space. Internet users involve memes to express their political or ideological positions and to reflect their experiences of the Past. The authors consider historical memes an effective form of participation of Internet users in the formation of political culture and historical memory. Historical Internet memes change the tone of information messages, the assessment of historical facts and their emotional color for the purposes of historical policy. Using the example of the memory of the Second World War, the authors show Internet memes as a tool of historical policy and a «weapon» of memorial wars. Political actors use the history of war as a symbolic resource. Various interpretations and falsifications of the historical events of Second World Warcome into conflict with each other. Images of Stalin and Hitler in memes represent the memory of the war. Internet memes clearly demonstrate the transformation of ideas about the Soviet leader and the Nazi leader in the media space. The case on historical memory of the Second World Warshows the possibilities of using memes in memory wars.

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to clarify the communicative possibilities and stylistic functions of Internet memes as verbalized representatives of the military period (2022-...) and carriers “collaborative memory” (Conte, Padulo, & Fairfield, 2024) in virtual communication, which is based on socio- and psycholinguistic dimensions. The dynamics of functioning of the memes in the information space of Ukraine is explained, according to the authors, by the rapid development of this media genre, an instant associative reflection on the current events of the present, and the precedence of the expression that is embedded in an Internet meme. Research methods. To objectify the research results, we used the method of media monitoring, which helped to analyze the media space of Ukraine in order to identify the dominant internet memes of the military era; sociological respondent-analysis, which helped to understand the decoding of modern Internet memes and the definition of associative series that accompany the use of Internet memes in communication; a method of stylistic analysis that helped to analyze the techniques by which Internet memes are created / replicated in the media; elements of the cognitive method for the analysis of collaborative memory (Rajaram, & Pereira-Pasarin, 2010) in the perception of Internet memes. Results. We interviewed more than 100 respondents – mostly young people who spread (and sometimes create) internet memes themselves. The vast majority of modern war memes were created on the contrast “own / foreign”, which is most understood by the recipients. More than 70% of the respondents understand Internet memes and it is not difficult for them to decode them. Therefore, the associations caused by the Internet memes we proposed were only positive and had a humorous connotation, despite the complex psychological situation with the war. Conclusions. Internet memes of the military era became a verbalized markers of the collaborative memory of Ukrainians during the war. And, therefore, became a verbalized marker of Ukrainians during the war. And this allows us to state that humor in the form of Internet memes can be both a protective reaction of Ukrainians to the events of the war, and a new cultural fund that reflects modern social realities.

Laboratories of pacification and permanent war: Israeli–US collaboration in the global making of policing

Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour

This paper examines the code choice and contestations on street name signs in China to find out the dynamics of language politics and the language ideological debates. In China, Hanyu Pinyin and English compete for visibility on street signs, though only Pinyin is the legally-endorsed alphabetic form for place names. Spolsky’s (2004, 2009) tripartite language policy model is adopted to analyse the management, practice and ideologies regarding the code choice on street name signs in Chinese cities. It shows that Pinyin has been promulgated as domestic standard fused with national interests in the official discourse, while English win the favour of the general public and some international-oriented cities due to its pragmatic value and the symbolic capital associated with it. The resilient approach taken by the top authority suggests that the traditional model of language management relying on political authority and ideological hegemony is hard to work its way out nowadays.

Междисциплинарные исследования городских языковых ландшафтов, демонстрирующие в последнее время значительную динамику, являются одним из наиболее активно развивающихся направлений современного гуманитарного знания. Важнейшей исследовательской задачей становится описание языковых ландшафтов в контексте общих проблем мультилингвальных коммуникативных практик, этнической идентичности и языковой политики. Получает дальнейшее развитие методология исследования визуальной этноинформации, репрезентируемой в городских пространствах. Предпринята попытка описания современного двуязычного ландшафта г. Петрозаводска. Карельский язык появился на улицах города относительно недавно, уличные двуязычные указатели на русском и карельском языках городская администрация стала устанавливать с 2021 г. В задачи исследования входило не только описание формирования современного языкового ландшафта в диахроническом ключе, но и анализ специфики номинации карелоязычных годонимов. С этой целью в рамках исследования были проведены интервью с экспертами-переводчиками, языковедами, участвовавшими в подготовке уличных указателей на карельском языке. В ходе интервью были выяснены основные принципы номинации годонимов. Не менее важной задачей было выявление оценок жителей Карелии к появлению в городе карелоязычных уличных указателей и фасадных вывесок. Для проведения опроса была разработана социолингвистическая анкета. Результаты обследования, в котором участвовали 60 информантов, показали, что жители города и республики в целом положительно оценивают визуализацию карельского языка, а большинство посчитали, что ее необходимо расширять. Положительные установки информантов напрямую коррелируют с символической функцией карелоязычных элементов языкового ландшафта. Отдельный блок вопросов анкеты был направлен непосредственно на выяснение символического поля. Анализ материалов показал, что письменные карелоязычные репрезентации в городском пространстве ассоциируются не с возможностью языковой коммодификации, а именно с символическим измерением языкового ландшафта – этнической идентичностью, сохранением и популяризацией карельского языка, его национально-культурной ценностью. Interdisciplinary studies of urban linguistic landscapes, which have recently shown considerable dynamics, are among the most actively developing areas of modern humanitarian knowledge. The main task of the research is to describe linguistic landscapes in the context of general issues of multilingual communicative practices, ethnic identity, and language policy. The methodology for studying visual ethnic information represented in urban spaces is constantly evolving. This article attempts to describe the modern bilingual landscape of Petrozavodsk. The Karelian language only began to appear on the city’s streets relatively recently, when the city administration began installing bilingual street signs in Russian and Karelian in 2021. The objectives of this study included not only describing the formation of the modern linguistic landscape in a diachronic way but also analyzing the peculiarities of the naming process of toponyms in Karelian. To this end, the study involved interviews with experts (translators and linguists) who created street signs in Karelian. During the interview, the basic principles of toponym selection were clarified. An equally important task of the work was to find out the opinion of Karelian residents about the use of street signs and façade signs in Karelian in the city. A sociolinguistic questionnaire was developed to carry out the survey. The survey results, in which 60 informants took part, show that the inhabitants of the city and the entire republic have a positive attitude towards the visualization of the Karelian language and the majority believe that it should be expanded. The positive attitude of the informants is directly related to the symbolic function of Karelian language elements in the linguistic landscape. A separate block of questions in the questionnaire aimed to clarify the symbolic area. The analysis of the material has shown that the written represen tations of the Karelian language in the urban space are not related to the possibility of linguistic commodification but to the symbolic dimension of the linguistic landscape – ethnic identity, preservation, and popularization of the Karelian language and its national and cultural value.

Literary and artistic works, whether oral, visual or written, have always banked on prevailing media spaces for their composition, performance and transmission. The implicature of this is that the dominant media surfaces at the disposal of an artist at any given time play a big role in shaping and influencing the nature and characteristics of creative oeuvres in any given society. This is because artists patronise surfaces within their reach to showcase their creativity. Resultantly, this review paper seeks to explore the intersection between different media platforms and artistic outputs across different literary and creative epochs in Africa. The paper traces technological revolutions that have shaped and enhanced the growth of creative arts from pre-literate to the postmodern society, which is characterised by an avalanche of techno-digital advancements that have significantly revolutionised media spaces. The paper adopts a qualitative research design in appraising the influence of media spaces on artistic productions spanning the aforementioned societies. As such, the study reviews literature that is germane to the subject under investigation to make the argument that artistic outputs cannot be fixated on certain media platforms but predate on the readily, convenient and suitable media spaces at any given time for their manifestation. Intrinsically, therefore, the paper seeks to rationalise proliferating artistic emergences in the wake of media revolutions in the 21st century and beyond. The discussions in this paper affirm that African artists and writers have always relied on the prevailing media platform to compose and disseminate their works. The media platforms that have shaped artistic and literary works include traditional media, print and mass media and lastly social media. All these mediascapes have supported varying artistic and literary works ranging from oral and written literature as well as present-day proliferating popular art forms such as internet memes and sketch comedy, which heavily rely on social media surfaces for composition and dissemination.

This article critically analyses Turkish security discourses connected to the meta-geography of the Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) before and after the developments of the Arab Spring. A critical geopolitics approach and critical security theories in international relations provide the theoretical framework, as security discourses are considered to be a product of geopolitical imaginations and codes that, in turn, shape the making of foreign and security policies. First, the article examines the invention of BMENA as a meta-geography within Turkey’s new geopolitical imagination, as well as the new geopolitical codes underlying the new security discourses. Then, the article assesses the impact of the Arab Spring, which led to major changes in Turkey’s newly established geopolitical codes, formulated in the pre-Arab Spring period, and analyses the ruptures and continuities in Turkey’s security discourses in the light of those developments. Finally, the article concludes that the Arab Spring, especially the Syrian crisis, shifted the focus of Turkey’s foreign policy in BMENA from cooperation to conflict. This has led to a resecuritization of Turkey’s geopolitical codes, discourses and security practices in the region, revealing the limitation of Turkey’s current geopolitical imagination.