Alternative Press Research Articles

Alternative media and normative theory: A case of Ferguson, Missouri

This paper, based on in-depth interviews with journalists at alternative and advocacy papers in St. Louis as well as interviews with live streaming protestors, a new breed of citizen journalist, applies six characteristics commonly associated with the alternative press to coverage of the protests and police crackdown in Ferguson, Missouri between August 9, 2014 and March 2015. Journalists from the alternative newspaper in St. Louis focused on progressive or radical values less than the literature predicted. The African-American newspaper in St. Louis found itself influencing the national and global agenda regarding Ferguson and the ongoing oppression of blacks in the city and surrounding municipalities. Mobile media savvy protestors broadcast police actions from the front lines of dissent in nearly constant live streams day after day from August to November, altering the scope of counternarrative and providing distilled counter­propaganda. In this study, researchers provide a snapshot of the alternative/advocacy press as it rose to fill in gaps in coverage and to find untold stories in one of the most widely broadcast events of 2014.

Political violence as shared terrain of militancy: Red Brigades, social movements and the discourse on arms in the early Seventies

ABSTRACTIn this paper, the author inspects the discourses on violence carried out in Italy in the first half of the 1970s by the Red Brigades (BR) and the left-wing social movements. Processes for conceptualizing political violence will be examined, in an attempt to understand whether they represented a sort of shared terrain of militancy and in what way they contributed to defining forms and contents of political militancy, either public or clandestine, leading often to diverse outcomes. The paper engages this matter by interlacing simultaneously three analytical levels: firstly, the historical context and the structural changes affecting Italy starting in the late Sixties; and secondly, the manners in which the BR and the various movement's areas conceptualized the political violence. Finally, the forms will be highlighted in which movements and armed struggle perceived each other. Using documents of the BR and the alternative left-wing press as sources, the aim is to consider the role played by these reciprocal perceptions in the definition of certain collective identities, out of the conviction that such an approach may supply new analytical research tools in order to “de-exceptionalize” terrorism and to understand it as a historical phenomenon.

Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940

Maligned by modern media and often stereotyped, Italian Americans possess a vibrant, if largely forgotten, radical past. In Italian Immigrant Radical Culture, Marcella Bencivenni delves into the history of the sovversivi, a transnational generation of social rebels, and offers a fascinating portrait of their political struggle as well as their milieu, beliefs, and artistic creativity in the United States. As early as 1882, the sovversivi founded a socialist club in Brooklyn. Radical organizations then multiplied and spread across the country, from large urban cities to smaller industrial mining areas. By 1900, thirty official Italian sections of the Socialist Party along the East Coast and countless independent anarchist and revolutionary circles sprang up throughout the nation. Forming their own alternative press, institutions, and working class organizations, these groups created a vigorous movement and counterculture that constituted a significant part of the American Left until World War II. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture compellingly documents the wide spectrum of this oppositional culture and examines the many cultural and artistic forms it took, from newspapers to literature and poetry to theater and visual art. As the first cultural history of Italian American activism, it provides a richer understanding of the Italian immigrant experience while also deepening historical perceptions of radical politics and culture.

The Chicano/a Photographic: Art as Social Practice in the Chicano Movement

While photography within the Chicano movement functioned as a tool of counternarrative or self-representation, California-based Chicano/a artists during this period also mobilized a photographic impulse across media. The concept of the Chicano photographic proposes that the practices, circulation, and idea of photography functioned in this context as inspiration for artwork in other media, as an archive of vernacular expression, as a conceptual device, and as documentation of process-based works. By examining four key practices or concepts in early Chicana/o cultural production—the alternative press, muralism, rasquachismo , and artists associated with the group Asco—this essay argues that the multidimensional mobilization of photography was central to the participatory and community-based foundations of early Chicano/a art. Approaching practices as being simultaneously visual and social in nature holds implications for the analysis of Chicana/o artwork and for its relationship to art history.

Book Review: Popular Media and the American Revolution: Shaping Collective Memory, by Janice Hume

Popular Media and the American Revolution: Shaping Collective Memory. Janice Hume. New York: Routledge, 2014. 148 pp. $150 hbk. $38.95 pbk.You could spark a pretty good debate by questioning whether we learn more history from historians and history courses or from popular culture. Whatever the answer, here comes Janice Hume to show convincingly that history, culture, and media have a powerful symbiotic relationship.Hume heads the Department of Journalism at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. In this monograph-length work, she offers a case study of how our understanding of the American Revolution coalesced over time. Shaped and reshaped by politicians, historians and especially journalists, an epic storyline eventually emerged. It was part fact and part myth, part fortuitous and part strategically reimagined to suit changing times.Not surprisingly, according to Hume, the news media found themselves in the middle of it all.She examines mainstream newspapers, magazines, the alternative press, and to a lesser extent broadcast media, focusing, for example, on the nurturing of the George Washington legend or the didactic and flag-waving nationalism loaded onto Fourth of July celebrations. Through stories, memories, and shared sentiment, she writes, there developed a national of the Revolution, nourished and sustained by popular media and culture, determining to a large extent what Americans both remember and forget.As Hume notes, the news media of the day-mostly newspapers and pamphlets- stirred the colonists toward rebellion and provided information as the war unfolded, though much of it was rumor and hearsay. But her main interest is in what happened afterward, as time passed and the revolutionary narrative played directly into later nation-building goals.Hume effectively shows that it did not take long for Americans to become nostalgic about the Revolution. In newspaper obituaries of veterans of the war, according to one study she cites, service to country during the war . . . was mentioned more frequently even than religious affiliation.While it has become common to speak of journalism as the first rough draft of history, Hume demonstrates that its influence goes much further. From the Revolution forward, even historians often used press accounts as sources, especially those with colorful language, quotations, and narrative. In addition, of course, much history has been written by journalists and former journalists ( think of the current work of Walter Isaacson). So that first rough draft may not be as ephemeral as we sometimes think. …

Analysis of the Shape of Stamp on the Distribution of Deformation in the Process of Alternate Pressing and Multiaxial Compression

The paper presents the results of numerical simulations of the alternate indirect extrusion and multiaxial compression process, performed using commercial software designed for the thermomechanical analysis of plastic working processes, Forge 2009. The paper presents selected results on the distribution of deformation in the process of alternating extrusion and multiaxial compression. Examples of modifications to the shape of the die and punch, and their effect on the kinetics of the material flow as well as the likelihood of defects of materials are provided. The results confirm that suitable modifying the shape of the die and punch enables to obtain a material with no internal defects. Iterative process, alternating squeezing and multiaxial compressive strain allows the accumulation of which results in fragmentation of the microstructure.

Effects of Constrained Groove Pressing (CGP) on the plane stress fracture toughness of pure copper

Among severe plastic deformation methods, groove pressing is one of the prominent techniques for producing ultra-fine grained sheet materials. This process consists of imposing repetitive severe plastic deformation on the plate or sheet metals through alternate pressing. In the current study, a 2 mm pure Cu sheet has been subjected to repetitive shear deformation up to two passes. Hardness and tensile yield and ultimate stress were obtained after groove pressing. Fracture toughness tests have been performed and compared for three conditions of sheet material namely as received (initial annealed state), after one and two passes of groove pressing. Results of experiments indicate that a decrease in the values of fracture toughness attains as the number of constrained groove pressing (CGP) passes increase.

Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts: A Slice of Life from the Rainbow Region

Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts: A Slice of Life from the Rainbow Region

The Maple Spring as the Background for the Flourishing of the Fifth Estate in Québec

The political disengagement of the Millennials has long been a subject of scholarly debate. Using ethnographic research methods, our lab conducted a multi-sited field study to investigate the digital practices of some of the community networks that have emerged or consolidated since the Maple Spring. Our field findings suggest that the Millennial student protesters – alongside citizens from all generations who have lent them their support – have actively engaged in their own forms of political participation and by doing so, have helped to firmly entrench the Fifth Estate in Québec society. In particular, we have found that these grassroots networks might have expanded Québec’s alternative press by using interactive technologies to self-publish, self-represent and self-document issues that are of great concern to them and have typically not been topics up for debate on the public agenda. Our analysis brings to the fore the fraught relationship between the Fifth Estate and the four traditional democratic institutions.

Pensamento latino-americano e a imprensa alternativa: relações com o jornal lampião da esquina

The Latin American thought communicational reflected in several countries of the continental references creating and establishing new ways of doing and thinking of communication. There are several contributions of writers of this school for the development of the alternative press, also known as plantain press. This aspect of the Brazilian press was a mechanism adopted to face while mitigating the influences of power structures related to communication, the same as one of the channels was created to provide recognition of the citizenship of individuals considered minorities social. With literature review and analysis of the editorial, this study aims to examine the relationship of Latin American communication thought to confront power with the newspaper clipping Lampiao da Esquina, a communication vehicle aimed important to recognize the social role of homosexuals among years 1978 and 1981.

Blind Side

In this article, newspaper reviews of the film, “The Blind Side,” are examined in the mainstream, African American, and alternative press. We select and code all comments in those reviews about the two protagonists, one white and one black. Our analysis revealed different degrees of favorableness and negativity about the protagonists, in the three types of American newspaper media. Our findings reveal that all three types of newspapers favor classifying the white heroine in greater positive terms than the African American character.

Water Gives Life: Framing an Environmental Justice Movement in the Mainstream and Alternative Salvadoran Press

This article explores mainstream and alternative press discourses of conflict over metallic mining in El Salvador. Through identifying mainstream and counter-frames, I show how an anti-mining movement achieved a position of short-term prominence within the dominant media discourse surrounding gold mining. However, even when the movement was able to break into the mainstream press, the resulting news coverage reproduced the nation-state's traditional power structure. In contrast, the alternative press challenged the neoliberal economic system, presenting a counter-narrative of community rights and a negligent national government that failed to protect the environment and health of its citizens. In this comparative analysis, I argue that by reframing dominant narratives of economic progress toward community rights and environmental justice, alternative media can act in synergy with environmental justice movements to discursively break a cycle of environmental inequity by collectively reimagining a more sustainable and just future.

Rubber pad-constrained groove pressing process: Experimental and finite element investigation

Abstract A new severe plastic deformation (SPD) process named rubber pad-constrained groove pressing (RP-CGP) has been developed for producing ultrafine-grained metallic materials. In this process, repetitive shear deformation conditions are imposed on the sheet material by utilizing asymmetrically grooved die and a polyurethane rubber pad instead of the rigid top die, as in the CGP, through alternate pressing. In this study, commercial pure aluminum sheet was subjected to repetitive deformation using RP-CGP. The process was carried out in two conditions utilizing two dies with different groove angles. Changes in mechanical properties measured by tensile and hardness tests is investigated. Tensile tests show a significant enhancement in mechanical properties including hardness, yield strength and ultimate tensile strength, but the ductility of the alloy reduced by employing this process. The influence of die groove angle on strain distribution throughout the transverse cross-section of specimen was analyzed by the finite element method in 2D plain strain condition using the commercial finite element code ABAQUS. It is shown that a die with a larger groove angle can result in better grain refinement and mechanical properties but cause a less uniform plastic strain distribution throughout the specimen.

Numerical Analysis in the Process of Alternate Pressing and Multiaxial Compression

This article presents the results of numeric simulation obtained with commercial software for thermo-mechanical analysis of plastic forging processes, Forge 2009, of the process of alternate forced pressing and multiaxial compression. The new method of alternate forced pressing and multiaxial compression suggested by the authors is characterized by the presence in the plastically forged material of the similar states of deformations to those present in the processes of the equal channel angular pressing and cyclic extrusion compressing. From the performed preliminary tests it can be stated that as a result of combining and repeating two alternate operations: pressing and multiaxial compression, strain accumulation and development of deformation state favorable to grain crushing take place.

Michel Foucault na imprensa brasileira durante a ditadura militar: os "cães de guarda", os "nanicos" e o jornalista radical

Como parte da pesquisa "Michel Foucault no Brasil: presença, efeitos e ressonâncias", são focalizados os modos como o filósofo apareceu seja na grande imprensa, seja na imprensa alternativa, durante sua visita ao Brasil no ano de 1975 e, mais brevemente, no de 1976. No primeiro caso, especial destaque é dado à conduta de Foucault quando do assassinato do jornalista Vladimir Herzog nos porões da ditadura militar. No segundo, à vigilância exercida sobre o filósofo pelos serviços de informação, bem como à participação da imprensa alternativa, notadamente a anarquista, na divulgação de suas conferências e ideias. Embora Foucault nunca tenha escrito um trabalho específico sobre a imprensa, sua concepção de filosofia como jornalismo radical é posta em correlação com tais ocorrências, numa tentativa de articular narrativa histórica e crítica do presente.

Special relations: the Americanization of Britain?

Special Relations reevaluates Anglo-American cultural exchange by exploring metropolitan London's culture and counterculture from the 1950s to the 1970s. It challenges a tendency in cultural studies to privilege local reception and attempts to restore the concept of Americanization in this critical era of mass tourism, professional exchange, and media globalization-while acknowledging an important degree of cultural hybridity and circularity. The study begins with the influence of American modernism in the built environment and in Swinging London generally, and then moves to its central project, the re-exploration of British counterculture-the anti-war movement, student rebellion, hippies, popular music, the alternative press, and the late Sixties triad of black, feminist, and gay liberationisms-as intimately tied to American experience and to American agents of cultural change. Special Relations retrieves these phenomena as more central and enduring in British metropolitan life than the current orthodoxy allows, and subjects to sharp critical scrutiny prevalent assertions of cultural authenticity in their British variants. Finally, the book looks at aspects of the turn against modernism and the counterculture in the 1970s.

Scene through the Press: Rock Music and Underground Papers in London, 1966–73

AbstractIn the years around 1968 London was home to a sizeable community of writers, musicians, artists, and political activists whose countercultural attitudes are expressed in the publications of the ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ press – magazines such asInternational Times,OZ,INK,Friends(laterFrendz),Time Out,Gandalf's Garden,The Black Dwarf, andThe Hustler. That most of them had at least some pages devoted to music reflected the crucial role of rock in particular in summing up the community's aspirations, focused less on political or social than on cultural transformation. This article seeks to chart in these underground publications the changing attitudes towards music and its revolutionary potential. Initially the alternative press portrayed popular music as sharing with avant-garde tendencies a basic equation between new creative means and their would-be disruptive effects on society as a whole. However, there soon arose contradictions between the radical social potential of music and its growing commercialization, contradictions stemming not only from the co-optation of rock by market forces and record companies but also from the underground's own lack of a coherent ideological agenda. Paradoxically, it was precisely when popular music began to be considered a form of ‘high’ culture – just as the alternative press advocated – that its perceived effectiveness as part of the revolutionary, countercultural project began to diminish.

Polymorphic transformation of anhydrous caffeine under compression and grinding: a re-evaluation.

Polymorphic transformations that may occur during mechanical treatment are of great interest for the production of pharmaceutical solids. Anhydrous caffeine is a well-known example of such transformations but a careful reading of the already existing literature shows that published results are contradictory. In this study, both forms of caffeine, form I and form II, respectively metastable and stable at ambient pressure and temperature, were submitted to compression in an instrumented alternative press and to grinding, and were studied before and after treatment by X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Compression experiments showed no changes of form II during compression, whereas form I was partially transformed into form II. Nevertheless, this transformation did not happen immediately. Form II appeared after a kinetically slow transformation and was clearly detectable only after a few days, fact that was never mentioned by previous authors. Same phenomenon was observed after the grinding of form I but also after an extensive grinding of form II. DSC and XRPD measurements indicated that polymorphic transformation did not happen directly, but that a new intermediate form was obtained after mechanical treatment, which slowly turned into form II within a few days.

Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change

The termzineis a recent variant offanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in theWhole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.

Book Review: Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings

Published as two of geography's first open-access, online collections, Radical Theory/Critical Praxis (edited by Rob Kitchin and Duncan Fuller) and Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings (edited by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro) mark what is hopefully the beginning of more expansive challenge to the current political economy of academic publication. The editors note the immediate difficulties of such an experiment: copyright limitations of previously published work; desires to capitalize on the value of such collections; RAE and tenure pressures; and the “currency” of a new, alternative press.