Contemporary Fears Research Articles

Perceived Health and Nomophobia among Young Adults: The Mediating Role of Depression and Stress

Nomophobia refers to the contemporary fear of being unable to communicate sufficiently via a smartphone. As reported in the literature, nomophobia leads to excessive smartphone use, and one of the crucial issues of this overuse is its effect on physical and mental health. The current study aimed to investigate the association between perceived health assessments and nomophobia among young adult smartphone users through the mediating role of depression and stress. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 1408 young adults aged 18–25 in Athens, the capital city of Greece. Data were collected through a self-reported questionnaire and included information on sociodemographic characteristics, patterns of smartphone use, self-perceived health status, and depressive and stress symptoms. Nomophobia was assessed using the “Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q)”. The effect of nomophobia on perceived health was analyzed by taking into account its effect on depression and stress. The results indicate a positive significant association between nomophobia and overall health burdening (i.e., musculoskeletal, hearing/vision, and psychosomatic symptoms). Depression and stress seem to play a significant mediating role in this association. Raising awareness through health-promoting interventions could play a pivotal role in eliminating the phenomenon of nomophobia and its consequences.

Empathy, a Hallmark of Equality: Shaping Fearlessness Into Transformative Decision-Making and Teaching

Abstract Whether acting as lawyers, activists, judges, policy makers or academics, there is a void in our equality agendas. This void has enabled the contemporary state to rationalise inequality through the propagation of fear. How can we talk about equality if we do not talk about the current crisis of fear? What shapes our contemporary fears? How might we surpass them? Two contemporary narratives, both from judges, offer the possibility of prevailing over certain kinds of fear to meet equality outcomes. With everything to lose in hostile political circumstances, Justice Attaee’s fearlessness materialises from her lived experiences of inequality from where empathy naturally flows for the benefit of women’s equality against the hostile tide of both Afghan politics and global betrayal. Having never walked ‘in the shoes’ of lgbtqia+ persons, fearlessness for Justice Venkatesh, a deeply conservative judge, is put to the test. Taking on the social fears of himself and others, he cultivates the skill of empathy through the rare and unconventional choice of experiential immersion. Both justices serve as examples for creating inclusive experiential courses on empathy and social context within legal/judicial education institutes and practice, where the lives of those most impacted become central to such learning.

‘What els do Maskes, but Maskers Show’: Masked Ladies in Shakespeare’s Comedies

ABSTRACT Black vizard masks, worn as a fashion accessory in the early modern period, were a source of mixed anxieties: while they were worn by many women, they were associated with sex workers. Vizards preserved pale beauty but also could conceal the lack thereof. This essay proposes that William Shakespeare’s comedies tap into these tensions, first by proposing that fashionable vizard masks were indeed worn onstage. Using Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing as key case studies, I then argue that these costume masks, weighted with the baggage of both offstage prostitution and the stage history of cloth racial prosthetics, carried specific semiotic meaning, allowing playwrights a shorthand for reflecting on contemporary fears regarding women’s whiteness, sexual availability, and the impossibility of ever knowing a woman’s heart by looking at her face.

“Have another?”: Edwin Drood ’s Princess Puffer and the Distorted Ethics of Victorian Hospitality

ABSTRACT: Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood features Princess Puffer, who masters the tenets of Victorian hospitality while subverting their foundational purpose of social cohesion. This analysis explores Puffer’s rhetoric of hostessing through the genre of Victorian etiquette books and its gendered advice about serving, eating, and drinking. But as the hostess of an opium den, she distorts that purpose by employing hospitality rituals—not for social cohesion, but for fragmentation, individually and nationally. Traditional fears about witchcraft and contemporary fears about female poisoners encapsulate the specter of female defiance. Princess Puffer’s perversion of hospitality rituals casts her as a threat, as the antithesis of the Angel in the House, offering a vision of an England that is externally prosperous while deteriorating from within.

Towards a general sociology of fear: a programmatic answer to crucial deficits of the contemporary fear discourse

Towards a general sociology of fear: a programmatic answer to crucial deficits of the contemporary fear discourse

Le Corset Expérimental: Fashion, Fertility, and Fiction in Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Au Bonheur des Dames

ABSTRACT This essay examines fertility politics in Zola's Pot—Bouille (1882) and Au Bonheur des dames (1883) in terms of the controversial and ubiquitous foundation garment of nineteenth—century women's dress: the corset. The corset exemplifies the novels' concerns with good form — good form meaning both the ideal feminine silhouette and the code of bourgeois propriety. The corset abets a series of reproductive failures in the narratives and thus incarnates contemporary fears about fashion—induced dénatalité. Zola ultimately condemns the hypocrisy of social attitudes that deemed pregnancy “indecent” and underscores the danger of placing intractable constraints — whether sartorial or cultural — on the maternal body.

‘Of counsel with [m]y mistress’: The mistress–servant alliance in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622)

Analyses of service in The Changeling have focused on De Flores as an embodiment of contemporary fears about servants, neglecting his mistress's agency and the play's engagement with anxieties about women's authority, especially their power over servants. They also ignore two other servants, Diaphanta and Lollio, whose relationships with their mistresses are equally revealing of those anxieties. This article argues that The Changeling stages alliances between mistresses and servants as threatening to patriarchal authority. It revises the dominant critical reading of the play, showing that while the castle plot dissolves the mistress–servant alliance, the hospital plot is less straightforward.

The Concept of Violence in Frankenstein in Baghdad

A prize-winning novel in literary horror after the occupation of Iraq, Frankestien in Baghdad (2013) is a story about a monster who is created from the remains of bombing victims, which are often treated as garbage. This paper is about the concept of violence in Frankestien. The paper shows how Ahmed Al This study examines how the monster in the novel gives a voice to contemporary fears of society and what sorts of fears of the monstrosity are highlighted. To illustrate this claim, different roles of the nameless monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad are analyzed. The present study furthermore discusses how violence is represented as the main theme in the novel, how far the supernatural monster in Ahmed Saadawi's Arabic Booker Prize-winning novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014) is a social construct and how he has reflected the violence and political dimensions in Iraqi society during 2005 to 2013.

“Buying on time”

Consumer credit has been central to the history of small loans since the late 19^th century. Debates over credit buying (or “buying on time”) reveal fundamental assumptions about imagined futures and pasts in modern economies. Credit buying often built on expectations of future growth and improved living standards. Still, debates over credit highlight social anxieties also invoked an imagined past of supposedly more frugal household financing. Taking the German debate as a vantage point, the article deconstructs both the myth of a prewar past built on cash buying and contemporary fears of an “Americanized” future of debt-based spending. It explores transatlantic differences in the temporal perception of consumer credit. The final section examines shifts in consumer lending since the 1970s.

‘At the Mercy of the German Eagle’

In the years before 1914 the novels of William Le Queux provided a catalyst for British debates about the economic, military and political failures of the empire and featured plots that embodied fears about new national and imperial rivals. For Le Queux, the capture of London was integral to German military occupation. Representative of the nation’s will to resist, or its inability to withstand attack, the vitality of London was always at issue in his novels. Drawing on contemporary fears about the capital and its decay, this article considers the moral panics about London and Londoners and their relationship to Britain’s martial decline reflected in his stories. Engaging with images of anarchist and foreign terrorism, and drawing on fears of covert espionage rings operating in government circles, this article probes the ways in which Le Queux’s fiction expressed concerns about London as a degenerate metropolis in the process of social and moral collapse.

The Other as Potential Enemy

In this paper Professor Zoja describes the archetypal, universal roots of paranoia, showing how it is a collective problem, with a projective relationship with evil at its core. He highlights paranoia’s socially contagious nature with reference to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the potential for paranoia across all societies. In expanding on the human need for enemies, Professor Zoja identifies how advances in mass media can affect mass psychology through soft and hard paranoia, allowing collective paranoia to take hold, resulting in racism, nationalism and genocide. The need for enemies is illustrated by contemporary fears relating to Islamic migration and terrorism. His paper ends with an illustration of how self-consciousness can be a defence against paranoid infections.

Medo e apoio ao autoritarismo na contemporaneidade

O presente trabalho busca empreender uma reflexão acerca do medo, enquanto afeto político central, que constrói os laços sociais, tanto do ponto de vista das relações interpessoais quanto do ponto de vista mais amplo das relações políticas, discutindo as facetas da insegurança na contemporaneidade, a apropriação do discurso e das práticas de medo e insegurança pelo Estado neoliberal e pelo Capital, e a relação estabelecida entre o medo e a adesão a posições e proposições políticas conservadoras e autoritárias. Para tanto, parte-se de uma perspectiva da Teoria Crítica, considerando a maneira como a vida social e a experiência política mobilizam os afetos, com atenção especial voltada ao medo na contemporaneidade, conjugada com a utilização de pesquisas empíricas já realizadas que corroboram, direta ou indiretamente, a relação entre o medo e o apoio ao autoritarismo.

Of robots and humans: Creating user representations in practice.

In this study, we explore the constitution of user representations of robots in design practice. Using the results of ethnographic research in two robot laboratories, we show how user representations emerge in and are entangled with design activities. Our study speaks to the growing popularity of and investment in robotics, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown that it is often difficult for designers and engineers to develop accurate ideas about potential users of such technologies. However, the social context of robots and design settings themselves have received significantly less attention. Based on our laboratory ethnographies, we argue that the practices in which engineers are engaged are important as they can shape the kind of user images designers create. To capture these dynamics, we propose two new concepts: ‘image-evoking activities’ as well as ‘user image landscape’. Our findings provide pertinent input for researchers, designers and policy-makers, as they raise questions with regards to contemporary fears of robots replacing humans, for the effectiveness of user involvement and participatory design, and for user studies in STS. If design activities co-constitute the user images that engineers develop, a greater awareness is needed specifically of the locales in which the design of robots and other types of technologies takes place.

CORVIN MÁTYÁS A KORA MODERN ANGOL SZÖVEGEMLÉKEKBEN

A tanulmány célja, hogy feltérképezze a Corvin Mátyással kapcsolatos utalásokat a kora modern Angliában. Elsősorban az érdekel, hogy milyen szövegemlékekben történik utalás a magyar királyra, és mi volt az oka a Corvinok és a Magyar Királyság iránti érdeklődésnek a szigetországban. A Mátyásra történő utalások többrétűek: egyrészt bizonyos kora modern angol szövegemlékek említést tesznek az „igazságos Mátyás” toposzra, másrészt az utalások szorosan összefüggenek a török hódoltságról szóló angliai forrásokkal, melyek az Ottomán Birodalommal kapcsolatos korabeli félelmeket tükrözik, és hangsúlyozzák a kereszténység és az iszlám közti ellentéteket. A tanulmányban tárgyalt korabeli allúziókon keresztül a gazdag kulturális háttérre kapunk rálátást, és választ kaphatunk arra a kérdésre, hogy mi lehetett az oka a Corvinok és a Magyar Királyság iránti érdeklődésnek a kora modern Angliában. Ehhez elsősorban a rendelkezésre álló korabeli irodalmi szövegkorpuszt fogom vizsgálni, beleértve a korszakban kiadott emblémás könyveket is.

Mirages and phobias of Modernity. The principal subject of O. Slavnikova’s prose

The article analyzes the principles behind the dominant subject of O. Slavnikova’s books, which relies on a flexible scheme built from several recurrent motifs and examines the relationship between talent and fate, the latter understood as an unplanned course of events. Invading the character’s plans, fate forces an ordeal on its victim, often subduing them completely and toying with them capriciously. It acts through a double (often a grotesque copy of the protagonist), destined to ruin the original. In a world of reflections and distorted mirrors, a person is split up into a myriad of invariants, no longer able to distinguish the truth. Slavnikova’s novels also feature a special type of character: an unconventional (gifted/strange) person in imposed circumstances, normally deprived of freedom of choice because life seems to be guided from above, with any action requiring fate’s ‘authorization’. On the whole, the dominant plotline reveals contemporary individual fears and challenges which define the way of life in Slavnikova’s creative universe.

On Recent Developments in the New Historiography of (Neo)Liberalism

Over the last twenty years or so several new waves of research on the history of liberalism have emerged. The novelty of this should not be exaggerated as broad scholarly interest in liberalism has in fact been increasing at a remarkable rate since the 1980s. Nevertheless, it is clear that the historiography of liberalism has broken much new ground since around the turn of the century. This has been driven partly by the influence of larger developments in the humanities and social sciences. The global and post-colonial turns, for instance, have helped to reshape the historiography of liberalism by provoking debates over the extent of its complicity in slavery and colonialism, while also drawing attention to the contribution of theorists from the global south. But even much of this ‘normal’ innovation has been driven at least indirectly by a growing sense that liberalism is in crisis. The War on Terror, the financial meltdown of 2008 and the global rise of populist authoritarianism are the obvious staging posts in liberalism's journey from post-Cold War triumphalism to contemporary fears for its imminent demise. And it is not a coincidence that the end of the end of history has seen the beginning of a new historiography of liberalism. Since the early 2000s the emergence of new sub-fields like the histories of ‘Cold War liberalism’, human rights and neoliberalism can all be seen in different ways as responding to liberalism's unfolding crisis.

Las hilachas de los machos: masculinidad argentina en los cuentos de Fontanarrosa

ABSTRACTRoberto Fontanarrosa is considered one of the authors who have been able to represent Argentinian identity most insightfully and critically. His short stories make use of pastiche, parody and folklore as hedonist tools by a humorist who resists dominant narratives with his persistent attention to the mundane. This article focuses on the ideals of Argentinian masculinity that Fontanarrosa evokes and critiques in his parodic costumbrist stories, particularly those of the gallant gentleman (galán), the football fan (hincha) and the wonder player (pibe). With traditional masculine values from gaucho and tango cultures such as courage, craftiness and loyalty, these normative realizations of contemporary Argentinian masculinity hide, however, multiple fears, anxieties and obsessions. Fontanarrosa reproduces in detail the voices of the protagonists themselves and thus, his narratives function as parodies whose ironic tone denotes his analytical and critical view of the frail superiority of the Argentine macho.

Topography of Fear and Violence in Ahmad Al Sadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad

This paper examines the postcolonial Iraqi novel which gives a voice to the Iraqi writers to describe for the first time the political repression and violence in Iraq before and after the US invasion. They address the bad conditions in Iraq after the 2003 and discuss the reshaping of the Iraqi identity due to the sectarian conflicts that have endangers the minority population in this pluralistic society. We intend to stress the contemporary fears of Iraqi people through the use of the monster. In this paper, the researchers attempt to present a new voice in the Iraqi novel that was silenced for a long time. The Iraqi writers tend to describe aesthetically the terrible national condition in Iraq post 2003.

Mutating Bodies: Reproductive Surgeries and Popular Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France

This article reads Jane de La Vaudère’s 1897 novel Les Demi-Sexes within the context of the historical trial that allegedly inspired it and debates surrounding surgery and sterility at the fin-de-siècle. The novel exploits contemporary fears that modern surgery posed a new kind of threat to binary sex in ways that challenge distinctions often made in the history of sexuality between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

When it is Appropriate to Racially Appropriate: Reverse Colonial Miscegenation in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

This presentation uses Victorian science to examine the racial conflict between Dracula and England in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The novel’s horror situates itself in the context of Late Victorian England and its contemporary fear of Reverse Colonization: the fear that England’s empire, already in its onset of decline, will be invaded and colonized by an uncivilized other people. The development of evolutionary theory stimulated concern that the opposite of evolution – degeneration – was not only possible, but already in effect. Stoker expresses England’s decline in accord with degeneration theory by portraying English men as weary. He establishes fear of Reverse Colonization by portraying Dracula to possess the animalistic vitality England lacks. Dracula invades and disrupts notions of English identity by mirroring the nation’s intelligence and consuming its women’s blood. Blood symbolizes racial identity, political allegiance, and, according to persisting medieval medical theory, semen. Thus, Dracula effectively consumes English racial identity, causes his victims to politically defect, and proliferates the vampire race through rape when sucking women’s blood. The lattermost invasion tactic is facilitated, according to contemporary studies of craniology, by women’s latent sexuality and criminality. Despite critics’ assertions that Dracula portrays miscegenation (the interbreeding of different races) as racial annihilation, the birth of Quincey Harker from mixed racial inputs at the novel’s end symbolizes the revitalization of the English race. The novel thus responds to contemporary degeneration theory by proposing miscegenation (with vital races and in which England remains the dominant racial input) as a solution to Late Victorian decline.