Rhetoric Of Crisis Research Articles

Cries of crisis: rethinking the health care debate

Since the late 1960s, health care in the United States has been described as a system in crisis. No matter their position, those seeking to improve the system have relied on the rhetoric of crisis to build support for their preferred remedies, to the point where the language and imagery of a health care crisis are now deeply embedded in contemporary politics and popular culture. In Cries of Crisis, Robert B. Hackey analyzes media coverage, political speeches, films, and television shows to demonstrate the role that language and symbolism have played in framing the health care debate, shaping policy making, and influencing public perceptions of problems in the health care system. He demonstrates that the idea of crisis now means so many different things to so many different groups that it has ceased to have any shared meaning at all. He argues that the ceaseless talk of crisis, without a commonly accepted definition of that term, has actually impeded efforts to diagnose and treat the chronic problems plaguing the American health care system. Instead, he contends, reformers must embrace a new rhetorical strategy that links proposals to improve the system with deeply held American values like equality and fairness.

Japan’s Rhetoric of Crisis: Prospects for Change after 3.11

For some Japanese political entrepreneurs, the March 2011 catastrophe in Tohoku (3.11) was a warning for Japan to “put it in gear” and head in a new direction—away from nuclear power or toward a muscular military. For others, 3.11 was a once-in-a-millennium “black swan,” so Japan should “stay the course.” Still others say Japan must rebuild what was lost to modernity and globalization. The battle among these perspectives on change and the use of three other tropes—leadership, community, and risk—have defined post-3.11 politics and public policy in Japan.

Notes on Opening Access to German Studies

When at the 2010 Congress in Montreal Harvard Library Director Robert Darnton spoke in support of rapidly changing digital publishing models, the most recent global financial collapse was going into its third year and the words crisis and humanities were firmly linked in the academic imaginary (4Humanities). In his talk, Darnton outlined the hard numbers with which libraries must contend in this economic climate, highlighting in particular the increasing fees for journal subscriptions, even as journals and other publishing venues continue to multiply. Open access publishing is one manner in which academic libraries may enact cost-saving measures, and this is perhaps why discussions surrounding open access seem to always begin, and often end, with the libraries. The week beginning 22 October 2012 was Open Access Week around the world, and fittingly it was celebrated on the campus of the University of Alberta by library-sponsored events related to publishing and research archiving. But the open movement more broadly, and open access specifically, also offers us a mode of thinking about the perpetual crisis of the humanities beyond numbers and dollar value. I was introduced to this mode of thinking through practice. While I became an open access practitioner by chance, through my continued contact with its models for publishing and knowledge circulation, I have come to think very deliberately about the potential disciplinary considerations that the open movement brings with it. Further, I come to it as a junior scholar who is deeply concerned about how the rhetoric of the crisis of the humanities and the scepticism surrounding digital cultures, even as, or perhaps because, digital humanities is on the rise, is impacting academic culture in a way that perpetuates disciplinary navel-gazing. In publications, talks, and responses since the 2010 Congress, Darnton has outlined how open access and digitization offer not only a way of saving university libraries but also – as the title of a talk published on falling-walls.com contests – the democratization of culture (Darnton). Humanities disciplines can be positively transformed through direct engagement with the open movement and just such a democratization of culture, beginning with but not limited to open access and non-standard modes of knowledge dissemination. I use the term discipline transformation here to mean not simply greater circulation of knowledge or cost-saving measures for economically strapped departments and libraries,

A Global City in an Age of Global Risks: Singapore’s Evolving Discourse on Vulnerability

As Singapore becomes a leading city, perceptions of the country's vulnerability are evolving as a result of its hyper-connectivity and exposure to risks. First-generation leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew, S. Rajaratnam and Goh Keng Swee of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) viewed Singapore's strategic predicament as a function of its miniscule size and lack of resources and hinterland, as well as the country's turbulent history and a multi-ethnic population surrounded by larger Muslim neighbours. To overcome its vulnerabilities, its first foreign minister, S. Rajaratnam, presented the alluring vision of Singapore as a that would become a key node in the international system coordinating flows of trade, money, materials, goods and people. Singapore's hub status in maintaining the smooth functioning of the economy would also enhance its strategic relevance: major powers would have a vested interest in the country's survival. Being a city, however, is not without its perils. Singaporean leaders have long realized that recent crises (e.g. pandemics, financial meltdowns etc.) affecting Singapore are related to its position as a highly connected urban node in the age of interdependence. This paper examines the conundrum in Singapore's attempts to deal with its perceived vulnerabilities. While the drive to become a global city articulated by Rajaratnam has largely succeeded, Singapore's highly globalized status has ironically meant vulnerabilities to fast-spreading phenomena that characterize what sociologist Ulrich Beck terms a global risk society. The first section outlines the core components of Singapore's early post-independence vulnerability as expressed by its leaders, providing a baseline for comparison. The second section describes Rajaratnam's vision to ameliorate such professed vulnerabilities and examines measures of its connectivity as a sign of success. The final section shows how becoming a as part of an attempt to enhance survival prospects has paradoxically introduced new elements into Singapore's earlier discourse on vulnerability. A discourse analysis is undertaken to identify emerging features of Singaporean leaders' perception of vulnerability to risks. Key sources of data include policy documents, media interviews, speeches and statements. The focus here is on recurrent patterns whereby key code words to convey certain ideas are shared among political leaders holding Cabinet-level positions or senior policy-makers with Director-General or above rank in government bureaucracies. The sample is fairly representative of elite beliefs, drawing from the Prime Minister to a range of ministers and senior bureaucrats holding diverse portfolios from customs, transport, defence, health, to monetary regulation. These political and bureaucratic elites hold policy responsibilities for addressing vulnerability-related issues in their specific areas of work. Corporate elites are thus not included to the same extent in this analysis. The paper concludes that vulnerability is now seen to be coalescing around three types of critical infrastructure that Singapore paradoxically depends on to coordinate flows as a city. First, as a maritime port hub, Singapore faces exposure to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) proliferation. Second, its aviation hub at Changi can also become a gateway for importing pandemics. Third, its financial centre is exposed to terrorist financing risks and financial contagion. Singapore's Early Notion of Vulnerability This paper concentrates on Singapore's perceived vulnerability, assuming in good faith that the leaders quoted believed what they said. (1) There are of course difficulties with analysing so-called crisis rhetoric, because whether Lee's or the PAP's private sense making coincided with their public pronouncements remains unclear. ... they might have believed their own, self-confident rhetoric. …

Frame, Set, Match! Towards a model of successful crisis rhetoric

This article explores the mechanisms behind the ability of political leaders to win praise and support in times of crisis by Studying one such case of crisis exploitation: the Swedish government’s communication during the 2008 financial crisis. Looking back at the first term in office for the centre-right Alliance government, the government was initially struggling with historically low results in the regular opinion polls and a new electoral victory seemed to be beyond reach. However, this trend changed completely in the midst of the financial crisis when the government and its most prominent ministers from the dominant Moderate Party regained public support and confidence, and were able to win the next national election in 2010. The article argues that in order to explain successful political communication in times of crisis both the frames advocated by the political actors themselves and the media need to be taken into account. Based on this assumption the article proposes that successful political communication in crisis depends on a three-step process with interrelated aspects: the actor’s ability for frame promotion, setting and matching. Frame selection here refers to actors’ ability to use active frames (herein managerial, moral and responsibility frames), their ability to set the frame contexts so that they create a coherent logic resulting in frame reinforcement and, finally, their ability to match the political frames with the media’s framing.

From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The Metaphoric Transformation of Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market Crisis

The logic of political economy depends on a domestic metaphor, using the oikos or household as a model for the polis. Historically, this metaphor has imagined citizens as the children of a paternal state. However during the 2008 housing crisis, this metaphor was turned upside down, depicting citizens as the parents of infantile state institutions. Although initially portraying citizens as juvenile “delinquents,” the rhetoric of the mortgage crisis ultimately repositioned citizens as surrogate caretakers for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant politico-economic institutions that constituted the majority of the mortgage market. In this way, the rhetoric of the housing crisis inverted both the metaphorical and material structure of political economy.

Joan Barfoot's Exit Lines and the Pastoral of Old Age

This article traces the way in which Canadian author Joan Barfoot's novel Exit Lines draws upon the pastoral tradition in its representation of old age. Pastoral literature has traditionally encoded ideologies of age, and it is the inclusion of pastoral tropes that structures Barfoot's participation in the discussion of population aging currently taking place across disciplines and in the popular media. Pastoral writing is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability and loss, and this provides Barfoot with an effective counterpoint to a contemporary culture of “positive” aging founded on an ethic of bodily control that alternately stigmatizes and masks the existence of decline and dependency in late life. The novel questions the way in which the rhetoric of crisis that characterizes discussions of population aging threatens to generate resentment against the dependent elderly, whom the novel depicts as vulnerable to exploitation by those who stand to profit from this “crisis.”

The Sustainable Humanities

Any discussion of how the humanities can contribute to sustainability or how the humanities are sustainable must begin with what critics of the sustainability concept have called its cultural deficit: academic humanists and artists have not been central to discussions of what sustainability is and might be. Sustainability is most commonly understood in economic terms, as production that respects ecological carrying capacities. Because the sustainability concept is “squishy,” in Bill McKibben's words, it invariably drifts toward the more pragmatic project of sustainable development, the goal of which is keeping modernization viable—a goal dubious to many environmentalists as well as to cultural critics (102). In an era when the rhetoric of crisis dominates public conversation about political, social, educational, and environmental affairs, the termsustainabilitycan seem anemic. Its emphasis on long-term planning and stewarding of resources has none of the dramatic appeal of apocalyptic visions of a world in which all human and natural ecologies are in collapse. For many environmental critics, it is a term that in some sense fails to account for the necessity of drastic changes in how resources are protected, much less distributed, and it relies too heavily on protecting the very state of affairs that got us into trouble in the first place. For its critics, and even for its reluctant supporters, it is a term about managing anxieties that shuttle between local and global concerns, individual and corporate responsibilities.

‘TEEB Begins Now’: A Virtual Moment in the Production of Natural Capital

This article uses theories of virtualism to analyse the role of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project in the production of natural capital. Presented at the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the project seeks to redress the ‘economic invisibility of nature’ by quantifying the value of ecosystems and biodiversity. This endeavour to put an economic value on ecosystems makes nature legible by abstracting it from social and ecological contexts and making it subject to, and productive of, new market devices. In reducing the complexity of ecological dynamics to idealized categories TEEB is driven by economic ideas and idealism, and, in claiming to be a quantitative force for morality, is engaged in the production of practices designed to conform the ‘real’ to the virtual. By rendering a ‘valued’ nature legible for key audiences, TEEB has mobilized a critical mass of support including modellers, policy makers and bankers. We argue that TEEB's rhetoric of crisis and value aligns capitalism with a new kind of ecological modernization in which ‘the market’ and market devices serve as key mechanisms to conform the real and the virtual. Using the case of TEEB, and drawing on data collected at COP10, we illustrate the importance of international meetings as key points where idealized models of biodiversity protection emerge, circulate and are negotiated, and as sites where actors are aligned and articulated with these idealized models in ways that begin further processes of conforming the real with the virtual and the realization of ‘natural capital’.

Book Review: General Politics: Framing the Global Economic Downturn: Crisis Rhetoric and the Politics of Recessions

Book Review: General Politics: Framing the Global Economic Downturn: Crisis Rhetoric and the Politics of Recessions

California Water and the Rhetoric of Crisis

Water management in California has always been politically charged and fraught with controversy. In the summer of 2009, the last year of a three-year drought, a specific type of “water crisis” emerged in political rhetoric, in which constructing new dams and lifting protections for endangered fish species could solve California’s water problems. This piece critically examines these claims by presenting a brief background on how water is used and managed in California, highlighting the disconnect between the cost to deliver water and the price users pay, and explaining misconceptions that led endangered species protections to be attacked. California needs to take a proactive stance in water management by examining how water is currently allocated, reforming our water rights system, and dealing with difficult water issues before they reach a “crisis” level.

The Peacekeeping Mission: Bringing Stability to a Chaotic Scene

This article examines the military intervention called the peacekeeping mission. This article argues that this particular intervention is qualitatively different than war and crisis rhetoric. A tentative model of the rhetoric of peacekeeping that involves 2 elements is proffered. First, it is found that peacekeeping mission rhetors emphasize a chaotic scene that drives American action. Second, and perhaps most important, American intervention is characterized as facilitating security to allow larger political, economic, and cultural stability to take hold within a particular state. Further, peacekeeping mission rhetors highlight the constraints of the intervention to make it more palpable to the American public. Exploring peacekeeping mission rhetoric has implications related to presidential justifications for the use of military force and U.S. foreign policy in general.

Art and Economics

College Art Association Annual Conference New York City February 9-12, 2011 Interest in practical, digital, and global matters was especially prominent at the ninety-ninth College Art Association annual conference, while the intellectual ecstasies of high theory subsided from that of previous years. Indeed, the October moment is over, although its effects still echoed through conference sessions analyzing the expansion of art history's discursive Held. There were, of course, panels on traditional scholarly topics such as Afterlife of Cubism, Symbolism: Its Origins and Consequences II, and Meisterfrage in Medieval and Northern Renaissance Art, Revisited. However, judging by the tweeting and blogging that went on during the four-day event, the most popular panels were concerned with the effects of the economic downturn on artists' practices, galleries, and academia, as well as on the growing presence and effects of new media. The panel Making a Living as an Artist: With or Without a Gallery yielded an animated discussion about how an artist might survive given that art galleries are both strapped for cash and inundated with unsolicited portfolios. Advice was varied. Make your own scene, said Sharon Butler, who maintains the blog Two Coats of Paint. Create less expensive work, suggested gallerist Ed Winkelman. Artists should integrate all their creative activities, claimed Bill Carroll, Director of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program. Diversify what you do creatively, said Peter Drake, Dean of the New York Academy of Art. Cultivate social skills, engage with others outside the studio, and build community, both local and global, said others. The theme of collaboration as a working model between individual artists, as well as between artists and institutions, wove through many conference sessions. Taking a broader view on what constitutes hard times was the standing-room-only session Crisis in Art History. David Murray, a medievalist at Columbia University, wryly noted that art history has deployed the rhetoric of crisis for three decades now. Critical dissatisfaction with the immediate past is typical of the medieval origins of academe, he said, going on to describe what he called the endism promoted by recent manifestos on the death of the old. Murray also noted the salutary effect of the digital, which he sees as a stimulus for collaboration. Patricia Rubin, director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, noted the changing episteme brought on by digital media, and lamented the commodification of learning in which knowledge is viewed as part of the GDP. …

Political Ecologies of War and Forests: Counterinsurgencies and the Making of National Natures

We examine the significance of a specific type of political violence—counterinsurgency—in the making of political forests, providing a link between literatures on the political ecology of forests and the geographies of war. During the Cold War, particularly between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, natures were remade in relation to nation-states in part through engagements with “insurgencies” and “emergencies” staged from forested territories. These insurgencies represented alternative civilizing projects to those of the nascent nation-states; they also took place in historical moments and sites where the reach of centrifically focused nations was still tentative. We argue that war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency helped normalize political forests as components of the modern nation-state during and in the aftermath of violence. The political violence also enabled state-based forestry to expand under the rubric of scientific forestry. Military counterinsurgency operations contributed to the practical and political separation of forests and agriculture, furthered and created newly racialized state forests and citizen-subjects, and facilitated the transfer of technologies to forestry departments. The crisis rhetoric of environmental security around “jungles,” as dangerous spaces peopled with suspect populations, particularly near international borders, articulated with conservation and other national security discourses that emerged concurrently. Counterinsurgency measures thus strengthened the territorial power and reach of national states by extending its political forests.

Letter from the Editorial Board

The media regularly circulate the rhetoric of both crisis and reform in education. Philanthro- pists and politicians (Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan), documentary films (Waiting for Superman) and government initiatives (The Race to the Top) keep our hopes and fears about U.S. schools present in the public discourse. CNN's interactive Fix Our Schools campaign asks viewers to post photos and videos of what is working in their local schools. The hope, according to CNN's website, is to find the recipe for success. While we agree that public education is in need of reform, we worry that the language of right recipes (the CNN cam- paign being only one example) narrows our conception of teaching and, thus, how edu- cation reforms are imagined and enacted. Gates is quick to cite studies that suggest the teacher, more than any other variable, determines student success. So it only seems logical to figure out what good teachers do and make other teachers do the same. This brand of education reform - quantifiable, scalable, and replicable - obscures the humanity, mystery and com- plexity of teaching and learning. Teaching is complicated and multidimensional, and like dancing, cooking, and perhaps even sex, there is no one best method. Success is difficult to quantify, and following a script, while providing structure and form, can stifle improvisation and innovation. In Teaching by Num- bers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education ,P eter Taubman (2009) does not mention dancing, cooking, or sex. But our analogy channels his sentiments. Teaching is an inventive, artful act that demands we remain open to context, nuance, and the intangible. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde's (1979) distinction between work and labor helps us understand the problem of teaching, literally, by numbers. Work can be measured quantitatively, in clock time, and is more likely associated with de-contextualized and repeated application of tech- nique. Taubman would agree that teaching in a testing culture is one prominent example of work: an activity endured and undertaken within a framework imposed by others. In contrast, labor follows the rhythms of inner time, of becoming and understanding, and is associated with the production of works of art. Processes of labor - like art-making or teaching - honor the spirit of the creators, the relationships that constitute one's art (e.g., curriculum and stu- dents) and, lastly, demand a change in those who create, teach or learn. Who one is and what one does or makes are thus interrelated. The difference between work and labor has relevance for educators who believe that teaching and learning consist of more than lecturing from a course pack, training able workers, or relying on scientifically proven lesson plans. Those who fight the tendency of reducing teaching and learning to checklists, of making everything visible, countable, or tangible, believe that teaching and learning are creative endeavors; that teaching and learning happen during difficult and recursive negotiations of dreams, desires, and knowledge; that curriculum helps (re)shape selves and worlds. Reformers who would like to script what happens in schools down to the minute would do well to remember poet David Whyte (1997): you can plan / is too small / for you to live. // What you can live / wholeheartedly / will make plans / enough / for the vitality / hidden in your sleep.

Crise de vers : Adonis’s Dīwān and the Institution of Modernism

Crise de vers: Adonis’s Dīwān and the Institution of Modernism Robyn Creswell (bio) Modernism and Memory Crisis Speaking at a conference in Rome in 1961, the Syrian modernist poet Adonis launched a famous and famously intemperate attack on traditionalism in Arabic poetry and poetry criticism. His talk, entitled “al-Shi‘r al-‘arabī wa mushkilat al-tajdīd” [Arabic Poetry and the Problem of Renewal], began by reviewing the classical tradition of literary criticism. Critics of the ‘Abbasid era (c.750–1250), Adonis argued, had only ever sought to inhibit poetic creativity, setting themselves up as guardians of tradition and obstacles to renewal: “The critics defended inherited values [qiyam mawrūtha] and clung to the ancient, exalting it because it was ancient, even when it was ridiculous.”1 Adonis went on to assert that the traditionalism espoused by these critics had not diminished with the passage of centuries, but rather had become stronger: “The understanding of poetry that dominated our past with all the force of tradition [al-taqlīd] continues into our present with the same force. Indeed, it has grown in acuteness and complexity.”2 For modern poets to free themselves from this powerful and creeping sclerosis, they would have to undertake radical measures. It was in this spirit that Adonis announced a “revolt against the traditionalist mentality.” Renewal cannot be accomplished by reverting to tradition or by adapting to its poetic conventions, for such a reversion would mean a separation from the present, a shackling of sensibility, a betrayal of reality.3 [End Page 877] Poetry, he declared at the end of his talk, reaching for the rhetorical heights, was “an act of salvation and liberation” [khalāṣ wa taḥarrur].4 Stephen Spender, one of the respondents to Adonis’s paper, must have heard echoes of his youth in all this (translated echoes, so to speak). But he wondered if Adonis hadn’t overstated the case. T. S. Eliot, Spender reminded the audience, had been both a modernist and a traditionalist. Perhaps the Syrian poet, with all his talk of “revolt,” had been reading too much Rimbaud? Spender ended his brief remarks—according to the Arabic transcription, which is the only one that survives—by reproaching Adonis for his “complete disregard of the ancient heritage [turāth] of Arabic poetry,” and calling his paper “extremist in its demolition of poetic traditions [mutaṭarrifa fī taḥṭīm al-taqālīd al-shi‘rīya].”5 The exchange between Adonis and Spender evokes several of modernism’s familiar and apparently insoluble contradictions: heritage versus modernity, rupture versus continuity, the revolutionary Jetzseit versus the long durée of tradition. While Adonis argues that a reversion to the classical heritage would entail “a separation from the present,” Spender counters that a dismissal of this heritage leads to a separation from one’s own cultural past. Backwardness or inauthenticity, here are the two equally intolerable options that confront so many modernisms of underdevelopment, which experience these contradictions with especial sharpness.6 It is perhaps because their choice is an impossible one—a choice between two kinds of alienation, we might say—that these modernisms so often employ a rhetoric of crisis, a mode of self-articulation that is frequently extravagant and even melodramatic.7 It is this excessiveness or “extremism” that Spender objects to explicitly. But while Spender accuses Adonis of chasing after the new and foreign at the expense of the inherited past, other readers have accused him of doing precisely the opposite, claiming that his version of modernism is only a kind of covert pastism, a classicizing movement that calls itself revolutionary. So the Moroccan critic, Abdullah Laroui, in his seminal essay, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual (1974), lumps Arab modernists together with their European confreres—he mentions Eliot, Pound, and St. John Perse—“all of whom are exponents of tradition and order, and who take as models and foundations of the ‘poetic’ the attitudes and works of the classicizing periods.” Laroui argues that the modernity of these poets merely “consists in their recombining of transmitted culture according to a conscious and unvarying code (poetic technique).” “Now,” he asks rhetorically, “have all the...

Racialising Religion in the Debate on Religious Freedom in Malaysia

This article summarises the results of a media analysis conducted by the example of one of the country’s biggest daily newspapers, the New Straits Times. With regard to the controversial religious freedom debate, it summarises what actors are involved in the discussion and how their positions are presented in the mainstream media. Several examples from articles show what strategies are employed in the discourse, such as the rhetoric of fear and crisis and the constant emphasis of racial and other supposedly separating categories. The close linkage of the categories ‘ethnicity’ and ‘religion’, which is manifested legally as well as politically, is perpetuated linguistically. Especially important in this context is the construction of a Muslim-Malay identity.

Paths of the Past or the Road Ahead? Path Dependency and Policy Change in Two Continental European Welfare States

In contrast to what many critics claim, path dependency theory can explain both policy stability and change. It explains how public policy and institutions get increasingly consolidated, legitimated and protected by the elites governing a policy sector, and that precisely this rigidity preludes inevitable large-scale reform. Reform is the result of political behavior at a critical juncture in the history of a policy sector. This political behavior includes the use of crisis rhetoric to instigate reform. Crisis rhetoric has the most potential when institutional inertia has been building up during long periods of path-dependent policy development. This explains why similar welfare state predicaments in the Netherlands and Belgium lead to different reforms in the mid-1990s.

Academic Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of American Horror Cinema: Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety

Academic Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of American Horror Cinema:Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety Steffen Hantke (bio) Ask any fans, and they will tell you that American horror film is in a slump. Not that no more horror films are being made; on the contrary, as far as popularity and profitability go, the horror film seems near the top of its game as Hollywood lavishes a steady stream primarily of mid-budget films upon its audience. And yet the vast majority of these films just aren't any good. The current slump, according to many fans, began in the 1990s with the so-called neo-slasher. Successful with large audiences but received with apprehension by fans and critics, Wes Craven's Scream was, depending on who you asked, either the best or the worst thing to happen to horror film. According to the critical voices, Scream's recycling of "classic" precursors transformed the more politically [End Page 191] attuned horror film of the previous generation into self-indulgent postmodern play.1 If this wasn't bad enough, what came after the neo-slasher was even worse—a mindless series of remakes, starting with Joel Silver's and Robert Zemeckis' production company Dark Castle and its remakes of gimmicky William Castle films from the 1950s and 1960s, and leading up to the indiscriminate plunder of Asian horror films like The Ring or The Grudge. While more of these so-called J-horror films were still in the pipeline, Hollywood lowered its sights yet again, from foreign to domestic remakes, churning out new versions of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, Robert Harmon's The Hitcher, or Fred Walton's When a Stranger Calls. While the Craven remake can at least boast directorial hopeful Alexandre Aja, the remake of the Walton film is nothing but a pointless exercise in style—and not a very successful one at that.2 At what must be considered the bottom of the slump, even remakes of remakes are possible now; the recent announcement of a new version of "John Carpenter's The Thing" in The Guardian, for example, omits any reference to Christian Nyby's The Thing from Another World (1951). As the boundary between original and remake vanishes, all concepts of originality, genealogy, or history go out the window as well.3 One wonders how long it will take, after this latest remake has been released, until someone will begin thinking about remaking the remake of John Carpenter's remake of The Thing from Another World. And after that, if the money's right, remaking that one . . . and after that . . . sky's the limit! Not surprisingly, then, the fans complain. "It seems to me that the genre has hit a crisis point creatively," Scott Tobias states. "J-horror is dying off, Hollywood is running out of '70s and '80s horror staples to remake, and surely at some point, the Saw and Final Destination franchises will lose their novelty" ("Crosstalk"). Larry Fessenden sees this slump commencing even earlier: "Recently, horror movies have fetishized [sic] serial killers and clinically gruesome effects, as we become possessed by the arbitrariness of violence and our ability to recreate it in the movies. This is a slump" (Glass Eye Pictures). The fact that horror film web site Bloody-Disgusting.com even hosted a discussion among its readers in the late fall of 2005 in which the basic question—Do you think horror movies are done for?"—itself is indicative of the mood among the fans of horror cinema.4 Speaking somewhat more objectively, even the Wikipedia entry on horror film, while noting recent developments in the genre past 2005, confirms this trend: The start of the 2000s saw the horror genre going into a slump as movies dealing with the supernatural had mild but not memorable success. Even the re-release of a restored version of The Exorcist in September of 2000 didn't quite cause a stir. Also, near-defunct franchises such as Freddy Vs. Jason somehow made it into theatres. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_film) [End Page 192] Academic critics writing roughly in the time period between 2002 and 2006 chime...

Crisis als katalysator

Social security reform in Belgium and the Netherlands Social security reform in Belgium and the Netherlands The record levels of benefit dependency and labor market inactivity rates in the Netherlands and Belgium induced a political crisis in both countries in the early 1990s. Policymakers announced drastic interventions in the Dutch disability insurance and the Belgian unemployment insurance. The countries are similar in many ways: both are continental welfare states, corporatist social security systems, and consensus-seeking political systems. Despite these similarities and despite the scope and severity of the problems in each country, reform outcomes looked very different. In Belgium, major reforms were announced but incremental steps were taken to improve the financial sustainability of the social security arrangements. The Netherlands experienced major changes in its disability policy and in the organization of benefit administration and supervision. Why do welfare states with similar institutional settings respond so differently to similar social policy problems? This study argues that historical institutionalism in combination with a crisis-induced reform perspective can account for this divergence. Historical institutionalism explains how path dependency led to increasing rigidity and accumulating contradictions in both welfare states. If crisis rhetoric is successful, it questions this rigidity and includes a great deal of blaming and framing to legitimize a drastic change of the status quo.