Mainstream Spaces Research Articles

Make It Funky for Me: Black British Women’s Explorations of Britishness, Womanhood, and Artistry Through 2000s Music

ABSTRACT 2000s Britain was an interesting and expansive time musically for Black Britain (Bradley 2013), as underground music gained traction in mainstream spaces. This article examines the context in which Black British women were able to cross over into the British mainstream and explores how U.K. garage and U.K. funky artists expressed their creativity, autonomy, womanhood, Blackness, and Britishness. Female U.K. garage artists set a precedent in the creation of “new” diverse identities for Black British women artists, but artists in both underground and mainstream music scenes were also forced to contend with restrictive and harmful misogynoir.

Optimizing the Space Debris Removal Process: An In-Depth Analysis of Current Debris Removal Technologies

As humanity progresses towards mainstream space transportation and eventually space colonization, the accumulation of space debris orbiting around Earth has become critical, jeopardizing safety, operational economics, and ultimately overall success. The scope of this project is to analyze data from existing technologies - some still “concepts” and some in early commercialization stage - to pinpoint the most efficient technology in removing debris. Efficiency is a function of both the removal volume (effectiveness) and operational costs associated with the debris removal technology. Primary and secondary research was conducted to identify the most prominent technologies, collect data associated with their operation, define the main cost categories, assume relative cost relationships across the various technologies (in reference to the cost categories) and quantify their ability to remove various debris types and volumes. Eventually each technology was described via a “Total Cost” (a mathematical formula summarizing the various cost types) and a “Total Efficiency” (calculated as Removal Capacity over Total Cost). Given the large number of independent variables (for which only a min/max value range and a normal distribution could be assumed) a simulation code was programmed in Python to generate a population of outputs (for Total Cost and Efficiency) based on millions of random input values (for the independent variables). Out of a list of seven technologies (OrbitGuardians, Astroscale, Clearspace, Aurora, D-Orbit, Airbus RemoveDEBRIS Net and Airbus RemoveDEBRIS Harpoon), Astroscale is best technology in terms of efficiency because of its extreme reusability and its unique mechanism of driving debris out of orbit.

Digital Rage: Testing “the Obama Effect” on Internet-Based Expressions of Racism

The concept, “White Rage,” has previously been used to describe the way Whites have historically responded to Black advancement with policies and practices designed to quietly disrupt the progress Blacks had been making. White rage is typically subtle, masking its true intent. In contrast, recent research has found that the covert, subtle expressions of racism that are so normal in most mainstream spaces may be less common in internet-based communication. The extent to which online racism is connected to real-world racist attitudes, behaviors, and events, however, is unclear. In this article, we test the effects of real-world racialized events on explicit expressions of racism in online spaces using days that Obama gave speeches as our treatment effect and explicit usage of the “n-word” on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) as our measurable outcome. Does usage of the n-word, a racial slur, increase in the days following speeches made by President Obama? Our results of over 9 years and more than 2.9 million tweets demonstrate a statistically significant increase of racist speech in response to those speech cycles, which are further placed in contrast to the speeches of other political actors, including President Trump.

Femslash fan fiction’s expansive erotic imaginary

As a genre largely unregulated by market trends and commercial interests, fan fiction can explore forms of bodily pleasure that might not otherwise be viewed as viable in mainstream pornography or romance. Fics from three significant but understudied femslash fandoms—Once Upon a Time (2011), Supergirl (2015), and The Devil Wears Prada (2006)—serve as case studies for analyzing the queer theoretical work fic writers do in interrogating dominant sexual scripts. These authors present an expansive queer erotic imaginary that untethers pleasure, desire, and intimacy from mainstream spaces and practices. In the fan works I examine, sexual connections are often routed through external objects like ink, fabric, and water. The canonical presence of magic, futuristic technology, and nonhuman characters also allows for the imagination of bodily morphologies and sexual practices untethered from both hetero- and homosexual norms, creating polymorphous pleasures that need not be tied to genital sexuality at all.

Plus-Size Fashion Influencers and Disruptive Black Bodies

This project examines the ways that Black plus-size fashion influencers disrupt normative beauty standards (thin, White, cis, able-bodied) through visual self-fashioning in the digital public. Because Black women’s bodies are inscribed with meaning by hegemonic systems that deem them ugly, lazy, angry, and therefore unworthy of respect, care, or safety, Black women are constantly working to rewrite narratives and ideologies regarding their lives. Fat Black women reclaim agency via their embodied rhetorical acts by forwarding Fat Black women’s ontologies into the digital public. Rather than attempting to conform to dominant standards that center White, thin, cis, able-bodied women and hope for acceptance into mainstream spaces, Black women create their own ways and spaces of being and knowing in the digital public that serve to transform those publics.

Sisterhood in 5D

Sisterhood in 5D

‘This is how it works here’: the spatial deprioritisation of trans people within homelessness services in Wales

Access to physically, psychologically, and emotionally safe spaces is of critical importance for those experiencing the stress and stigmatisation of homelessness. Nightshelters, hostels and day centres provide material resources and respite from dangerous, stigmatising, public space. Yet these spaces also reinscribe a binarised, essentialist understanding of gender by selectively permitting hegemonic masculine behaviours. Structural and economic inequalities translate to significantly elevated homelessness risks among trans people, yet trans people are often under-represented among homelessness service users. Based upon interviews with 28 trans people about their experiences of homelessness spaces, I argue that a hegemonic centring of masculinities results in the physical and emotional safety of trans people of all genders becoming deprioritised. While trans people were not excluded from hostels, trans identity was seen as presenting risk. Thus, trans people are not regarded as normative occupants in mainstream homelessness spaces. Trans people were routinely subject to intense surveillance, and it was trans people, not cis perpetrators, who were relocated when violence occurred. Further. staff tacitly condoned transphobic marginalisation by cis service-users: violence from cis men was understood as inevitable, and normalised, with trans people responsibilised for conducting themselves in space to avoid provoking attack. This research extends hegemonic masculinity by considering spatiality, specifically through attending to the tension between the perceived needs of homeless cis men and the consequent exclusion of trans people from homelessness services. It identifies some specific areas where provision might improve, yet cautions that this must also avoid further disempowerment of homeless trans people.

Comme un million de papillons noirs by Laura Nsafou: How an Afrofeminist Picture Book Gave the Impetus to a Discussion about Inclusive Children's Literature in France

Comme un million de papillons noirs by Laura Nsafou:How an Afrofeminist Picture Book Gave the Impetus to a Discussion about Inclusive Children's Literature in France Élodie Malanda (bio) The need for inclusive children's and young adult (YA) literature in France has only recently started being discussed in mainstream spaces. The absence of inclusivity in children's literature has been a topic1 in the main journal about children's literature in December 2019 but no study on ethnic diversity in children's books has been done, and no broad movement like #WeNeedDiverseBooks2 has emerged. The traditional French model of universalism implicitly erases all collective identity other than the French one, making it difficult to raise the question of the needs of minority groups. Thus, for a long time, the only voices advocating the need for more inclusivity in children's literature were the lone ones of individual blogging parents or librarians. This changed when, in September 2017, a young author of Congolese and Martinique descent, Laura Nsafou, published the picture book Comme un million de papillons noirs. With this story celebrating nappy, textured hair and showing mainly Black characters, the need for racial and ethnic diversity in children's and YA literature suddenly became a topic in French mainstream media. Before her fame as an author, Nsafou was already a well-established Afrofeminist blogger known as Mrs. Roots. Since 2013, her posts about the gender and race discrimination faced by Black women in France helped spread the ideas of Afrofeminism—an Afro-French feminist movement that fights against the oppression of Black women by men and by white women and claims the right for Black women to speak for themselves. Nsafou's picture book is deeply shaped by her Afrofeminist activism. Comme un million de papillons noirs tells the story of Adé, a Black girl who gets [End Page 164] bullied for her nappy hair and who, throughout the story, learns to love her hair and thus to accept herself. Despite being considered "unsaleable" by traditional publishing houses, the picture book is currently in its fourteenth printing and has received media coverage from major national newspapers like Libération, Le Nouvel Obs, Le Monde, the women's magazine Glamour, and the online newspapers HuffPost and Slate. Titles like "La diversité, grande absente de la littérature de jeunesse" (Amétis)—"Diversity, the big absentee in children's and YA literature"—pointed out the lack of diversity as the number one subject of the articles about Nsafou's picture book. It seems Comme un million de papillons noirs launched the interest of French mainstream media for the diversity issue in children's and YA books. This paper examines how one children's book served as the catalyst to grow broad discussions about inclusive children's literature in France. On the one hand, it shows how Comme un million de papillons noirs challenges the French understanding of universalism and how the narrative choices of Laura Nsafou succeeded in raising the attention of mainstream media to the lack of representation of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) children in children's literature. On the other hand, it analyzes the social context of the book's publication, linking its success to social media activity, which has been changing the power relation between authors of color and the mainly white industry of French publishing. 1. French Universalism and the Impossible Discussion about Inclusive Children's and YA Literature The reticence of France to acknowledge the need for more ethnic and racial diversity in children's and YA literature is deeply rooted in France's self-concept as a country where everyone is equal and where no distinction of race, ethnicity, or religion is made. The first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a core statement of the French Revolution, declares: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good." This idea remains valid today: the first article of the current constitution (adopted in 1958) says that "France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It guarantees equality of all citizens before the...

Law and policy for space situational awareness towards Space Traffic Management - A Japanese perspective

It is only in the last couple of years that the concept of Space Traffic Management (STM) has come into the spotlight in the political stage with the United States Trump administration issuing Space Policy Directive 3 (SPD3), creating a national STM policy for the first time in history. SPD3 is a revolutionary step forward, not only because it introduces the STM concept into mainstream space policy, but also because it attracted the attention of the international community to focus on this concept of STM. The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the brief history of STM in international initiatives for sustainable space activities by identifying and linking certain fragmented elements that gave rise to the concept. Based on a conceptual discussion on the reluctant nature of international space law regarding the issue of controlling traffic in outer space, this paper will highlight the importance of the role of spacecraft operators for rule-making toward an international STM regime. This paper will also provide observations from a Japanese perspective to these initiatives by introducing some political and/or industrial movements of the Japanese space community and its contemporary challenges.

“This is Not Who We Are:” Progressive Media and Post-Race in the New Era of Overt Racism

Abstract This analysis explores how a liberal mainstream news outlet—MSNBC—grapples with the overt racism of the current right-wing populist presidential administration in the United States. With a plethora of “good” conservatives and its stable of liberal pundits, the cable network has painted the president as mentally ill or declining, an incompetent purveyor of chaos. In perpetuating a mantra of “this is not who we are” in coverage of overt racism, MSNBC pivots to a more comfortable mainstream space of post-race, an ideological stance that places racism as a fringe anomaly. The post-race pivot belies the country’s ongoing racist legacy, and potentially lulls viewers toward acceptance of official antiracisms that serve hegemonic interests. Thus, the news coverage of the current presidency plays a role in forestalling a meaningful reckoning with the country’s ongoing history of institutional and everyday racism.

Double Take – dance duets in the public realm

Abstract Photo essay created as part of a larger performative project exploring what it means to put contemporary dance practice into public spaces and the experience and drive to place this work unexpectedly into the public realm. The duets by Neil Callaghan and Simone Kenyon, Maria Hassabi and Sioned Huws where all conceived to be presented outside of traditional theatre settings but would in other circumstances be unlikely, with their focus on repetition, stillness, a relationship with the floor, be put within the mainstream space of a UK summer seaside town, outside of any festival or art show.

Social and Spatial Precursors to Innovation: The Diversity Advantage of the Creative Fringe

Innovation spaces and hubs are increasing in numbers internationally. Entrepreneurs and start-up founders who use these spaces and hubs are often unaware of being inside an echo chamber, i.e. a filter bubble they share with only like-minded people who have similar ideas and approaches to innovation. Digital technologies that use algorithms can aggravate these echo chambers by filtering towards improved personalised experience and preferences. Yet, social inclusion fosters diverse ideas and creativity, hence, has a positive impact on innovation. We studied the social navigation patterns of entrepreneurs and start-up founders, and their awareness and opinion about homogeneity in innovation spaces. This data informed the design of a tool to escape their echo chambers. The tool gives its users the opportunity to discover networks and innovation spaces that are at the creative fringe, that is, marginalised from mainstream spaces and hubs for creativity and innovation. Our findings show that users of innovation spaces often find themselves surrounded by like-minded people. Further, our study participants welcomed the ability to identify fringe spaces in order to discover and access more diverse people and ideas. Our approach seeks to unlock the diversity advantage of the creative fringe for the purpose of creativity and innovation.

Suburra. La serie as "Patrimonio internazionale / International Patrimony"

This essay investigates fascinations surrounding glamorized criminals by looking at how recent Italian history and queer bodies are represented, negotiated, and received in Italy’s first made-for-Netflix series Suburra. La serie (2017 - ). In many ways, the series is a distinctly Italian production, especially in terms of the popular mafia-corruption plot that is based upon real life events. However, Suburra. La serie is a transnational production that engages viewers outside of Italy. This essay pays attention to the series’ interesting marketing strategy that flagrantly draws attention to fictional/historical consistencies, before addressing the physical allure and charisma of criminal antiheroes who appear trapped in a perpetual adolescence. Most importantly, I address how Suburra. La serie’s singularity as a transnational co-production allows for a unique representation of gender and sexuality on Italian small screens, as it marks an opening up of a mainstream space on the small screen to tell stories from the perspective of a non-normative sexual orientation. Suburra. La serie engages in a representation of queer masculinity that is distinctive in relation to Italian serial drama as a whole and especially in relation to serial dramas that depend upon sympathetic perpetrators to create relationships with viewers. As I argue, Suburra. La serie is a queer text with an address to viewers spanning continents, cultures, and languages.

A critical geography of disability hate crime

Many disabled people experience fear, harassment and occasionally violence in an array of public and private spaces, yet the issue remains unexamined by geographers of disability. To address this research gap, the paper develops a critical geography of disability “hate crime.” Extreme, yet rare, violent acts against disabled people constitute the popular and policy imagination of disability hate crime. While clearly important, these cases characterise disability hate crime as individually‐targeted placeless acts of extreme abjection against disabled people. At the same time, they arguably draw attention away from everyday “low‐level” harassment, name‐calling, fear, and neglect experienced by many in mainstream spaces and the impact on senses of social inclusion and belonging. Citing “race”‐related hate crime studies, which have recognised the role of social and physical environments in shaping incidence, the paper seeks to shift research and, in turn, policy on disability hate crime towards the local and micro‐scale spaces and moments within which incidents occur, and the social relations that constitute these acts, in the context of an exclusionary disablist society. The paper is organised in two parts: first, evidence of harassment and violence experienced by disabled people (UK‐focused) is examined and the emergence of disability “hate crime” critiqued; second, a critical geography of disability hate crime is developed, applying insights from hate crime studies and relational geographies of disability. The paper concludes by setting out an agenda for Geography's potential contribution to disability and wider hate crime research.

Mainstreaming ‘Women’ without feminisms in psychology

AbstractAlthough it has been argued that feminist work has gained recognition in mainstream psychology (Eagly, Eaton, Rose, Riger, & McHugh, ), these arguments tend to cite a proliferation of research in high‐ranking Euro‐American academic journals, on topics that concern women or gender in psychology. However, the majority of this work is not presented as explicitly feminist. Rather, it tends to be incorporated into mainstream spaces under the umbrella of the psychology of women. This is often interpreted uncritically to mean the study of womanhood as a stable category or variable, reproducing binary accounts of sex and gender that are largely devoid of feminist analysis. Not only do these interpretations reify essentialist constructions of womanhood; they also convert transformative feminist politics into singular and special interest ‘women's issues’. Indeed, broad feminist theoretical perspectives remain largely absent at the fundamental levels of mainstream psychological knowledge production (Eagly et al., ; Eagly & Riger, ). Thus, while credit has been given to the growing visibility of issues concerning women and gender in the discipline, less critical attention has been paid to the broader absence of feminist language in this work. As such, instances of mainstream inclusion have come to take priority over broader issues of feminist exclusions in psychology. Taking a critical position on the discipline from within the context of the Global North, this paper questions the state of mainstream inclusions and reasserts the transformative potentials of diverse feminisms (Liebert, Leve, & Hui, ), arguing that current inclusions of women without feminisms in psychology are problematic. Drawing on recent mobilisations of the psychology of women in the interests of ‘male psychology’, it is argued that the transformative potentials of feminist psychologies are more likely to be stifled than supported by mainstream inclusions.

War During Peacetime: Mainstream Theater, Mass Media, and the 1985 Premiere of The Normal Heart

Many twentieth‐century theater scholars declared contemporary mainstream theater drained of any political efficacy. To them, the financing of mainstream productions necessitated giving no offense to elite investors who tend to hold the dominant ideology. These scholars advocated relinquishing mainstream spaces to capitalists and creating a radical theater outside the spotlight. This essay argues, however, that only in mainstream venues can progressive ideologies be assimilated and disseminated.Examining the 1985 production of The Normal Heart proves this thesis and demonstrates the political vitality of U.S. mainstream theater. The big‐budget and much‐marketed production used its position of high visibility—particularly in newspapers—to support organizations fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in ways radical performances in marginal venues could not. This article is a gesture toward a larger theory about the political potential mainstream theater wields in its interpolation by the mass media. Mainstream theater can act as a negotiating force between emergent and dominant ideologies.

One mosque and the negotiation of German Islam

In the last half century (pious) Muslims and their communities have become integral parts of German cities. They are creative cultural producers and religiously inspired urban citizens. Mosques are central nodes in urban Muslim religious and cultural geographies where believers negotiate pious identities and lifeworlds, configure pious public personae and modes of civic participation. In this paper I introduce the Al-Nour Mosque as a unique node in the religious and cultural geography of the southern German state capital of Stuttgart. I examine this mosque as an urban space where individual and communal religiosities and religious cultures are discussed, formulated, tested and practised. My central question is how urban culture and religion are negotiated in the context of a mosque community. I argue that urban culture and religion are negotiated not only in mainstream public spaces or established churches but also in invisible places like mosques. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Stuttgart, I analyse the creative role of the Al-Nour Mosque in the construction of religious subjectivities, negotiations of urban religiosities and religiously inspired urban cultures. Analysing exemplary events, activities, cultural and religious negotiations in the Al-Nour Mosque, I demonstrate that places like the Al-Nour Mosque are dynamic elements of the urban religious and cultural geography.

보이지 않는 ‘경계’에서: 용산 성매매 집결지 중·노년층 여성의 이주 체험을 중심으로 = Between Invisible Boundaries: Focusing on the Migrant Experience of Middle- and Older-Aged Women of Yongsan Red-Light District

This study examines the migrant experience of women of the Yongsan redlight district and its significance through life-history methodology and long-term participatory observation. First, migration is an event that transforms one’s whole life and stands between the expulsion from one’s regular life space and the challenge of a new life. The process of adapting to the mainstream space in which one’s past or history can be denounced, includes not only financial problems but those of identity and cultural conflict, among others, and is supported by the intimacy, communication, a sense of belonging, and social approval in the relationships with neighbors, colleagues, and other people. These women’s community brings forward the need for an alternative in-between space, suggesting that a genuine empowerment and de-embodiment of boundaries is possible not through an one-way adaptation or support but through the realization of mutual exchange.

Immigration and Electoral Change in Mainstream Political Space

Research on radical right politics shows that the immigration issue can reshape electoral alignments and patterns of political competition in favor of anti-immigrant parties. However, we know surprisingly little about the capacity of the immigration issue to generate electoral change in systems where radical parties are absent. On the basis of issue ownership theory, we show with longitudinal data that concerns over immigration strengthen the identification with the centre-right party owning the immigration issue, especially when primed by the media. Our results, obtained using the German Socioeconomic Panel and media content analysis, confirm strong priming effects among previous non-identifiers and among supporters of the issue owner, and weaker effects among former mainstream left-wing leaners. The findings suggest that the immigration issue is a relevant trigger of electoral change in mainstream political space, but is less likely to generate transfers of party loyalty. Our analyses refine the test of priming effects as a mechanism for issue ownership theory.

The Feminist Spectator As Blogger: Creating Critical Dialogue About Feminist Theatre On The Web

From blogging, to YouTube-ing, to social networking, feminist theatre audiences and artists are increasingly using the Internet to shift the power dynamics in their relationship to mainstream critics. This is not only reshaping the discourse surrounding theatre, but also working toward the broader cultural change that Jill Dolan envisioned as an outcome of exposing the ideological underpinnings of performance and criticism in her landmark book, The Feminist Spectator as Critic. In this article I consider how alternative critical practices made possible by the web address problems posed by the static, single-authored nature of traditional theatre criticism. Through a survey of feminist theatre reviewing in the blogosphere and a brief case study of Montreal-based performer Pol Pelletier’s web activities, I investigate what blogging means for the feminist audiences and artists who practice it, the mainstream critics whose profession it threatens, and the scholars who rely on reviews in their own work as critics and historians. I argue that while blogging provides a means for feminist spectators and artists to address key gender issues present in both theatre and criticism, its potential to transform these institutions is rooted in its negotiation of two key functions: on the one hand, its ability to “preach to the converted” and create community, and on the other, its ability to navigate more mainstream spaces on the web and engage with hegemonic critical discourse.