Popular Magazines Research Articles

The function of humor and ideological discourse in Turkish Islamist humor magazines: the case of Misvak

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the ideological discourse of Misvak, one of Turkey's most popular Islamist humor magazines in the 2000s. By analyzing the magazine’s cartoons, it first attempts to reveal the general characteristics and function of humor in Misvak. It then discusses how Islamism is presented as the primary ideological position in the magazine. In order to uncover absences and silences in the discourse, the purpose of the study is also to investigate whether there is discursive parallelism between the magazine and the AKP government by analyzing visual texts while positioning the magazine within debates over hegemony.

Physical culture, posing, and the medium of fitness magazines

ABSTRACT Physical culture describes a new socio-political interest in physical activity which emerged in the late nineteenth century and became a global phenomenon. Physical culture was concerned with the ‘commercial and ideological cultivation of the body’, as made manifest in gymnasium and keep fit cultures. This paper focuses specifically on physical culture magazines, which began to be sold with regularity in North America and Europe from the late 1890s, and contributed to the movement’s spread in this period. Publications relied on a reciprocal relationship with their readers to craft their content and remain financially viable. Reader-submitted content, be it images or letters, helped these magazines shape the practices and values of physical culturists. Critically, many of these magazines were transnational in nature, republishing articles and images from other publications and from readers across the world. This article is driven by a two-pronged argument: first, that magazine cover images helped to implicitly inform ways of presenting the male body. Second, that this was a transnational phenomenon. The article discusses the rise of physical culture in Europe before examining two popular physical culture magazines from the early twentieth century, the French magazine La Culture Physique and the English magazine Health and Strength. Using examples of cover images and reader submissions to these two publications, the article demonstrates how the growing mediums of physical culture magazines and photography provided crucial avenues for countless men around the world to re-evaluate their relationships with their bodies.

Running shoe cushioning properties at the rearfoot and forefoot and their relationship to injury: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial on leisure-time runners

Previous work has demonstrated the protective effect of shoe cushioning on injury risk in leisure-time runners, but most models currently available on the market have greater cushioning than those investigated...

Epistemology and its implications in designing the cover of Popular Heritage magazine

الابستمولوجيا حقيقية تستحق المتابعة والاعتناء لدورها المنطقي والموضوعي فيما تدره على البشرية لتوفير المعلومة الصحيحة نظرا لدقتها وصلابتها في إظهار وفرز واقع معرفي متداول يساعد في تفسير التلاؤم بين افكارنا الذاتية والعالم الخارجي الطبيعي لتحديد معاني الاشكال، وذلك من خلال الجهد والأداء الذي يقدمه المصمم لينعكس على غلاف المجلة، مشكلة البحث التي تجلت بالتساؤل الآتي: كيف انعكست الابستمولوجيا في تصميم اغلفة مجلة التراث الشعبي؟ فيما حُدد هدف البحث في تعرف (الابستمولوجيا) وانعكاسها في تصميم اغلفة مجلة التراث الشعبي، وتضمن الإطار النظري في المبحث الاول (المفاهيم الفكرية للأبستمولوجيا)، فيما كان المبحث الثاني (المكونات البنائية لغلاف المجلة)، وفي الفصل الثالث تم وصف وتحليل (3) عينات بحثية، أما عرض النتـــائج والاستنتاجات: - الابستمولوجيا تبدأ بأداة للإحساس مرجعها معارف لاتصف تركيباً داخلياً وانما تقوم على مفاهيم ومعانٍ يمكن امتحانها على وفق سياقات ونظم معرفية تترتب عليها نتائج تؤثر في مظاهر السلوك الانساني يمكن اثباتها او ابطالها. - تتحقق الابستمولوجيا بفعل ملائمة تصاميم غلاف المجلة لاعتبارات المتلقي وتفضيلاته الأدائية التي ترتكز في تجميع الصور والاشكال على وفق تداولي يحفز الادراك المعرفي لدى المتلقي ويزيد من نسبة التفاعل مع مضمون المجلة

Gender Aspect of Media Discourse in Socialist Yugoslavia – Representation of Gender in the Women's Magazine "Bazar"

The paper revises the gender aspect of media discourse in socialist Yugoslavia on the example of one of the oldest and most popular Yugoslav women's magazine "Bazar." An analysis of the textual and visual content of the 1973 edition (issues 208–233) reaffirmed the assumption that the mass media – including The Women's Press – actively participate in the construction and reproduction of both "femininity" and "masculinity", and in the depiction of desirable/expected gender relations in a certain socio-historical moment (Yugoslav socialism). In addition to the main female character – a beautiful, young, modern and well-groomed woman who is successful in all fields (at work, at home, as a wife, mother, sister, friend, worker...) – there is also an equally caring and dedicated husband and father, a modern man, successful in his field of expertise. In other words, of all the roles that Yugoslav society has assigned to women/men, the following seem to be dominant: She is primarily 1) a wife, mother and housewife, 2) a hard worker, and 3) a woman who is clearly positioned in the new consumer society, while He is 1) Pater Familias, 2) a successful businessman, and 3) a modern man who keeps up with the times. The research has shown that these (and such) "Bazar" images of a woman / man are highly harmonized with the official representation of gender in the socialist Yugoslav society – She is the embodiment of the socialist "super-woman", while He is depicted as part of the hegemonic model of masculinity. The female-male relationship is presented in the experimental media discourse in two ways. The first (socialist) model of gender polarity – the one that is in the central media plan / easily observable / clearly legible – is placed in the official narrative framework of socialism as an ideology that follows the principle of equality as the dominant matrix in social/gender/economic/family relations. In the second narrative plan, there is a traditional model of gender polarity, which is based on binary oppositions – weak-strong, gentle-rough, subordinate-dominant, dependent-independent, right-wrong – performed by the female-male couple. By analyzing the media discourse of the experimental socialist periodical, it has also been established that the narrative of one of the most popular Yugoslav women's magazines contains all three key terms (for gender reading or in the media text) – these are power, gender (in)equality and representation of meaning. Interpreting textual and visual content as a system of representation (and not presentation) of reality, it becomes obvious that despite the change in social paradigm in the years after World War II, the policy of gender representation in the context of power relations (man over woman) continued, which Yugoslav socialism – as a doctrine of equality – clearly could not (or did not want to) eradicate in practice.

Dry Spells, Drought, and Environmental Crisis: The Drought Feature in Australian Women’s Weekly Magazine, 1939–2019

ABSTRACT Drought in Australia is expected but with climate change will worsen. Popular magazines can draw attention to and depict drought in distinctive as well as conventional ways, as shown by an analysis of content on drought in Australian Women’s Weekly from 1939 to 2019. That content, and in particular feature articles on drought, has established drought as a phenomenon experienced primarily by those who live and work on the land, promoted certain views of the experience of drought – and its significance for women – and advocated action of some kind. The features in later years also have placed drought in the context of climate change, including through prominent verbal and visual elements that draw attention to the plight of the environment. In these ways, the features illustrate the efforts made by the popular women’s magazine to contribute purposefully to environmental communication in the public sphere.

A Digital Archaeology of Early Hispanic Film Culture: Film Magazines and the Male Fan Reader

As a sociologically-oriented study, this project contributes to an archaeology of cinema fandom broadly, and early Spanish fan culture specifically, by spotlighting male readers of popular film magazines. Taking as an exploratory case study reader interactivity with the magazine Popular Film, analysis of correspondence and published photos of readers participating in reader contests demonstrates that the magazine’s cinema fan base was composed of a strikingly large proportion of readers who were male and that these were ardent enthusiasts of celebrity consumer culture. This is a notable contradistinction to the widely-held idea of the star-struck female movie fan. Methodologically, in conducting this study we reflect on the challenges of digital approaches to historical periodical research, where particular challenges are posed when working with magazines in a non-anglophone language, and when there are few baseline studies to rely on to guide and contextualize patterns picked up through strictly macro methods. We advocate for the affordances of a mixed macro-micro approach that combines distant reading with traditional textual studies of close reading. By adopting such a hybrid framework, digital methods provide new opportunities towards reconstructing profiles of magazine readerships and to unearth evidence of male movie fans in Spain.

Gender-specific motivational pathways in ADHD-related inattention and gaming disorder symptoms

Comorbidity between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and gaming disorder (GD) is widely recognized in the literature. Previous research has indicated gender-dependent underlying mechanisms in the development and maintenance of problematic gaming. Motivational research presents an opportunity to provide further insight regarding the nature of this association. Self-report data were collected from videogame players (N = 14,740) using an online survey in collaboration with a popular gaming magazine. The survey included items concerning symptoms of ADHD and GD, motives for gaming, and time spent playing videogames. Structural equation modeling was used to create two parallel mediation models (one for males, one for females), including motives to play games as mediators. This was done to potentially explain psychological drivers of the association between ADHD and GD. Results demonstrated a common pathway from inattention to GD symptom severity through the immersion/escapism motivation for both males (β = 0.068; p < 0.001) and females (β = 0.081; p < 0.05), while the path from inattention to GD symptom severity through the habit/boredom motive (β = 0.094; p < 0.001) and competition motive (β = 0.021; p < 0.001) was only significant for males. Gamers experiencing symptoms of ADHD, especially inattentive symptoms, are at risk of the occurrence of GD symptoms through videogames becoming a source of maladaptive coping with daily psychological disturbances. Males experiencing inattentive symptoms tend to additionally develop problematic patterns of use through videogame playing, becoming a subjectively meaningless and boredom-reduction-oriented habitual activity or a platform of virtual competition. Unique differences suggest the necessity of different treatment approaches for males and females.

“Pearl Rush” and the Construction of Australian Imagination of Aru Islands, 1869-1937

In the early 20th century, the Aru Islands emerged as an economic centre in Eastern Indonesia’s lesser known region. Australian pearling industry entry into its maritime zone created the “Pearl Rush”. This western-mode of natural exploitation shaped Aru’s conception as a thriving pearling centre. This image of Aru was therefore a direct result of a constructed imagination reinforced by the active Australian pearling zone. Movement of Australian mariners and pearling fleets influenced the public views of the region, as reflected in the Australian newspapers and popular magazines. Such views connected the Aru Islands’ image into the greater “Pearl Zone” of North and Western Australian cities. This paper examines how Australia’s views of Aru’s natural resources impacted and shaped the understanding of the islands’ commercial role and it will highlight the role of the pearling industry in creating the allure of imagined valuable resources, which paved the way for its exploitation.

Portals to the past and bridges to the future: exploring the impact of doulas on the birthing experiences of black and Latinx women

IntroductionIn the USA, maternal morbidity and mortality is markedly higher for women of colour than for white women. The presence of a doula has been associated with positive birthing outcomes...

Women are lean and men are also lean: nutrition titles in women’s and men’s health magazines

BackgroundWhether nutrition messages in popular health magazines differ by country or season has seldom been studied. We assessed the nutrition topics featured in the headlines of Men’s Health® (MH) and Women’s Health® (WH) magazines from different countries.MethodsWe sampled MH and WH magazines from Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the USA. Nutrition-related headlines were categorized as weight loss, weight gain, micronutrients and other.ResultsThe most frequent topics were “Other” (44%) and “weight loss” (41%), while “micronutrients” represented 4%. Topics related to weight gain were more frequent in MH (19% vs. 2% in WH), while no difference was found for weight loss (44% vs. 37% in WH). On multivariable analysis, weight gain had a higher likelihood of being present in MH than in WH, Odds ratio and (95% confidence interval): 8.3 (2.2–90.9), p = 0.002, while no association was found for weight loss: OR 1.1 (0.6-2.0), p = 0.80. Weight loss was absent from the US WH and present in two thirds of the Portuguese WH; in MH, weight gain was evenly distributed between countries. Prevalence of the weight loss topic was lower in March (15% vs. 54% in January, p < 0.01 by logistic regression) and to a lesser degree in June (35%) and July (35%). No seasonality was found for the “weight gain” topic.ConclusionIn WH and MH magazines, nutrition topics vary according to gender, country, and season. Weight gain remains a male topic, while weight loss is equally prevalent in both women’s and men’s magazines.

»Der Aufsatz […] war gar nicht so ›sexy‹ wie das Bild.«

TThe present essay features Das Magazin, a popular East German monthly magazine that appeared in the GDR for the first time in 1954. The author analyzes the photographic depiction of women in issues of the 1950s. This analysis starts with the magazine’s prominent and well-researched nude photographs, but later focuses on other images of female bodies, i.e. in photo montages, to explore the different variations in which women were depicted in Das Magazin. A close examination of the images in question, their position and contextualization within Das Magazin allows for a look beyond the pages of the printed product and sheds light on the work of the layout artists. In doing so, the author argues that its creators revived certain visual strategies that had already been cultivated by the popular press in the interwar period and which were also existent beyond the boundaries of the GDR press. Thus, the notion of GDR magazines’ production practices can be enriched by transnational and historical perspectives.

Способы аттракции в печатном и цифровом формате журнала «Дилетант»

The article introduces attraction marketing methods employed by Russian monthly popular science magazine Diletant. The authors compared the printed version and the website. The paper magazine attracts the reader mainly by the topic name printed on its cover as a unique creolized text. The further semantics of the front media text includes various aspects of the main topic. Color highlights both topical issue and regular features. The comparative analysis with the online version revealed some significant differences. The website has a muted color scheme and minimal animation; it contains neither video nor audio materials. Like in the printed version, the function of attraction belongs mainly to illustrations and subtitles. Online Diletant is interactive in navigation, tests, and surveys, which are, however, the only form of interactivity: the site does not provide comments, forums, “likes”, etc. Such limited use of attention-seeking tools makes the digital version of Diletant uncompetitive and inferior to its paper issue.

ОПЫТНОСТЬ КАК ОДИН ИЗ БАЗОВЫХ ПРИЗНАКОВ КОНЦЕПТОСФЕРЫ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ АНГЛОЯЗЫЧНОГО НАУЧНО-ПОПУЛЯРНОГО ПЕДАГОГИЧЕСКОГО ДИСКУРСА)

The article is devoted to the cognitive discourse analysis of the conceptual sphere of the English popular science pedagogical communication. The purpose of the analysis is to study and describe the linguistic representation of expertise as one of the key features of the conceptual sphere. On the material of English popular science pedagogical magazines, it is revealed that in the conceptual sphere of the English popular science pedagogical discourse, the feature of expertise is responsible for providing the audience with empirically defined pedagogical principles and teaching methods. In addition, the feature of expertise shows the expert knowledge and experience as well as serves as a tool for forming a trusting relationship between the professional pedagogical community and its audience. The results of the study show that in the English popular science pedagogical discourse, the feature of expertise is verbalised with the help of such speech mechanisms as so-called formula statements which represent indisputable facts about the way students should be taught; names of official documents testifying to the knowledge of teachers about educational laws; lexemes showing empiricality of information; lexemes indicating the quality and frequency of an action; stylistic enumeration. Key words: discourse, pedagogical communication, conceptual sphere, popular science discourse, popular science pedagogical discourse, the features of a conceptual sphere

Introduction: Science anywhere and anyhow

Today's society enjoys a welfare state that is largely a consequence of the scientific and technological advances of previous eras (especially the last century). Currently, (non-specialist) citizens interested in scientific topics have access to them in a variety of ways, from the classic formats of books and popular science magazines, television, and radio programmes, to internet platforms and social networks. And while being published is not synonymous with being worthwhile and reliable, the visibility that science can gain from these media is a welcome change. In addition to reporting on scientific and technological advances, an important part of the content offered by these media consists of recreational science activities, which provide an opportunity to acquire scientific knowledge in an entertaining way.

Just not cricket: Baseball, youth and national identity in late nineteenth-century children’s magazines

In the late nineteenth century, baseball became enshrined as America’s national sport. Across American culture, the game became imbued with a series of values and characteristics that seemed redolent of life in the Gilded Age and beyond. This article explores the ways in which this process played out in the pages of popular magazines directed at the children of the nation’s elite. These neglected resources provide us with an extraordinary lens through which to chart both the changing place of the national game within the lives of American children and the changing meaning of baseball within the life of the nation. In poems, stories, illustrations, editorials and even reader’s letters, children were newly acculturated into the sporting life in ways that had profound implications for wider questions of childhood, gender, race, class and national identity.

Interpreters of the Real: Poems about Photographs in the Periodical Press, 1840–1860

ABSTRACT Short, anonymous poems were a common feature in the popular magazines and literary journals of photography’s first two decades, the 1840s and 1850s. Yet despite its wide readership, periodical poetry has been largely neglected in histories of photography. Through close readings of periodical poems, this essay addresses this gap and adds a fresh perspective to the complex history of photography’s reception. It argues that whereas Victorian journalism often concentrated on photographic realism and focal clarity, periodical poets were more interested in photography’s ability (or inability) to convey the emotional and psychological qualities of visual experience. By drawing on the technical process and language of photography but concentrating instead on affective qualities, the poems discussed here repositioned familiar debates about photography’s status and made their own claims for the values of both arts as interpreters of the real.

BORDERLANDS: STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY AND PRESS DEPICTIONS OF THE BORDER BETWEEN THE REPUBLIC OF IRELAND AND THE STATE OF NORTHERN IRELAND

This article explores photographic representations of the border between the Republic of Ireland and the state of Northern Ireland. This contentious division of the island occurred in 1921 following a War of Independence. It left six of the island’s thirty-two counties under British rule and its creation precipitated a Civil War (1922-1923). Photography has been employed to either undermine or solidify the border’s existence. At various times its visibility was heightened or negated reflecting the political climate. The article will consider the border imagery reproduced in popular magazines such as LIFE and also those created by stock photo-agencies. Mainly consumed by non-Irish audiences, these representations were initially quaint, however, as political and civil unrest grew, and British troops occupied and patrolled the border area, the depictions became more sinister. Border checkpoints and a ‘wild’ countryside teeming with paramilitaries became visual shorthand for this ‘problematic’ space. Recent Fine Art representations of the border in the post-Brexit era will also be considered.

Ο εκδότης Ν. Π. Ιγγλέσης και το περιοδικό Εύα (1923-1924)

Publisher N. P. Inglessis and the magazine Eva (1923-1924)&#x0D; Publisher of one French and five Greek-language publications, daily and weekly, during the 1920s, N. P. Inglessis has remained to this day a rather invisible case in the history of the Greek Press. Born in the late 1870s in Constantinople, he studied at the Chalki School of Commerce, and probably in London, and worked as an employee and then manager of the Bank of Athens before turning to publishing. My research in the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece provided biographicaland financial material, which allows us to assume the origin of the funds that supported the turn in his professional life. His publications were short-lived, but pioneering and insightful, seeking to fill thematic gaps, and reach the interested audiences. His popular magazine Eva, presented in more detail here, addressed a large number of women readers and often popularized positions of the women’s movement, especially those related to work, spreading them to wider and lower social strata, whocould not access the original collectives and theoretical discourses. Eva has probably worked as a model for similar publications, which circulated the following years in Greece. Accordingly, Inglessis’ Kinimatografos/Cinema, the first Greek magazine of its kind, dedicated to film, had also a clearly targeted readership, as well as his last and final attempt, Athlitika Chronika/Athletic Chronicles. Interestingly, N. P. Inglessis was the father of the first Greek film critic Iris Skaravaiou, indicating a path through which women could enter the journalist profession.

Aesthetic of Light and Time: An Intellectual History of Pictorialism from India

Pictorialism emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a global aesthetic movement that argued for photography’s artistic status on par with other plastic arts more powerfully than ever. Archives from South Asia demonstrate the movement’s thriving life in the subcontinent with Calcutta emerging as a centre and its bilingual amateur photographer-writers as major participants simultaneously engaging in globally circulating specialist discourses on pictorialism and popular discussions of their practice aimed at public pedagogy. By looking into Bangla periodical press this paper investigates how Bengali pictorialists used popular Bangla magazines in the early twentieth century to establish their distinct voice regarding what counted as artistic photography as they engaged with a non-specialist mass readership. Mass-circulated Bangla articles were not vernacular translations of knowledge and practices produced in metropolitan locations and disseminated in transregional languages like English. Vernacular was an extension of Bengali amateur photographers’ participation in global photography, as they remained grounded in their historical specificity. These amateur photographers were bilingual intellectuals who wrote in English for a global public and in Bangla for a Bangla-reading publics and refraining from translating culture as they moved across languages. Indeed, articulations in vernacular didn’t mean a venularization of practice; they indicate plurality of belonging and affiliation that crafted the pictorialist aesthetic of the Bengali amateurs. By unpacking this intellectual history, this paper decenters the Euro-US-centric history of pictorialism towards writing an interconnected history of the artistic movement, while also complicating the category of modern Indian art.