Public Sensibilities Research Articles

Exploring and Navigating the Chasm: The Incompatibility of Western Gatekeeping Theory with Akwa-Cross Akata Indigenous Media

The global practice of journalism which is a Western conception stipulates that any media content meant for public consumption must go through the process of ‘Gatekeeping’ by ‘Gatekeepers’ before it is featured on any media channel. This quality assurance process ensures that media contents that could insult public sensibilities and unfit for public consumption are sorted out and discarded. Ironically, it is believed that this principle applies globally across media terrains. The Akata indigenous media, of the Akwa-Cross (Akwa Ibom and Cross River States) rural communities does not have ‘Gatekeepers’ who ensure that the quality of information churned out is fit for public consumption, free of legal issues and defamation. This study basically examines the sharp contrast, the incompatibility and unsuitability of the Western theoretical concept of Gatekeeping with the traditional African ‘Akata’ masquerade which serves as the traditional media for West African natives (Akwa Ibom and Cross River States communities in Nigeria). A qualitative methodology using focus group discussion as the procedure to elicit data from members of the Akata masquerade was used in this study. To ascertain the contextual relevance and significance of this cult, several Afrocentric theories were employed to examine the phenomenon.

The Patriotic Spirit of the Bulgarian Army in the First Balkan War presented in the Reports of Major Gheorghe A. Dabija

"The companion of the 19th and 20th centuries found the Balkan nations in the fullness of the generative process for the legitimation of identity and international recognition. The destiny of becoming a nation has destined those peoples to be truly grumpy and warlike, with territorial claims beyond the limits of the violence allowed by public sensibilities in a prosperous and emancipated Europe. Territorial conquests, followed by expulsions and purifications, of forced cultural assimilation, made the Balkans the “gunpowder barrel” of Europe, detonated by the great European powers in the competition for the Ottoman heritage. Geographically positioned at the periphery of the Balkan world, Romania's national project was focused more on Central and Eastern Europe, where several million Romanians lived under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. However, the threatening Russian expansion into the Straits led Carol I to opt for an alliance with the Central Powers. Therefore, during this period the official nationalist rhetoric was focused on the issue of the Balkan Romanians. Context in which the army, together with the other institutions of the Romanian state, was mobilized in the effort to define and affirm the historical right of the Romanian nation in the Balkans, receiving the mission to identify and inform on realities and political-military, economic-social and cultural activities south of the Danube, facts that we bring to attention from the perspective of military documents. "

Negotiating Lebanon’s urban boundaries and sectarian space: Syrian refugees in Beirut and Tripoli

ABSTRACT As Syrian refugee numbers in Lebanon have increased, so has the hostility directed towards them, with targeted attacks against informal encampments and public restrictions on Syrian mobility through localized curfews and military checkpoints. The Syrian experience is constrained by both their precarity as refugees and the volatility of Lebanese urban politics. Syrians must navigate the complex terrain of moral and socio-spatial Lebanese boundaries: when to keep silent or remain publicly invisible, how to navigate sectarian street dynamics, and how to respond to heightened public sensibilities. This article, based on six months ethnographic research (2017–2018) among Syrian refugees in Tripoli (Bab al-Tabbaneh) and Beirut (Nab’a) examines how Syrian refugees navigate Lebanese urban spatial realities—adapting and responding to its complex hybrid sovereignties, sectarian atmospheres and everyday security practices. The findings attest to how Syrian refugees seek ‘security within borders’ through practices of rootedness, invisibility and ‘safe space’ boundary marking, while also accepting that crossing boundaries—physical military checkpoints and immaterial social barriers—can result in public confrontations, detention, and violence. Although Syrian refugees attempt to remain apolitical and deliberately disengaged from Lebanese sectarian networks of power, their everyday choices (rent, electricity fees) and physical presence connect them to local political contests and rivalries.

The Sovereign and the Sensible

AbstractThis article investigates the history of the formation of the red-light district of Tehran in 1922, to tackle larger questions about the genealogy of the constitutional Islamic state in Iran in the twentieth century. Through an engagement with the Islamic local campaign against prostitution and the state's subsequent sovereign decision to form the district, this article demonstrates how Islamic public sensibilities moved to the forefront of analytics of governance, under postconstitutional state formations (1911–). This revisionist narrative remaps the force of religion in Tehran, a city that is so often glossed as a case of state-oriented top-down secularization and subsequent Islamization in the twentieth century. The aim is not to question the process of secularization or to render it incomplete, but to demonstrate how secularism in Iran negotiated and consolidated a particular relationship between Islam and sovereign modern rule. As such, this work reads the history of the district against the grain of the grand narrative of the Islamic Revolution's (1979) moment of rupture to trace the genealogical roots of moral governance in the Islamic Republic today, within the postconstitutional state formations in the early twentieth century.

Translating the Public Imaginary: The Narrative Aesthetics of Public Engagement in Canadian Broadcasting Policy

Background In public proceedings, professionalized discourses often reflect markedly different communicative strategies than those used by members of the general public. Analysis This article describes the findings of an aesthetic discourse analysis of public submissions to one of the largest public processes ever held by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Let’s Talk TV review of television regulation in Canada. Conclusions and implications Public submissions demonstrated heartfelt, affective, psychologically complex, and sometimes ambiguous expressions of desire. A routine tactic engaged in public submissions was “narrative aesthetics”—the implicit and explicit use of story structures to shape aspects of discourse legitimacy. The discursive landscape revealed gaps between public sensibilities and those legitimized by policy decisions, suggesting a territory of public experience more complex than the social realities reflected in policy discourse outcomes.

The Law of Advertising Outrage

Abstract: This article examines the stimulation of audience outrage, both as a marketing strategy and as a subject of legal regulation. A brief history of advertising in the United States reveals repeated yet relatively infrequent attempts to attract consumer attention through overt transgressions of social norms relating to sex, violence, race, and religion. Natural concerns over audience reaction limited use of this particular advertising tactic as businesses needed to be careful not to alienate prospective purchasers. But now companies can engage in “algorithmic outrage”—social media advertising meant to stimulate individual feelings of anger and upset—with less concern for a consumer backlash. The ability to segregate audiences based on psychological profiles enhances the effectiveness and reduces the risk of shocking advertising. Should anything be done about outrageous advertising? Different government regulators have long sought to protect public sensibilities from shocking commercial appeals. Recently, however, the legal doctrine undergirding advertising regulation has changed. The courts have become skeptical of efforts to police advertising outrage, recognizing First Amendment arguments on behalf of commercial speakers that once would have been given no legal credit. The article closely examines the 2017 US Supreme Court decision Matal v. Tam , which prompted the end of a nearly century-old prohibition on the registration of “scandalous” trademarks, to illustrate this trend.

Denunciatory technology: forging publics through populism and secrecy

This paper theorizes contemporary institutionalized forms of denunciation, or what I call ‘denunciatory technologies’. Denunciatory technologies are mechanisms that allow citizens to report one another to the state for a wide range of wrongdoing, such as welfare fraud. The scarce literature on such initiatives relies heavily on concepts of neoliberalism to explain their emergence and operation. I first argue that a focus on neoliberalism fails to recognize these technologies as a sophisticated type of statecraft that promotes public sensibilities. I then offer a more robust account of denunciatory technologies. Rather than relying on an analysis of neoliberalism, I argue that these technologies fuse the policing of political criminals like the ‘welfare cheat’ to the very notion of ‘public good’, and refract vertical populist energies back onto the population. I conclude that, through such technologies, publics become an integral tool in their own governance.

The missiology of trouble: Liberal discontent and metamodern hope

Missioners and missiologists called home from the wider world, literally or figuratively, to do mission in the United States return to confront a historically liberal society in disarray. To what troubles shall we address our public witness in word and deed? How shall we make our witness intelligible to a traditionally liberal society in the midst of its unraveling? Liberalism’s legitimacy crisis and the decline of the force of its social imaginary since the 1960s define the specific public conditions for a contemporary, contextually sensitive Christian mission in America. Liberalism is taken here not as a political orientation, but as a central theme in the public sensibilities shared by most Americans on the left and right. Liberalism’s often overlooked conceptual foundations and its many manifestations along a spectrum of ideologies and practices are presented as a background to this discussion. As well, the discussion features the pervasive and also overlooked Christian influences that emerged in the 18th century—the American Reformation—and elaborated into the middle of the 20th century to shape a distinctively (mostly) Protestant liberal society. A well-contextualized Christian public witness—and a public missiology—will draw from its own historical resources born in the American Reformation as well as address both post-political despair and metamodern hope if it is to make sense to a liberal society in trouble.

The Original Meaning of 'Cruel'

This Article demonstrates that the word “cruel” in the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause means “unjustly harsh,” not “motivated by cruel intent.” The word refers to the effect of the punishment, not the intent of the punisher. In prior articles, I have shown that the word “unusual” means “contrary to long usage,” and thus a punishment is cruel and unusual if its effects are unjustly harsh in light of longstanding prior practice.This Article solves several important problems plaguing the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. First, it clarifies the Eighth Amendment’s intent requirement. To violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, some government official must possess intent to punish but not necessarily intent to punish cruelly. Second, it demonstrates how to determine whether a given punishment is so harsh that it violates the Eighth Amendment. The question is not whether a punishment is unjustly harsh in the abstract but whether it is unjustly harsh in comparison to the traditional punishment practices it has replaced. Third, it shows how to sort between those unintended effects of punishment that may properly be considered part of the punishment and those that may not. If a given punishment heightens the risk of severe, unjustified harm significantly beyond the baseline risk established by longstanding prior practice, it is cruel and unusual. Finally, this Article establishes that the core purpose of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is to prevent unjust suffering, not the coarsening of public sensibilities. Historically, governmental efforts to protect public sensibilities by making punishment less transparent have increased the risk that the offender will experience undetected cruel suffering. When the government undertakes such efforts, it should bear the burden to show that they do not significantly increase this risk.The original meaning of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause calls into question the constitutionality of several current punishment practices, including lengthy prison sentences for certain offenses, long-term solitary confinement, the three-drug lethal injection protocol, and certain prison conditions, to name a few.

Experiencing post-socialism: Running and urban space in Sofia, Bulgaria

This article suggests that cities in Central and Eastern Europe should be understood as developing and interacting with their own unique character and challenges on their own terms. In providing an account of embodied and everyday activities, this paper challenges the conception of a decline in public-oriented acts and affordances understood via the notion of post-socialist privatism. In doing so this paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork of recreational running; an underutilised tool for urban analysis. Despite the growing interest in recreational running amongst urban scholars, engaging with the practice has remained largely neglected within research on the post-socialist cities of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper uses a case study of two recreational running clubs from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, offering a discussion of everyday experience, public life and urban space. This case study combines participant observation and in-depth qualitative interviews with runners and club organisers to complicate the idea of post-socialist cities as places defined by the decline of public sensibilities and a single conception of the post-socialist condition.

Cycling in the post-socialist city: On travelling by bicycle in Sofia, Bulgaria

There are many ways of moving through a city. Cycling is one which has received considerable attention from urban scholars. Yet it has remained largely neglected within the burgeoning literature on the post-socialist urbanisms of Central and Eastern Europe. This paper uses a case study from Sofia, Bulgaria to address this gap in urban research. By exploring the practices and affordances of cycling, we offer a discussion of everyday mobility, public life and urban space in post-socialist Sofia. This case study incorporates ethnography and in-depth interviews with regular cyclists. Through a discussion of bicycling spaces and practices, this paper complicates the notion of post-socialist cities as places defined by the decline of public sensibilities.

Mobility, belonging and bodies: understanding discourses of anxiety towards temporary migrants in Australia

The figure of the temporary migrant is one which puts into question the forms through which public sphere sensibilities on mobility, belonging and sociality are forged. This article argues that the temporary migrant can be a site of anxiety resulting from the perceived complexity of flows of mobility in a trans- and/or post-national context in which migration is not necessarily always permanent, social mobility does not occur within the site of the nation, and close kinship networks may be spread across multiple regions of the globe. The article investigates the 2012 case of politician Teresa Gambaro's claims that temporary migrants in Australia on 457 visas required hygiene training, including the wearing of deodorant in order to integrate into the national community. The question raised by these statements is why permanent migrants bodily, food and other cultural practices are more readily incorporated into Australian liberal-multiculturalism, while temporary migrants' bodies are made a site for practices of shaming. It is argued that a ‘networked’ understanding of mobility rather than a migrational, transnational or globalizational perspective opens opportunities for a more ethical response to temporary migrants co-habiting as temporary members of a (national) population.

The New Perspective on Organizational Wrongdoing

Wrongdoing in and by organizations offends public sensibilities, is costly to organizations, and is injurious to the individuals who perpetrate it and are victimized by it. The dominant perspective on organizational wrongdoing considers it to be an abnormal phenomenon; behavior that is rare, clearly aberrant, perpetrated by people who are abhorrent (who possess outsized preference structures or perverse values), and produced by a narrow range of out of whack organizational arrangements (most frequently, misaligned incentives or perverse cultures). However, new emerging theory and research on organizational wrongdoing present a fundamentally different perspective. It views wrongdoing as a normal phenomenon; behavior that is prevalent, not much different than rightdoing, perpetrated by people who are for the most part upstanding (otherwise ethical, socially responsible, and law abiding), and is a function of a plethora of structures, processes, and mechanisms that are integral to the efficient and effective functioning of organizations. This new way of approaching wrongdoing has important implications for managers.

Skate-Park Builds, Teenaphobia and the Adolescent Need for Hang-Out Spaces: The Social Utility and Functionality of Urban Skate Parks

This paper details perspectives of skateboarders on the utility and functionality of skate-parks in Western Australia. To this end, skateboarder interview data and skate-park audit data are triangulated in a mixed-method research design. The study's findings reveal that skateboarders believe adults view them as being anti-social deviant youth and their leisure pursuit of skateboarding as an undesirable pastime that requires regulation. Skateboarders also contend that as urban skate-parks double up as youth hang-out spaces, vocal adult opponents of skate-park builds often petition for them to be situated in places that do not offend public sensibilities. It is hypothesized that this social marginalization of skateboarders within the community underpins the current poor provisioning of skateboarding facilities.

Learning difficulties scandal

Last month's primary care scandal was the news that overpaid GPs are to be paid even more to provide annual health checks for people with learning difficulties.1 Press reports carried familiar themes. Although it is now universally accepted that the NHS should be administered according to the principles of the capitalist market, it is regarded as a disgrace that doctors' pay should rise in response to an increase in demand for their services. It is apparently even more offensive to public sensibilities that GPs should expect to be remunerated for an increased burden of work at a rate comparable with that received by a plumber. The real scandal obscured by these reports is that the healthcare needs of people with learning difficulties …

Keeping A Safe Distance: Individualism and the Less Punitive Public

This article will address individual differences in punitiveness or ‘get tough’ attitudes towards lawbreakers, but will do so by looking in depth at the nature of worldviews that have been identified as decidedly forgiving. The aim is to generate new hypotheses through a grounded narrative analysis regarding a dimension of public sensibilities towards crime—leniency—about which we know very little. I conclude that social identity is an important aspect of merciful worldviews, and that a precondition of a forgiving orientation may be a focus on individual agency. This analysis is supported by quantitative tests of new hypotheses to emerge. This article contributes to the more complex picture of differentiated public opinion to crime and criminal justice that has emerged recently in the literature.

Canada's Communications Security Establishment, Signals Intelligence and counter-terrorism

Canada's Communications Security Establishment has undergone a far-reaching transformation in conjunction with the expanded role of Signals Intelligence in the global ‘war on terror’. For the first time, Canada adopted a formal statute for CSE, including an expanded remit for countering terrorism. With a shift in targeting priorities towards terrorism and threats to Canadian interests abroad, Canada's participation in SIGINT-related international partnerships takes on new significance. The collection of communication intelligence touches upon public sensibilities regarding privacy rights of Canadians. The evolution of Canadian SIGINT capabilities was therefore accompanied by the establishment, as early as 1996, of a system for intelligence accountability and review, the Office of the CSE Commissioner. Recent advances in communications technology and pressing requirements for Signals Intelligence have impelled changes in the law, while also accentuating the role played by the CSE Commissioner in scrutinizing CSE activities to ensure compliance with ministerial authorizations and the laws of Canada.

Counting and Accounting for the Decline in Non-Lethal Violence in England, Australia, and New Zealand, 1880-1920

This article contends that researchers have made two false assumptions about the history of violence and violent crime in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, that judicial statistics appearing to show an accelerating decline in violent crime towards the fin de siecle actually mirror a real fall, and that violence was becoming less prevalent in society. Second, that the prosecution figures evidence a changing public attitudes towards violence in the 1880-1920 period. These assumptions have helped to shape rather inadequate and schematic theoretical paradigms which link changing public sensibilities towards violence with the reformation of aggressive masculinity, and the civilization' of society. This article suggests that transcribed life histories can offer the researcher a greater understanding of public attitudes towards violence; and it therefore presents archival evidence from England, Australia and New Zealand to illustrate collective attitudes toward non-lethal violence/violent crime at the turn of the twentieth century.

The ‘Good War’ after September 11

Rather Than Signalling The End Of War, As Many Liberal Minds had hoped, the end of the cold war has seen ‘hot’ war moving firmly to centre-stage, while at the same time presaging a reclassification of its predominant forms and purposes. Since 1990 there has been a rash of what Kaldor calls ‘new wars’. Although often highly localized, they confound settled understandings of inter-state or civil war by virtue of the diverse range of protagonists involved, the issues over which they are fought, and their consistently brutal impact upon civilians. A virtual revolution in media technology has also made such wars publicly visible to an unprecedented degree. In spite of the fact that new wars are often fought without recourse to the most sophisticated or destructive of military technology, the horrific impact upon populations caught up in them has clearly assaulted public sensibilities worldwide and generated a chorus of demands that something should be done about them. Consequently, the political and ethical dimensions of going to war in response to such threats have also moved in from the periphery to the centre of public and intellectual debate. As Walzer has recently observed, the ‘chief dilemma of international politics is whether people in danger should be rescued by military forces from outside’. From the point of view of the key members of the international community at least, armed ‘humanitarian intervention’ is no longer just a form of war but has become virtually synonymous with permissible war itself.

Racial Profiling: Is There an Empirical Basis?

The disparity between public sensibilities and empirical data has become so extreme that certain topics can no longer be investigated without bringing down cries of "racism". Nevertheless, blacks commit violent crimes at four to eight times the white rate. Hispanics commit violent crimes at about three times the white rate, and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rate. Blacks are as much more criminally violent than whites, as men are more violent than women. Therefore, just as police stop and question men more often than women, they should stop blacks more often than whites. Of the approximately 1,700,000 interracial crimes of violence involving blacks and whites, 90 percent are committed by blacks against whites. Blacks are 50 times more likely than whites to commit individual acts of interracial violence. They are up to 250 times more likely than whites to engage in multiple-offender or group interracial violence. There is more black-on-white than black-on-black violent crime. Fifty-six percent of violent crimes committed by blacks have white victims. Only two to three percent of violent crimes committed by whites have black victims. Violent crime and interracial violence are important, agonizing concerns in this country, and we cannot begin to formulate solutions until we understand the problems.