Reception Practices Research Articles

Review of “Iraqi Refugees in the United States: The Enduring Effects of the War on Terror”

Scholars working in refugee studies have long been concerned to address what is called refugeeness. Conditions of existence in which persons deemed legally eligible for refugee status are subject to social, political, economic and cultural processes, and practices of reception which divest them of a historical and agentive identity. In the contemporary narrative of Western moral authority, refugees are diminished persons; objects to be rescued and re-invested with integrative interventions appropriate to the receiving state. Refugeeness is compounded by globally instituted distinctions, which authorize refugees only as involuntary movers, in contrast to voluntary migrants. The refugee/migrant distinction bolsters the notion that refuge confers legitimate victim status—objects of conflict or persecution—that is open to abuse by “voluntary migrant pariahs in disguise.” Refugees are therefore compelled to negotiate this victim-pariah duality in which their status as legitimate victims is implicitly called into question and must be continuously proved. Refugeeness presents a challenging research terrain for scholars in that the specificities of refugee experiences as historical actors should be validated without bolstering the victim-pariah construct, particularly in Western reception contexts.

Politics of Subsidiarity in Refugee Reception: Comparative Perspectives

This Special Issue brings together articles concentrating on the politics of subsidiarity in relation to deterrence and dispersal, the involvement of non-state actors and the role of social workers and street level bureaucrats in the local implementation of reception policies. Based on empirical research, we address politics and practices of refugee reception from the vantage point of the politics of subsidiarity, which refers to the delegation of responsibility for refugee reception across different levels of governance as well as from state actors to the civil society. It comprises external conditions, such as the global impact of neoliberalism and the internal complexification of immigration politics.

Interaksi dengan Surah Al-Rahman di Pondok Pesantren Al-Manshur Putri Popongan Klaten

Living Qur'an is a variety of forms and models of reception practices and community responses in treating and interacting with Qur'an in the midst of community life. The purpose study is to describe how the history and practice of reading the surah Ar Rahman in the Al Manshur Islamic Boarding School Popongan Klaten and to find the meaning tradition of reading the Surah Ar Rahman for those who implement them include caregivers, administrators, and students. To find out more details, the writer uses qualitative research methods to understand what phenomena experienced by research subjects by describing in the form of written or oral words from the implementation of the tradition of reading the surah Ar Rahman. For the method of data collection techniques, the authors use interviews, notes, and documentation. The tradition of reciting surah Ar Rahman has been started since the old generation's predecessor, in 1978. For the way the recitation is done in a quiet voice, it must be polite and tawadlu'. The meaning of reciting surah Ar Rahman is to get syafa'at, facilitate all matters, get sustenance, and always get the blessing of Allah.

Systemic Intertextuality. A Morphogenetic Perspective

If late modern literary production is structured by any principles rendering order to the otherwise nebular character of the process, this is the idea of intertextuality that paves the way for the dissolution of well entrenched structures, literary conventions and institutionalized canons. By fostering and facilitating the erosion of boundaries between elite and popular culture, mechanisms of intertextuality show that literature is not only a fixed collection of texts, but also a dynamic social system including structured practices of production and reception together with their institutional, cultural and technological determinants. The paper aims to provide a sociologically-oriented model of intertextual relations taking place within the social system of literature. In this context, circulation, dissemination, and recycling of literary motifs is viewed from a perspective of morphogenetic processes which result in the structural elaboration and systemic change due to the mobilization of social, cultural, and economic capitals in an effort to alter pre-existent practices of signification. Consequently, literature is discussed as an intertextual system in statu nascendi, a sphere of social practices that knows no sense of institutional boundaries or structural constraints.

Mental health consequences of detaining children and families who seek asylum: a scoping review.

Almost 80 million people globally are forcibly displaced. A small number reach wealthy western countries and seek asylum. Over half are children. Wealthy reception countries have increasingly adopted restrictive reception practices including immigration detention. There is an expanding literature on the mental health impacts of immigration detention for adults, but less about children. This scoping review identified 22 studies of children detained by 6 countries (Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Netherlands, the UK and the US) through searches of Medline, PsychINFO, Emcare, CINAHL and Scopus data bases for the period January 1992-May 2019. The results are presented thematically. There is quantitative data about the mental health of children and parents who are detained and qualitative evidence includes the words and drawings of detained children. The papers are predominantly small cross-sectional studies using mixed methodologies with convenience samples. Despite weaknesses in individual studies the review provides a rich and consistent picture of the experience and impact of immigration detention on children's wellbeing, parental mental health and parenting. Displaced children are exposed to peri-migration trauma and loss compounded by further adversity while held detained. There are high rates of distress, mental disorder, physical health and developmental problems in children aged from infancy to adolescence which persist after resettlement. Restrictive detention is a particularly adverse reception experience and children and parents should not be detained or separated for immigration purposes. The findings have implications for policy and practice. Clinicians and researchers have a role in advocacy for reception polices that support the wellbeing of accompanied and unaccompanied children who seek asylum.

Scholarly Milton. Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.

<i>Scholarly Milton</i>. Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.

Beyond texts: Using queer readings to document LGBTQ game content

Queer readings of texts allow audiences, queer or not, to see the possibility for queerness in media that does not explicitly name LGBTQ identities. At times these readings are intended by creators but they need not be, as audiences themselves help establish the queer potential of texts through their own reception practices. Studying queerly read content in media necessarily requires moving beyond a singular textual object, as authorship, fandom, and reception practices are all central to identifying queerly readable content in media. Yet scholarship on queerly reading digital game texts has largely relied upon close academic readings of the text itself. Drawing on our ongoing project documenting a large number of games with LGBTQ or queerly read content, herein we argue that given the unprecedented access to fan queer readings online communities make available, we can expand our methodological toolkit for documenting this content. Specifically, rather than considering fan queer readings as data to be analyzed on its own, we argue that these sources can be read alongside game content and producer statements as evidence of queerness in game texts. That is, by moving beyond the text, scholars can address a larger scope of queer reading practices as well as properly value fan work. We conclude that queer readings available in these spaces allow us to archive and preserve queer reception activities, but also allow fans actively shape the meaning of these texts.

O letramento e a multimodalidade no ensino de língua inglesa: Práticas didáticas nos cursos técnico e tecnológico

O presente artigo visa relatar práticas no ensino de língua inglesa desenvolvidas nos cursos técnico e tecnológico e traz discussões acerca do conceito de letramento e multimodalidade. Os pressupostos teóricos abordados consideram as perspetivas de Greimas e Courtés (2008), Dionísio (2006), Kern (2000), Kress (2010) e Kress e Leeuwen(1996). Foram então desenvolvidas práticas nas aulas de Língua Inglesa do Curso Técnico em Química e Inglês Técnico no Curso Superior de Sistemas para Internet, as quais contaram com estratégias de leitura em suportes e modos diferentes, bem como produção de vídeos a partir de softwares, aplicativos e ferramentas da Internet, contendo legenda em inglês e áudio gravado pelos alunos. Os resultados foram significativos, pois além de os alunos apresentarem domínio de ferramentas tecnológicas, esses fizeram uso do texto escrito, imagem, elementos gráficos, som e fala. Portanto, a partir de práticas de receção envolvendo letramento, houve as produções que constituíram um sistema semiótico multimodal.

The Potentials of Digital Collaborative Platforms for the Innovation of Refugees’ Reception Strategies

The article presents a reflection on the possibilities that the information technologies and new apps developed in the context of the sharing economy may have in the processes of receiving refugees. In recent years, the narrative of migratory phenomena has emphasised the idea of an “out of control emergency”, negatively affecting the ability to imagine constructive answers to arising situations. After a review of definitions, numbers and reception practices in Italy, the article focuses on the inclusive models made possible by using digital collaborative platforms. The case of Refugees Welcome, an association that uses an online platform to connect people offering a room with refugees looking for a place in which to live is analysed in order to better understand its working model, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. The conclusion provides a reflection on the potential that this kind of approach may have in promoting social inclusion processes and supporting active citizenship among all individuals both directly and indirectly involved in the association’s activities.

A case of double standards? Audience attitudes to professional norms on local and English language radio news programmes in Ghana

AbstractThe proliferation of radio stations across Africa has engendered an increase in local language radio stations and fuelled culturally-rooted practices of news delivery considered by many media professionals as sub-standard. This article explores the reception practices of multi-lingual audiences in Ghana, focusing on their views on the different norms and approaches of local language and English language radio newscasts. Using data from a convenience sample of 1000 radio listeners in five Ghanaian cosmopolitan cities the study finds that audiences prefer more performative modes of news delivery on their local language stations. It was also evident that radio audiences are discerning and make distinctions between what is acceptable on local language versus English language radio. These results call for a reconsideration of western-influenced standards of news delivery and the development of professional standards more accommodating of the inflections of culture.

The development of an analytical framework to compare reception structures for unaccompanied refugee minors in Europe

ABSTRACT The UN Convention of the Rights of the Child stipulates that unaccompanied refugee minors (URM) are entitled to specific and adapted accommodation structures and care. Despite the general strive in EU policy to reach common standards for those reception structures, they still vary largely, resulting in unequal treatment and care conditions. In this article, we aim to build an analytical framework, based on central features of concrete reception practices in different EU countries, which can serve as a tool for in-depth comparative researches of reception and care systems. Starting from the comparative framework of Watters and Hossain [(2008). Policy in practice: Reception practices and minimum standards (End report for ARG project)], we draw a new framework on reception structures for URM based on insights from various disciplines and extensive participant observations in 58 accommodation settings for this group in different EU Member States. Our framework includes four analytical axes: (1) separation versus integration; (2) control versus autonomy; (3) immigration control versus welfare protection; and (4) low intensity versus high intensity care and illustrates how organisational arrangements and choices made within the different axes strongly influence the realisation of care and support. As such, this framework may serve as a first, necessary step in creating increased evidence on how reception structures may impact URM’ well-being.

Российское благородное собрание как пространство коммуникации дворянства и государя (1780-е – 1850-е годы)

For the first time in the historiography, the paper views the Russian (Moscow) Assembly of the Nobility as a communication venue for the upper class and the Emperor. Based upon archival documents, periodicals, letters, diaries and records of the contemporaries, the researcher focuses on the emerging reception practices by the public organization of the Emperor, as well as various ways of communication that arose between the monarch and his subjects at a ball. The spatial-hierarchical place of a person at a ball and at the festive table depended on his/her symbolic capital: rank, nobility, age, and personal acquaintance with the emperor and his family.&#x0D; The communication at a ball was secular by nature, and excluded any serious topics. The communication between the monarch and the nobility at a ball was of three types: dancing and body contact, verbal and visual. Imperial balls in the Russian Assembly of the Nobility aimed at strengthening the monarch's ties with the nobility and served as a crucial tool of publicly expressing the pro-monarchical feelings by the Moscow’s upper class. Therefore, the leaders and members of the assembly, who appreciated the symbolic value of these balls, spent huge amounts of money on their organization. The details of the monarch’s receptions in the Russian Assembly of the Nobility were published in newspapers.&#x0D; The research is based on a wide range of archival (Central State Archive of Moscow, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) and published sources: chamber fourrier journals, memoirs, notes and letters, as well as periodicals (newspapers Severnaya Pchela, Severnaya Pochta, Moskovskie Vedomosti). Many of these materials are first introduced into the academic domain.

Do health reception policies in the Nordic region recognize the rights of asylum-seeking and resettled refugee children?

According to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, it is critical that refugee children’s rights are upheld in all national policies covering vulnerable children. This article examines how health policies in the Nordic region recognize the health needs of newly arrived refugee children, and whether these policies respect their individual rights. The article maps out, compares and contrasts health reception policies in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, paying particular attention to how each addresses the rights and needs of refugee children. The policy documents were obtained through desk-research conducted from January 2017–January 2018. We analysed 34 national laws and guidelines that support the health reception of refugee children. We find that only a few health reception policies across the Nordic region have been written specifically for refugee children. The policies identified predominantly recognize refugee children’s right of access to somatic healthcare services, and to emergency services. Their rights to mental health services or broader health-enabling contexts were addressed to a lesser extent. We conclude that there is a need for further recognition of refugee children as rights-holders, and for the intentions of health reception policies to be expanded to include mental health services and health-promoting initiatives. Further research is needed on whether and how the current policies play out in actual health reception practices.

Socially Vulnerable Students’ Language Needs in Italian SL A Survey on Second Language Courses Provided by Reception Centers in Piedmont

This paper presents the results of a research on language educational practices related to the teaching of Italian as a second language (ISL), aimed at learners in the situation of vulnerability and disadvantage. In many contexts of welcoming, the need to reconcile the first reception practices relating to housing, sustenance and health, with the dimension of language teaching, is evident. The ISL teachers who work within emergency frameworks often experience a feeling of discomfort connected to the motivational dynamics: if the students receive the necessities of the essentials from those who deal with the reception and expect to stay in Italy for a short period of time, it is possible that there will not be intrinsic motivation for studying and exercising the language. The survey, divided into several operational phases, is based on a questionnaire submitted to the teaching staff that deals with the ISL education within the contexts of reception. The most significant aspect of the data analysis is the absence of communicative needs compared to the daily life of the students.

I bisogni linguistici nei corsi di italiano L2 rivolti ad utenti vulnerabili

This paper presents the results of a research on language educational practices related to the teaching of Italian as a second language (ISL), aimed at learners in the situation of vulnerability and disadvantage. In many contexts of welcoming, the need to reconcile the first reception practices relating to housing, sustenance and health, with the dimension of language teaching, is evident. The ISL teachers who work within emergency frameworks often experience a feeling of discomfort connected to the motivational dynamics: if the students receive the necessities of the essentials from those who deal with the reception and expect to stay in Italy for a short period of time, it is possible that there will not be intrinsic motivation for studying and exercising the language. The survey, divided into several operational phases, is based on a questionnaire submitted to the teaching staff that deals with the ISL education within the contexts of reception. The most significant aspect of the data analysis is the absence of communicative needs compared to the daily life of the students.

Infrastructures of reception: The spatial politics of refuge in Mannheim, Germany

This article investigates the spatial politics at play in the urban reception of refugees by proposing an infrastructural conceptualisation of humanitarian spaces. In doing so, it destabilises the assumption that urban infrastructures form the mere backdrop of humanitarian government by thinking the city as socio-technical networks. By advancing the notion of infrastructures of reception, we draw attention to those parts of urban space that establish relationships between refugees and the cities that host them. Thus, building on ethnographic material collected in and around a state-managed reception centre in Mannheim, Germany, the article advances a critical reading of the universal, humanitarian gestures the German state has employed towards refugees since 2015, juxtaposing the state's rhetoric with the actual spaces of refuge. An attention to the situated materiality of the reception centre and its policy framework exposes on one hand that Mannheim's reception gesture towards refugees was the outcome of risk-benefit calculations, and on the other that its spatiality contributes to its residents' immobility, containment and suspension. Ultimately, the article argues that an infrastructural approach to urban reception practices offers a pertinent theoretical and methodological tool to uncover its political trajectories through highlighting the refugee centre's ambivalent relationship with the city.

Popular music, digital technologies and data analysis: New methods and questions

This article explores how respondents to The Harkive Project ( www.harkive.org ) are enfolding streaming services and automated recommendation systems into their everyday music reception practices. Harkive is an online project running annually on a single day in July that invites people to provide detail and reflection on their experiences with music. Since the project first ran in 2013, it has gathered over 10,000 individual entries. It is conceived as an ongoing experiment in research methodology that attempts to produce an online social space that encourages reflection from respondents about the detail of their music reception practice, while simultaneously acting as a place able to replicate commercial practices around data collection and analysis. This article will demonstrate how such a research process can produce rich descriptive data from respondents who provide a useful snapshot of contemporary music reception practice. The article begins with an overview of how streaming services, data collection from numerous online channels and automated recommendation systems interrelate, and how together they raise questions around how people engage in acts of music reception. It then describes how Harkive is based on similar types of computational/algorithmic processing to those used by key players in the digital music space. The analysis that follows shows that although respondents are engaging in everyday use of streaming services and dynamic recommendations, this engagement tends to be spread across a variety of online channels used in differing combinations, and that it is often recommendations from ‘traditional’ routes, such as media outlets (newspapers, radio stations) and users’ own social groups, that feature prominently in respondent descriptions. Indeed, what Nowak (2016) calls the ‘affective’ element of recommendation appears to be rooted in existing practices that are still in the process of being transposed to the relatively recently emerged digital platforms, rather than – and sometimes in spite of – the rhetorical framing of those platforms as key sites for recommendation and discovery by the companies who operate them. Through a discussion of those findings, and based on an update of Michael Bull’s concept of ‘auditory nostalgia’ (2009), it is then suggested that examining how listeners are enfolding the new technologies of music reception into their everyday routines and routes to meaning-making may be a useful direction for future research. The article then suggests that a mode of working where scholars attempt to reflexively harness data-derived processes may be useful in producing that work, and that experimental and practice-led approaches could enable popular music scholars and listeners alike to develop better epistemic responses to the data-related technologies that have recently helped bring about such huge changes in our everyday music reception practice.

On the Enactment of Roundabout Art: A Praxeological Analysis

The growth in the use of roundabouts to regulate traffic in many European countries has been accompanied for some years now by the planned use of their central islands. With the enactment of roundabout art, a new art form has established itself in the public space. Cities and regions that make use of such deployments generally do so for urban branding and community identity building purposes. Taking a praxeological perspective, this article uses a case study from Austria to demonstrate that the success and failure of such urban branding and community identity building practices does not depend solely on the ideas of the actors involved in the planning and implementation of roundabout art. Instead, it requires a broad perspective in which the enactment of roundabout art is understood as a phenomenon that is the result of the realization of the roundabout art itself as well as of the self–development of these installations and the context–dependent reception practices of their target audiences. In doing so, the article works out and suggests some central aspects of urban branding as well as roundabout art planning, implementation, and reception practices that could be used by urban planners, politicians, and other actors engaged in such artwork projects.

The Visual Experience of Accessing Captioned Television and Digital Videos

The increase in video-based communication has made different caption styles more apparent to audiences, including hearing viewers who watch social media videos with colorful open captions. To explore how viewers respond to a variety of caption styles, this article shares findings from three focus group discussions with twenty deaf and hard-of-hearing college students. This article begins by discussing the accessibility of captioned television and digital media and how captions can influence the viewing experience. This article then analyzes deaf and hard-of-hearing focus group participants’ statements about their viewing experiences, reception practices, and critiques of aesthetic and accessible caption styles. The analysis of viewers’ feedback reveals how the tension between various approaches to captions contributes to the reshaping of television and online media: a reshaping in which captions are coming to the forefront of the viewing experience for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing viewers.

Nature and the Wonders of the Moving Image: John Ott's Postwar Popular Science Filmmaking

This article sheds light on the films of a now-obscure popular science film-maker named John Ott who was widely known in the 1950s for making time-lapse films about plant life that intersected with everything in postwar America from Walt Disney’s animations to computer science and natural theology. Drawing on original archival research, I show how Ott used the spectacle of nature to cultivate popular interest in the innovative automated moving-image techniques and technologies he developed to photograph the secrets of nature. In the process, I consider how Ott reanimated early cinematic aesthetic, exhibition, and reception practices that invite us to see the popular science film as a genre that is as much about exploring the nature and possibilities of new moving-image forms as it is about science education.