Rich Theoretical Insights Research Articles

Yellow Techno-Peril: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and anti-Chinese racial rhetoric in the US–China AI arms race

The rhetoric of an ‘AI arms race’ between the United States and China has become increasingly prominent over the past 5 years, despite warnings that it is unnecessarily polarising and undermines safe and ethical artificial intelligence (AI) development. However, existing critiques of the AI arms race narrative engage only sparingly with the racialised dimensions of this discourse. In this article, I draw on the rich theoretical insights of Asian American and Asian diaspora studies to show how the AI arms race narrative is deeply racialised in two key ways. First, I show how the rhetoric of an AI arms race builds upon the myth of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ between the West and the East. This civilisational rhetoric constitutes China and the United States as distinct and mutually opposed cultural entities, thus foreclosing the possibility of more peaceful and cooperative alternatives to the AI arms race. Second, I demonstrate how the US–China AI arms race specifically draws on previous racialised configurations of anti-Asian sentiment, such as techno-Orientalism and the Yellow Peril. I coin the term Yellow Techno-Peril to connote how older European and Americans fears of being overrun or controlled by China are reproduced in the AI arms race. I close by offering recommendations to key stakeholders such as policymakers, decisionmakers, journalists and media organisations as to how they can mitigate and avoid the racialised rhetoric of an AI arms race between the United States and China.

LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE OF FRENCH LANGUAGE IN TOURISM EDUCATION

A significant amount of momentum has been gained in French as a Foreign Language in recent times, and it continues to flourish as a language that is highly sought after by young people everywhere. The French language is considered to be an inescapable language in hotel schools, which is why it is interesting to note that the tourism business in India receives the highest number of tourists from France. Additionally, the French food has effectively established itself as an antique cuisine. During the time that Tourism and Hotel Management courses were being developed, the French language was more prevalent in the sense that it gained the most popularity and was believed to be required to be learned as part of the requirements for the course. Under the circumstances that currently exist, is the French language still a preferred choice? The purpose of this paper is to provide a response to this question and to take into consideration the various facets of the French language. This piece of writing is one of a kind since it employs the qualitative research method to portray the purpose in a manner that is both moving and compelling. This engaging narrative article is an interesting one to read and treasure because it is interwoven with primary and secondary sources and contains rich theoretical insights. KEYWORDS: French, Language, Tourism, Education

“Converging on a new theoretical foundation for selling” five years later: emerging priorities, new applications, & directions for ongoing research

PurposeNot that long ago, half of all sales research was demonstrably if not unequivocally “atheoretical” (Williams and Plouffe, 2007). The foundational argument of this paper is that stronger theoretical development and application of theory in sales research is critical for the sales field to retain its relevancy. The purpose of this paper is to underscore that deliberate and cogent application of HWV (2018) is scant in the recent sales literature (over five years after publication in Journal of Marketing) for one or both of two reasons: scholars either do not understand the paper and/or are fearful of (mis)applying it.Design/methodology/approachMore than simply introducing the articles to this special issue of the European Journal of Marketing (EJM), this paper also makes a number of important, overdue contributions. Although Hartmann, Wieland and Vargo’s JM (HWV, 2018) theoretical and conceptual paper has been well-received by the sales community, it has seen limited meaningful integration or application in sales research since its publication. This paper thus clarifies key misunderstandings and misperceptions with HWV (2018) so that sales researchers can more impactfully apply it to future sales research.FindingsThis paper identifies and then explains key aspects of service-dominant logic (S-D logic) and commonly misapplied and/or misunderstood aspects of HWV (2018) to guide future sales research. Ultimately, the overarching goal of this special issue of EJM is to focus a “spotlight” on sales theory development, while simultaneously demonstrating – through the five articles the special issue reports – that with purposeful effort, rich theoretical insights can effectively be applied to both “classic” and more current and emergent sales research topics.Research limitations/implicationsBecause HWV (2018) draw heavily upon S-D logic, it follows that some aspects of their article have been misinterpreted or misapplied by sales scholars. In particular, the critical concept of “crossing points” (both of the “thick” and “thin” variety) are explicated and detailed further, so as to afford sales researchers with better knowledge and insight on how to apply these key tools within HWV (2018).Practical implicationsThe practical implications of this paper primarily revolve around further educating and clarifying for sales researchers “how” to better apply HWV (2018) to sales research, rather than simply citing it in passing. The paper also concludes by providing a summary and introduction to each of the five EJM special issue articles.Originality/valueThe originality and value of this paper and this special issue of the EJM is twofold. First, both this paper and the entire special issue itself emphasize the ongoing importance of advancing sales research through the meaningful and cogent application of theory. Second, the paper demonstrates that purposeful effort can lead to successful applications of HWV (2018) – as exhibited by the five articles in the EJM special issue – such that rich theoretical insights can be woven into both traditional and contemporary sales research topics.

Challenges and Strategies of Western Football Coaches in the Glocalized Context of Chinese Youth Football: An Exploration of Cross-Cultural Competence

In the rapidly globalizing world of football, China's youth football landscape presents unique challenges for Western coaches trying to integrate their techniques. This research delves deep into the intersection of Western football coaching methodologies and China's intricate cultural and athletic fabric. Utilizing a qualitative research paradigm, focus group discussions, and in-depth interviews, the study highlights profound barriers, encompassing not just language but also deeper cultural, epistemological, and training philosophical differences. Beyond merely identifying challenges, the research underscores the importance of strategies like cultural immersion, active participation in local events, and collaborative workshops. These strategies not only bridge the technical and linguistic gaps but also foster mutual respect, shared learning, and deeper integration. This study, while rooted in China's context, contributes to the broader discourse on sports globalization, emphasizing the necessity for coaches to be globally aware yet locally sensitive. It culminates in providing both rich theoretical insights and actionable recommendations for crafting a harmonized, effective cross-cultural coaching paradigm in China and other culturally distinct regions.

Memory online: introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT This special issue brings together the scholarship that advances our knowledge on remembering in the age of the Internet and social media. The studies reported in the ten articles address diverse topics in three broad areas prominent in current research: offloading memory and the associated costs, benefits, and boundary conditions, autobiographical memory online, and false memory in a misinformation age. They employ innovative and rigorous methodological approaches that are ecologically valid in the online context. Their findings reveal complex and dynamic characteristics of human memory in a digitally mediated world that shapes our learning, our sense of self, and our beliefs and decision making. Collectively, the studies provide rich theoretical insights into the workings and functions of memory. This special issue ushers in a new era of research on memory in the age of the Internet and social media.

The Intersection of Memory and Identity

Recent scholarship suggests that an inextricable link exists between collective memory and collective identity. Scholars have helped advance the idea that the features collectives deem central and distinctive about themselves are dependent upon how they remember their shared past. The focus of this symposium, thus, is to assemble a group of scholars who have collectively advanced scholarship on both memory and identity to discuss the rich theoretical insights that have been, and can be, gained by investigating the unique connections between these two constructs. The symposium invites each panelist to elaborate on one of five theoretical developments at the intersection of memory and identity, including the importance of authentic memories and identities, the relationship between memories and the future, the evolution of memory, the role of outsiders’ memories, and the influence of memories of the displaced. We believe that each development included in this symposium is central to understanding the inextricable links between collective memory and collective identity in organizational contexts.

Unseen potential: photovoice methods in hazard and disaster science

While still a nascent field, disaster science is surprisingly methodologically stagnant, often relying solely on traditional surveys, interviews, and focus groups to gather qualitative data. Social science disciplines that have long contributed to disaster research and the practice of emergency management, however, have begun to explore the value of alternative, participatory methodologies and their potential contributions to knowledge generation. In this paper, we discuss one such participatory method, photovoice, and its potential contribution to disaster research. We explore the epistemological roots of the method, lay out the steps involved in conducting a photovoice study, and briefly review previous applications of the method. We then enumerate what we see as topics ripe for exploration using photovoice in hazard and disaster contexts. We suggest that photovoice is an innovative method for capturing understandings of hazards and disasters and for providing rich theoretical insights related to extreme events, which are intrinsically geographical and place-based. Photovoice not only offers policymakers a valuable window into the public’s understanding of issues related to extreme events, it also empowers individuals to consider their own capabilities to reduce risk in their communities and contribute to broader resilience building efforts.

“The Irish Conflict” and the experiences of female ex-combatants in the Irish Republican Army

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to critically explore the importance of the experiences of female former combatants during the Irish Conflict, colloquially known as “The Troubles” and outline key moments of resistance for female political prisoners during their time at Armagh jail. The paper will situate the analysis within a Foucauldian framework drawing on theoretical tools for understanding power, resistance and subjectivity to contextualise and capture rich narratives and experiences. What makes a Foucauldian analysis of former female combatants of the Conflict so inspiring is how the animation and location of problems of knowledge as “pieces” of the larger contest between The State, institutions of power and its penal subjects (ex-female combatants as prisoners). The paper has demonstrated that the body exists through and in culture, the product of signs and meanings, of discourse and practices.Design/methodology/approachThis is primarily qualitative methodology underpinned by Foucauldian theory. There were 28 women and 20 men interviewed in the course of this research came from across Ireland, some came from cities and others came from rural areas. Some had spent time in prisons in the UK and others served time in the Republic of Ireland or in the North of Ireland. Many prisoners experienced being on the run and all experienced levels of brutality at the hands of the State. Ethical approval was granted from the Queens University Research Committee.FindingsThis paper only examines the experiences of female ex-combatants and their narratives of imprisonment. What this paper clearly shows through the narratives of the women is the gendered nature of imprisonment and the role of power, resilience and resistance whilst in prison in Northern Ireland. The voices in this paper disturb and interrupt the silence surrounding the experiences of women political prisoners, who are a hidden population, whilst in prison.Research limitations/implicationsIn terms of research impact, this qualitative research is on the first of its kind to explore both the experiential and discursive narratives of female ex-combatants of the Irish Conflict. The impact and reach of the research illustrates how confinement revealed rich theoretical insights, drawing from Foucauldian theory, to examine the dialectical interplay between power and the subjective mobilisation of resistance practices of ex-combatants in prison in Northern Ireland. The wider point of prison policy and practice not meeting basic human rights or enhancing the quality of life of such prisoners reveals some of the dystopian features of current prison policy and lack of gender sensitivity to female combatants.Practical implicationsIt is by prioritising the voices of the women combatants in this paper that it not only enables their re-positioning at the centre of the struggle, but also moves away methodologically from the more typical sole emphasis on structural conditions and political processes. Instead, prioritising the voices of the women combatants places the production of subjectivities and agencies at the centre, and explores their dialectical relationship to objective conditions and practical constraints.Social implicationsIt is clear from the voices of the female combatants and in their social engagement in the research that the prison experience was marked specifically by assaults on their femininity, to which they were the more vulnerable due to the emphasis on sexual modesty within their socialisation and within the ethno-nationalist iconography of femininity. The aggression directed against them seems, in part, to have been a form of gender-based sexual violence in direct retaliation for the threat posed to gender norms by their assumption of the (ostensibly more powerful) role as combatants. They countered this by methods which foregrounded their collective identity as soldiers and their identification with their male comrades in “the same struggle”.Originality/valueThis paper is one of the first to explore the importance of the experiences of female former combatants during the Northern Irish Conflict with specific reference to their experience of imprisonment. The aim of this significant paper is to situate the critical analysis grounded in Foucauldian theory drawing on theoretical tools of power, resistance and subjectivity in order to make sense of women’s experiences of conflict and imprisonment in Ireland. It is suggested that power and resistance need to be re-appropriated in order to examine such unique gendered experiences that have been hidden in mainstream criminological accounts of the Irish Conflict.

Nobody Cares, Lah!" The Phenomenon of Flaming on YouTube in Malaysia

Objective: The purpose of this paper is to investigate what motivates people to provide malicious comments on YouTube in Malaysia. This study will also question the differences between how flaming is constructed in each video classification and how are flaming comments categorized.
 Methodology: This study uses qualitative methods. Literature review has been summarized to contextualize the research problem.
 Findings: The paper offers rich theoretical insights to understand the practical issue of ridiculous comments by internet users on YouTube.
 Implications: Flaming or making ridiculous comments on social media has been a serious issue in Malaysia and other countries with high internet usage. Findings of the study will help understand the views of YouTube community in Malaysia on flaming. The study may further help understand the issue of flaming on other social media sites.

Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality by Purnima Mankekar

Purnima Mankekar, Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 301 pp.Purnima Mankekar's monograph, Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality, is a dazzling example of the melding of ethnography and theory at its best. It is replete with detailed ethnographic vignettes, rich theoretical insights, and methodological, analytical, and conceptual innovation. Mankekar's project is to highlight the constitution and production of India and through the study of cultures among Indians both home (in India) and abroad (in the San Francisco Bay Area in the US). In doing so, she examines the production of India and Indianness through feminist analysis of textual and ethnographic archives of affect and temporality.I read the book-taking meticulous notes-while conducting follow-up fieldwork research in Kampala, Uganda. I often marveled at the ways in which analyses in the text spoke to the conditions and nature of the multiple South Asian diaspora communities that I was studying-as well as the of ethno-racial insecurity that circulate in postcolonial East Africa. Indeed, this work highlights both the analytical possibilities and limitations of predominant usages of diaspora in South Asian studies. It argues for the need to focus on connectivities between home and abroad diaspora populations via an analysis of cultures, as well as focusing on themes of affect and temporality in the study of diasporas and cultures. Critically, Mankekar provides the reader with a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying affect and temporality within a anthropological framework.Chapter 1 outlines the concept of as both an ethnographic and an analytic lens in the study. Mankekar noted that unsettlement occurs at two registers: at the level of subject formation, as when subjects are formed through unsettlement, and as a framework for thinking about the relationship between media, culture, and culture/ change (19). Through the selective staging of evocative ethnographic vignettes, Mankekar explores the sense of unsettlement among her informants in India and in the San Francisco Bay Area, examining how cultures enable the reconstitution of India and Indianness for these subjects. As a part of her broader political project, she deploys the notion of unsettlement, rather than diaspora, as a tool for denaturalizing the claims of the nation. This chapter, entitled Unsettlement, offers a rigorous and at times dense outline of the methodological, conceptual, theoretical, and epistemological interventions of the book. Indeed, I found it more helpful to go back to this first chapter to help grasp its arguments once I had read the analyses in the other chapters. It contains a lot of theoretical jargon that demands slow reading and needs to be unpacked by the reader in order to understand the construction of Mankekar's complex arguments.Embedded in her analysis is a re-theorization of public culture such that she conceives of public cultures in terms of and sensorial ecologies produced by the circulation of media and commodities (6). She builds on the work of Raymond Williams (1977); Benedict Anderson (1991); Charles Peirce (1958); feminist anthropologists who have studied the relationship between emotion and (such as Rosaldo 1984, Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990, Yanagisako 2002); and, in particular, Sara Ahmed's (2004) work on affective regimes in order to draw out the relationship between cultures and the that undergird processes of in/habitation, being moved, feeling attached, and feeling in or out of place (Mankekar 2015:15). Mankekar notes that transnational cultures participate in the production of phantasmic notions of India in both the homeland and the diaspora by generating a range of affects spanning nostalgia and longing, as well as disaffection, alienation, and at times antagonism (15). …

Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements By Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks Paradigm Publishers. 2012. 320 pages. $23.76 paperback, $138.55 hardback

Rosenthal and Flacks's Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements provides an astute analysis of how music in all its multifaceted forms and genres can serve an array of functions for social movements. Outside of appealing to scholars of culture and social movements, this book also speaks to activists and musicians, providing a much-needed analysis of the complicated—yet often synergistic—role that music can play in movements. In addition, even younger audiences of undergraduate students will enjoy some of the more colorful quoted passages from musicians who were interviewed for the book. Clearly, Rosenthal and Flacks's commitment to in-depth empirical research, along with providing rich theoretical insights, should place this work on the same bookshelf as other classics within the field of music and social movements (e.g., Denisoff's Sing a Song of Social Significance [1972]; Eyerman and Jamison's Music and Social Movements [1998]; Roscigno and Danaher's Voice of Southern Labor [2004]; and Roy's Reds, Whites, and Blues [2010]).

Contesting Media History

This paper is concerned with the relationship between theory and history in the development of media history as a subject area, and in particular the way that it has come to conceptualise power. Contesting Media History argues that the history of the communications has become increasingly isolated within its related disciplines, cut off from the rich theoretical insights developed elsewhere and provincialised into the ‘story of the present’. The paper traces the roots of this intellectual isolation in the neologistic frameworks adopted to explain new media technologies, which have selectively appropriated media discourses and practices to underpin claims of the novelty of new media, and in the fact that much of media history is written from the standpoint of institutional actors. These two factors taken together, I argue, produce a history which is overly dependent on monolithic themes; teleological, insofar as an essential and eternal nature is imputed to successful forms and institutions; inadequately accounts for th e relationship between changes in media production and changes in media texts; and neglects to place communications history in the context of broader social change. As against this the paper traces the outlines of a history of the media ‘from the ground up’, using a study of alternate constructions of the public sphere in late Victorian journalism as an example of the way a more inclusive history could be developed.