Social Genre Research Articles

Digitality in the Open Science age: practices and genres

No matter where we are in the revolution versus evolution debate, digitality has undoubtedly brought about radical changes of practices and genres. Today digital genres born in the Internet age as New Media resources (science news reports or science blogs) compete with a traditional print-based genre of a research article. Although few works have synthesized the interaction of these “old” and “newly-born” genres, the Open Science digitality context has not received considerable treatment in genre scholarship, and little attention has been given to such features of scientific genres as multimodality, interdiscursivity, participatory culture. Thus, the relevance is in the reconceptualization of the Open Science practices and classifying the Internet-born genres of science communication. The qualitative method of discourse analysis is used in the lens of the social semiotic and the social genre theory proposed by the New Rhetoric School. As a result, four groups are suggested: research genres, promotional genres, trans-scientific genres, presentational genres. As a result of the analysis, we have come to the following conclusions. First, hybridization penetrates all the discourse and language levels: written discourse is combined with oral discourse, scientific style – with spoken style, scientific discourse – with journalism. Second, multimodality competes with the writing-based space, thus getting the potential of a meaning-making tool. As a result, the concept “science” has been reconsidered; science has become not only the professional community property but an active area of engagement with other fields and audiences in the process of science popularization. Digitality serves more than a medium and genres are not only recontextualized but gained more complexity.

The Ritual Fusion

Abstract This article explores domestic religious practices of Iranian Muslim women in Los Angeles. In the diasporic context, Iranian women’s voluntary engagement in vernacular Islamic practices is often associated with an unreflexive pursuit of religion and lack of agency or with complicity with the Islamic Republic’s conservative brand of Shiism. To examine the complexities of such practices in the United States, this research relies on the ethnography of a monthly domestic gathering in LA that offers a hybrid blend of multiple devotional and social genres. The article demonstrates that the event’s performative and affective characteristics cater to a range of individual framings of the shared ritual and allow for complex and multilayered modes of engaging with the practice of faith. Further, it argues that vernacular Islamic practices in the diaspora are not always tied to individuals’ expression of religious conviction and pursuit of piety. By depicting the material and sensory aspects of the space, the article suggests that such rituals can serve as sites for engaging in a mode of diasporic nostalgia that does not commonly have a place in Iranian communities’ nostalgic narratives of the homeland.

Диалогизация дискурса и жанра в медиа

The article studies dialogization of media monologue messages aimed at intensifying the interiorization of new information into the addressee’s picture of the world by stimulating a dialogue with the audience. There have been singled out two levels of dialogization–discourse and genre. The analysis of the media content in the advertising and political types of communication, as well as discussions and talk shows on any topic, suggested that the most effective factor stimulating the recipient’s response is the provocativeness of the discourse, found in the topic under discussion, categorical statements, controversial points of view and defiant behavior of the participants. The author analyses communicative ways of dialogization of three genre types–informative, evaluative and incentive genres (according to L. Duskaeva’s classification). The study has found that important factors determining the dialogization of discourse and genre are the interactivity of the information and communication system and the convergence of genres, the product of which is, for example, such social network genres as a blog and a forum which in their modern form depend only on the creative potential of their authors. Particular attention is paid to the dialogization of the social advertising genre which does not imply interactivity, but the real objective indicator of its effectiveness is the audience’s awareness of the problem and their subsequent actions. The author presents two directions of dialogization: firstly, the strengthening of dialogueness and interactivity with the help of rhetorical means and techniques that appeal to the addressee; secondly, the verbal expression of the interaction of two or more semantic positions, a form of representation of media facts, which presupposes the reaction of the audience.

Social semiotic genre: exploring the interplay of words and images in advertising

This study examined the interplay of pictorial and written modes that position advertising as a multimodal genre, explainable through a social semiotic perspective. Eight advertisements of the financial, telecommunications, and beverage products functioned as devices of analysis. Nevertheless, multimodal communicative acts served as the processing tool, elucidating the meaning potentials of the advertising configurations. Having deployed a system of multimodal interacts, tables and graphs assisted in accounting for the frequency of the semiotic resources of the written modes. The analysis indicated large and highlighted fonts (Celebrating the world’s no. 1 fixer), repetitions (Guinness, Maltina, real deal), and deviant constructs (EazyLoans, GTWorld) as elements of propagating intended messages. The deployment of codes (*966*11#, 737) and fragmented clauses (Over N100 million worth of airtime) played some roles in the meaning-making operations. Of significance is the Guinness’ conceptual “digits” of 17:59, contextualising the year, time, and channel of promotional benefits. Though questions (Have you called mum today?), offer (It can be), and minor clauses (Welcome to Guinness time) were parts of the communicative systems, statements (Terms and condition apply) and commands (Enjoy the complete richness of Maltina) dominated the entire dialogues. One might suggest that communicators should endeavour to deploy apt constructions and create eye-lines between participants as means of sensitising readers into consumption.

Narrativised simile and emotional responses to Brexit

This study looks at two figurative ways in which popular media and social media represent the publics response to the process of implementing Brexit. Specifically, it contrasts analogies, which construe the nature of Brexit in terms of the nature of the problems arising (e.g. the impossibility of taking the eggs out of the cake ), with tweets relying on simile to express emotional responses. The focus of this study is on the nature of simile, as the trope of choice in profiling emotional responses, and especially on narrativised similative constructions, such as Brexit is like X , where X as an extended narrative. These similes match the real story of Brexit, which lasted several years, with other narrative scenarios. Crucially, the scenarios created are focused on how the person feels about the story of Brexit (e.g. the long period of hesitation and indecisiveness) and not on political affiliations and arguments. In effect, Brexit is like X framing could be loosely paraphrased as Experiencing Brexit makes me feel similarly to experiencing a narrative such as X , where X is a made-up story, depicting unimportant social events or movie genres. The emotions targeted in the Brexit is like X examples (such as disappointment, boredom, feeling exasperated or bemused) are complex emotional reactions to a narrative failing to reach a satisfying resolution. From the perspective of figuration, Brexit is like X similes suggest the need to re-evaluate the nature of simile as a conceptual mapping and to consider the role fictive stories play in expression of emotions. Also, the complex syntactic forms used to represent the narrative structure of X provide the material for reconsidering simile as a construction.

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THINGS

This essay explores the centrality and ambiguity surrounding the thing in recent attempts to articulate an object-oriented politics. Attempting to reconnect seemingly divergent ways in which the thing has been theorized – as object, as assembly, as the Freudo-Lacanian Ding – the discussion analyses the persistence of libidinally charged scenes of “naked” human encounter within efforts to orient politics around objects. Subtending a Western conception of assembly as the ideal modern political form, this persistent political object is described as the meeting, a social genre that has received little sustained philosophical attention but which shapes the everyday experience of the political. The meeting as an emotionally ambivalent scene of collective sensual encounter is articulated as a space of anti-politics in which political work is both done and undone. The essay concludes by illustrating the political dynamics of meeting within the emergence of European capitalism through the brief analysis of a painting by Rembrandt.

Imagine All the People: Characterizing Social Music Sharing on Reddit

Music shapes our individual and collective identities, and in turn is shaped by the social and cultural contexts it occurs in. Qualitative approaches to the study of music have uncovered rich connections between music and social context but are limited in scale, while computational approaches process large amounts of musical data but lack information on the social contexts music is embedded in. In this work, we develop a set of neural embedding methods to understand the social contexts of online music sharing, and apply them to a novel dataset containing 1.3M instances of music sharing in Reddit communities. We find that the patterns of how people share music in public are related to, but often differ from, how they listen to music in private. We cluster artists into social genres that are based entirely on aggregate sharing patterns and reflect where artists are invoked. We also characterize the social and cultural contexts music is shared in by measuring associations with social dimensions such as age and political affiliation. Finally, we observe that a significant amount of sharing is attributable to extra-musical factors—additional meanings that people have associated with songs. We develop two methods to quantify the extra-musicality of music sharing. Our methodology is widely applicable to the study of online social contexts, and our results reveal novel cultural associations that contribute to a better understanding of the online music ecosystem.

Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia by James Pickett

Reviewed by: Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia by James Pickett Alisher Khaliyarov (bio) James Pickett, Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 301 pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-50830. James Pickett's Polymaths of Islam is another great contribution in line with recent works of scholars on the history of Bukhara and its role in Eurasian history. Although the essential role that Bukhara's global connections played in its history in the early modern period has been well-established in the literature, Polymaths of Islam nonetheless builds on recent scholarship by showing the social orbit of this connectivity. The main argument of the book is that a specific elite class of Bukharan ulama emerged as "polymaths of Islam" by the nineteenth century. This was a unified social group that mastered the multiple social genres of Perso-Islamic writing during the nineteenth century and raised the centrality of Bukhara to a new level in the "Persianate cosmopolis." Pickett defines this cosmopolis as shorthand for the "transnational high culture" that was derived from Arabic and Islamic textual practices in Central Asia but was closely intertwined with power in the region. The ulama's mastery in law, medicine, astronomy, occultism, and beyond allowed them to wield substantial power by guarding their prerogative moral authority over knowledge, culture, and religion. Polymaths of Bukhara were the core personalities of knowledge centers of this "Persianate cosmopolis," which operated in the regional "inner ring" of Balkh, Badakhshan, and Farghana Valley (P. 75) through their intellectual networks. Despite the book's major focus on a slim layer of intellectuals, the scope of the research includes several regions and centuries. Pickett integrates a great deal of archival sources from almost every country in the region including untapped ones, which shows his great familiarity and erudition in multilingual sources. The author's scrupulous analytical skills with a dose of humor makes the Polymaths of Islam both an entertaining and enlightening book to read. The book consists of three thematic parts. In the first part, Pickett introduces and explains the concept of Persianate society and the Persianate cosmopolis. He explains that it is impossible to understand the Persianate cosmopolis through today's nationalist categories, which he finds "unhelpful at best and actively misleading at worst" (P. 18). The Persianate cosmopolis was built on the mixture of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic cultures and inclusive Islamic discourse, in which each of these nested in the others by creating [End Page 230] transregional knowledge networks. A representative of each cultural background could compete for the level of polymathy with necessary knowledge set in "'Speaking Persianate,' which meant articulating their world through a symbolic discourse that monopolized the available trajectories of social and political advancement" (P. 40). The second part of the book locates Bukhara in space and time with its uncontested role as a cultural and religious center. The educational infrastructure of Bukhara increased over centuries since the Shaibanids and reached its zenith under the Manghits who oversaw the staggering number two hundred madrasas by the twentieth century. The vast religious infrastructure allowed the flourishing of multiple genres of textual reproduction and compilations while also connecting the scholarly activities of the regional knowledge centers that Pickett calls "little Persianate spheres." The Islamic scholars who graduated from Bukharan education centers gradually placed the centrality of Bukhara over centuries by localizing Islamic sacred history, which the author calls the "mythologization project" (P. 44). The process accelerated over the course of the "long nineteenth century" (which the author identifies as from 1747 to 1917), making Bukhara the peerless center of the Persianate cosmopolis. The last part of the book (chapters 5 through 8) explains how the polymaths emerged and describes their relations with the Turkic nobility (the Manghit rulers of Bukhara). In these chapters, the author argues that by the nineteenth century, from the ulama of Bukhara emerged multitalented polymaths who were educated in interdisciplinary fields of Perso-Islamic knowledge including Sufism, jurisprudence, art, astronomy, and beyond, which made them uniformly eclectic. This skill set allowed them to work in various influential social roles and positions including qadi...

Penetras na Festa da Democracia

Este trabalho objetiva discutir aspectos discursivos das violências políticas de gênero vivenciadas por parlamentares brasileiras, considerando uma entrevista concedida por jovem Deputada empossada no ano de 2019. A análise de dinâmicas identificacionais do texto, com base em Resende e Ramalho (2019), van Leeuwen (1997), Castells (1999) e van Dijk (2017), permitiu compreender vieses sociais e discursivos nessa diferenciação e subordinação de gêneros sociais, ao investigar propriedades do discurso como o uso de expressões dêiticas, o tópico ou macroproposição da entrevista, as manobras de persuasão, os pressupostos e os acarretamentos lógicos ou inferências, as escolhas lexicais. Conclui-se que, para as mulheres, há relevante inter-relação entre o êxito nas eleições, o acúmulo de capital educacional e letramento político, além de acumulação e mobilização de recursos como capital econômico, visibilidade e inserção em posições de prestígio social (Vogel, 2019b).

Discovering Social Desires and Conflicts from Subculture Narrative Multimedia

This study aims at discovering social desires and conflicts from subculture narrative multimedia. Since one of the primary purposes in the subculture consumption is vicarious satisfaction, the subculture works straightforwardly describe what their readers want to achieve and break down. The latent desires and conflicts are useful for understanding our society and realizing smart governance. To discover the social issues, we concentrate on that each subculture genre has a unique imaginary world that consists of inventive subjects. We suppose that the subjects correspond to individual social issues. For example, game fiction, one of the popular genres, describes a world like video games. Under game systems, everyone gets the same results for the same efforts, and it can be interpreted as critics for the social inequality issue. Therefore, we first extract subjects of genres and measure the membership degrees of subculture works for each genre. Using the subjects and membership degrees, we build a genealogy tree of subculture genres by tracing their evolution and differentiation. Then, we extract social issues by searching for the subjects that come from the real world, not imaginary. If a subculture work criticizes authoritarianism, it might include subjects such as government officials and bureaucrats. A combination of the social issues and genre genealogy tree will show diachronic changes in our society. We have evaluated the proposed methods by extracting social issues reflected in Korean web novels.

De-celebrification: beyond the scandalous

ABSTRACTIn this article, we propose de-celebrification as a term in celebrity studies to designate celebrities losing legitimacy to inhabit the public role and possess the formal and symbolic power formerly attached to their celebrity status. De-celebrification does not refer to celebrities acting scandalously, as scandalous performances often play out within the confines of celebrification. By contrast, de-celebrification is occasioned by transgressions so serious that celebrification is eroded. In recent years, social media genres have rendered de-celebrified individuals visible in new ways. Media users have come to play an active role in the process of de-celebrification, as they reflect and contribute to the visual deconstruction of celebrities’ public image and visibility. Critical, playful and humorous internet memes constitute a central case in point. To illustrate our arguments, we engage analytically with internet memes generated in relation to two recent cases of de-celebrification: Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey.

The Economics of Everyday Life in “New” Socialism

The article explores the effort by economists and economic journalists in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s to translate economic knowledge to the political language of reform communism. Czechoslovak economists aimed to cultivate public understanding of economic issues and to disseminate economic knowledge among the nonacademic public, not only through politically engaged writing in the journal Ekonomická revue, but also through research on management to change managers’ behavior, habits, and competencies. In this important communication with nonacademic recipients, experts translated their economic knowledge to the specific managerial language of advice and personal self-development. A significant part of management studies literature was concerned with capitalist economies, especially capitalist managerial praxis. It thus contributed to the social academic and journalistic genre of the 1960s that focused on exploring capitalism and the West.

Genres and situational appropriation of information

PurposeInformation science research has begun to broaden its traditional focus on information seeking to cover other modes of acquiring information. The purpose of this paper is to move forward on this trajectory and to present a framework for explicating how in addition to being sought, existing information are made useful and taken into use.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual enquiry draws on an empirical vignette based on an observation study of an archaeological teaching excavation. The conceptual perspective builds on Andersen’s genre approach and Huvila’s notion of situational appropriation.FindingsThis paper suggests that information becomes appropriable, and appropriated (i.e. taken into use), when informational and social genres intertwine with each other. This happens in a continuous process of (re)appropriation of information where existing information scaffolds new information and the on-going process of appropriation.Originality/valueThe approach is proposed as a potentially powerful conceptualisation for explicating information interactions when existing information is taken into use rather than sought that have received little attention in traditional models and theories of human information behaviour.

Do Intersectional Variations Shape Prisoners’ Understanding of Their Past Lives? An Examination of the Stock Narratives of Persistent Offenders

Narratives have returned as an important resource for understanding how prisoners make sense of their lives. However, as a number of scholars have pointed out, these narratives do not emerge sui genersis; they are drawn from social constructs and cultural genres available to individuals. Using data gathered from a Life History Calendar and a modification of Canter and Youngs (2015) Life as a Film, we investigate whether the multiple locations individuals occupy (based on their race and gender) influence their narrative accounts and the contribution of both social structure and agency to these accounts. Our analyses of the narratives of 95 male and female persistent offenders’ (of whom 30 are Black and 65 are White) reveal the structural disadvantages, and advantages, they had experienced as well as the narrative tropes they deemed to be culturally relevant given their race and gender.

Translating the Christian Moral Message: Reading Liang Fa's Good Words to Admonish the Age in the Tradition of Morality Books

This paper seeks to interpret Good Words to Admonish the Age, the most important writing of the first Chinese Protestant pastor, Liang Fa (1789–1855), in its complex relations with the tradition of morality books (shan shu). By doing so, the paper attempts to show Liang's subversive adoption of an existing social and religious genre that enjoyed widespread acceptance at the time. While Liang affirms the significance of moral values, he also distinguishes those practices held by morality books as meritorious from actual moral uprightness. In contrast, moral good for Liang is a result of divine intervention (that is, salvation) and a Christian duty, thus transcending the conventional purpose of earthly reward or securing one's own fate for blessings. In crafting his Good Words, the morality-book tradition forms an essential point of contact that Liang appropriated and adapted for delivering his Christian message – a message that is also in competition with the conventional moral view of salvation. For Liang, these moral tenets, which he still holds dear after his conversion, now culminate in a theological knowledge of God and his salvation plan.

SOCIALISM IDEOLOGY IN NOVEL O BY EKA KURNIAWAN (Genetics Structuralism Study)

AbstractThis research points to gain the comprehensive of socialism ideology in novel O by Eka Kurniawan investigated by genetical structuralism. A novel is an interesting literary work contains kinds of topics inside, but there is stil a line or certain contents on it. A social genre novel brings social stories in this research. This research inspects how socialism ideology described in this novel by genetics structuralism. The focus goaled to find out how does socialism ideology describe the existence of humanism fact in novel O based on genetics structuralism. Analytic method used in this research, it observes attentively technic and notes after the writer read and studied the novel many times to gain a better comprehensive. Research result shows that there is socialism ideology based on humanity fact described in novel O written by Eka Kurniawan has seen on a police character that is social classes cover ; lower social class taken by a monkey, a description of lower society beside police as a middle class.Keywords: Socialism Ideology, Novel O, Genetics Structuralism

Four-Meter-High Gods and Heroes: Mythological Bodies

The earliest genre of Indian film, the Mythological, presented the gods and heroes from the myths and epics of Hinduism in a new medium, with all the entrancing corporeality that the cinema screen suggested. Audience reception, to be found in an energetic culture of newspaper review, over time expresses not only the changing tastes of a maturing filmic critical faculty, but the way in which this feedback influenced cinematic portrayals, often leading to an eventual transmogrification of beloved characters. The physical representation on the screen of the bodies of divinities and avatars presented different problems to producers as their concerns grew to encompass not only censorship, but competition from other increasingly popular genres; such as the social genre film, in which sexuality could be scrutinized by the audience while pruriently censured. Films of such genres came to accommodate those physical types that had long been a staple of the Mythological genre, its champions and villains, along with its stories; without the growing confusion that the Mythological genre displayed in the physical portrayal of characters, or in faithfulness to character histories or even names. The alterations over the period of the genre’s dominance and decline, to clothing, sexuality and personal relationships, extended to the representation of myth and epic in other mediums, that of picture books and television, the two worlds in which the Mythological genre was reincarnated.

Seeing through Scandinavian exceptionalism: Tina Enghoff’s photography

In the three works Seven Years (2010), Migrant Documents (2013) and Isolation (2017a), Danish photographer Tina Enghoff addresses the visual and social marginalization of immigrant women caught in abusive relationships, homeless migrants who live outside the welfare system and prisoners in solitary confinement. The article discusses how her projects probe established ideas about Denmark as an ideal Scandinavian welfare state, ostensibly with a high level of social equality and transparency, as well as low levels of injustice, crime and punishment. It is also argued that a photographic practice like Enghoff’s offers original and productive negotiations of questions of representation and visibility embedded in the social documentary genre.

Just us, just discussing: imagined homogeneities in the Gender Studies classroom

This article explores practices of othering through formations of normative sameness in discussion-based seminar classrooms. It takes literary scholar Stanley Fish's question, ‘Is there a text in this class, or is it just us?’, back into the classroom to explore the formation of a ‘just us,’ an imagined homogeneous interpretive community which, I argue, has discriminatory effects by normalising some voices and practices. It draws on feminist and anti-oppressive theory to discuss ways to pedagogically trouble the enactment of homogeneous interpretive communities in the Gender Studies classroom. As the Gender Studies teacher, I devised pedagogical practices based on the allocation of specific roles as a way to work towards an anti-discriminatory classroom by de-mystifying academic practice and framing seminar practice as a social genre. The article critically reflects on students' subsequent reluctance to take on roles and their preference for free-flowing discussions, doing what comes naturally, a ‘doing' of academia which, I suggest, is linked to social privilege.

The Frivolous Scene: Cosmopolitan Amusements in Mexico City's 1920s

This article historically excavates the ludic performance scene and transregional leisure culture that significantly shaped Mexico City’s farandula , or entertainment industry. It focuses on theatrical revue, cinema, and the cabaret scene of the 1920s, an overlapping arena of cosmopolitan combustion, frivolous pleasures, and aesthetic experimentation that would play a critical role in revamping public life after the Revolution (1910–1917). Defined by the commercial exchange of music, song, dance, and also sexuality, the city’s theater and dance venues created a key matrix for the emergence of sound media, particularly the radio and musical film industries of the 1930s. More than any other phenomena, including silent cinema and Hollywood, the city’s amusement milieus established the conditions of possibility for show business, as they created a space for emerging social relations, aesthetic formats, and genres of labor and leisure. This article argues that the city’s expanded arena of lowbrow diversions was fundamental, and not merely incidental, to the consolidation of an entertainment industry as a counter-public sphere. The implications of this shift are crucial to writing an account of public amusements and mass culture that challenges existing national and transnational historiographies: grounded in urban history, my exploration of entertainment practices reveals how travelling comediennes and troubadours, regional migrants and itinerant impresarios, congregated in the capital as they moved to the beat of show business. In doing so, I outline an argument for how to think about the ways in which Mexico City’s frivolous, playful, and commercial culture played a pivotal role in the making of the modern.