Use Of Cultural Theory Research Articles

“I Heard of PrEP—I Didn’t Think I Needed it.” Understanding the Formation of HIV Risk Perception Among People Who Inject Drugs

Uptake of pre-exposure prophylaxis medication (PrEP) to prevent HIV among people who inject drugs (PWID) remains extremely low in the United States. West Virginia’s rising HIV incidence and highest drug overdose rate in the nation makes it an important locus for opioid use and HIV risk interaction. In this pilot study we pioneered the use of Cultural Theory among PWID to understand HIV-related risk perception arising from four contrasting modes of social organization. Carried out during an HIV outbreak, we explored PrEP uptake qualitatively as a window onto risk perception. Of the 26 interviewees, 18 were HIV− and despite the medication’s free availability from the health center where recruitment took place, none had taken PrEP, half considering they were not at risk. Intimate couples who showed characteristics of ‘enclaves’ considered the boundary around themselves protective against HIV, creating a safe space or ‘invisible risk group’. Higher HIV risk was perceived among those who were housed compared to those living homeless. Beliefs about the causation of the local HIV outbreak and the validity of scientific research corresponded with characteristics of the contrasting modes of social organization and the approach is promising for informing public health interventions among PWID.

A bottom up approach to slowing fashion: Tailored solutions for consumers

Fast fashion has emerged in the last few decades, clothes have become cheaper, less durable and are purchased more frequently. Shifting consumers away from fast fashion is challenging, even for the more ethically minded. Individuals have different decisionmaking practices and respond differently to social norms. Even the most ethically minded engage in ‘grey’ consumption and are susceptible to planned obsolescence in fashion cycles (McDonald et al., 2012). There is, thus, a value-action gap in relation to clothing where environmental consciousness does not cohere with behaviours. In this paper we use cultural thematic schemata (from cultural theory) as a heuristic device to tailor solutions that could reduce the value-action-gap in relation to sustainable clothing based in-depth qualitative research. Recognising that consumers differ from one another, we suggest targeting the three ‘ideal types’ of personality derived from cultural theory - the egalitarian, the hierarchist and individualist. It is evident from the findings that bottom-up solutions such as making stations, social marketing, wardrobe audits and education are important enablers of slow fashion. They would work alongside a number of industry-led governmental and top down policies. Our novel use of cultural theory to the problem of fast fashion has enabled us to suggest bottom-up solutions, which can be tailored for maximum resonance with a broad range of people. It was clear for the huge majority of our research participants that social interaction was as important in shaping their views and behaviours as the learning of skills. This should be mimicked in any attempt to increase the life of, or upscale our work. Finding ways of expanding our project work from a small niche, to a mass market is crucial.

Jurnalisme sebagai Arena Pertarungan Kepentingan: Telaah Teori Kebudayaan

This paper is a theoretical study of the use of cultural theory which played to explain journalism activities that just not an activity to provide accurate information in the public space. In an industrial context, in fact journalism activities has face any complex situasion. Now, the activities is no longer exclusively owned by journalists, but journalism is a kind of football arena that have some interest in it. To present news, journalists must be able to absorb various interest from various trajectories. There is a game metaphor that journalists must follow, and how journalist do "practice" the game in the field of contestation, which will be explored using Bourdieu's cultural theory,Through this article, I hope, it can contribute to how anthropology plays a role in developing media studies, and vice versa, it can be a trigger for how anthropologists should begin to enter cultural studies which are not just exotic and simple social units; but also entered the study arena into more complex social units, for example in media organizations

National history and migrant history after the transnational turn: the French in Australia and the articulation of Frenchness

This article considers the advancements made in Australian historical scholarship since the transnational turn and how these can now be applied to the writing of national histories. In particular, by considering the case of ‘the French presence’ in Australia, it explores how transnational insights can help bridge the historiographical divide between ‘ethnic’ or ‘contribution’ history and mainstream Australian history through the use of cultural theory.

Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: Planning as expectation management

In 1973, Horst W Rittel and Malvin A Webber introduced the term ‘wicked problem’ in planning theory. They describe spatial planning as dealing with inherent uncertainty, complexity and inevitable normativity. This contribution picks up the concept of wicked problems, reflects on it from a planning-theoretical perspective, and proposes the use of Cultural Theory’s concept of clumsy solutions as a response to wicked planning problems. In discussing public participation processes in spatial planning, it is then shown what clumsy solutions mean for spatial planning. The four rationalities of Cultural Theory are then used to explain why public participation in planning can become wicked, and how these rationalities provide a response that copes with this wickedness.

Understanding the impacts of quality assessment: an exploratory use of cultural theory

Cultural theory is tentatively used to understand how far quality assessment affects institutions by influencing the group and grid dimensions. This paper argues that the self‐assessment phase of the Portuguese system, in use until recently, promoted the egalitarian (logic of mistrusting power and expertise) and the individualist (logic of freedom and autonomy) ways of life as its structure was based on academic cooperation and closed to society. However, the external assessment phase emphasised the individualist and hierarchical ways of life, the latter promoting the logic of authority and expertise. This analysis presents the dynamics of quality assessment as a step‐by‐step process rather than a broad‐spectrum development. This attempt to apply the grid/group cultural theory to the opinions expressed on the establishment of quality assessment systems of Portuguese universities is promising. Moreover, if it is accepted that pressures from outside will enforce the grid dimension, to avoid the fatalist way of life the group dimension should be reinforced, by adopting policies and strategies to increase the group membership. These policies might be linked either to social capital or to collegiality.

Cultural contextualization of indicators of human-environment interaction: the case of the Kola mining network

This article addresses the important but overlooked socio-cultural dimension of sustainability indicators. We use cultural theory to assess indicators of human-environment interaction in different cultural contexts in a case study of a mining-industrial complex in the Kola Peninsula, North-West Russia. The analysis yields results with implications on two levels. First, the article contributes to indicator theory by illustrating with the use of cultural theory how the choice of indicators on one hand and their value range on the other shape and are shaped by culture. Second, with its analysis of the long-term use of environmental indicators, the article contributes to the development of trans-national environmental policy in the North. The analysis contradicts the widely-held notion that Russia has moved from a hierarchic directly into an individualistic culture. We illustrate how between these two domains, an egalitarian cultural storyline has played an important role in the shaping of environmental indicators in the Kola Peninsula. We conclude that the presence of the three cultural storylines in different time periods should be taken into account in the environmental policy that the international community is currently promoting in North-West Russia.

Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada by Jonathan Kertzer (review)

'Blackness'is neither timeless nor universalbut geographically,culturally,historically , and politicallyconstituted.In fact, Kanneh rightlyargues,whatWalker'snovel fails to analyse is the 'poeticisation and narrativisation of a history which has continuously reinvented Black Americans from the time of slavery onwards' (p. I 6). African Identities is a studyrichlydetailed and admirablysophisticatedin its use of cultural theory and its engagement with the large number of writers it treats. Kanneh weaves highly diverse threads (literature, history, and anthropology) together as he highlights the multivalent meanings that Africa registers on the literaryimagination. The work'sinterdisciplinarynaturewill make it an invaluable resource in African studies, African-American studies, and cultural studies in general. Importantly,African Identities is a decidedly readablework. Forany reader interestedin the politics of literature,without a doubt, thisis a book worth reading. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ MARGO HENDRICKS Worrying theNation:Imagining a NationalLiterature in EnglishCanada. By JONATHAN KERTZER. (Theory/Culture) Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. I998. xi + 243PP. $40;?30. Worrying theNation,or more accurately,worryingabout discoursesof nationhood in contemporary Canada, offers a vigorous contribution to the latest phase of the debate about Canadian identity. Propelled by the 1988 MulticulturalismAct with its officialemphasison diversityand racialdifferenceas fundamentalcharacteristics of Canadian society, cultural and literarytheorists(especially English-Canadians) have been anxiously engaged with questions of how Canadianness might be redefined to take into account these late-twentieth-century shifts of emphasis in traditional demography and ideology. As a literary critic and cultural historian, Kertzer focuses his attention on problems relating to English-Canadian literary traditions and Canadian history. His anxiety at times borders on the apocalyptic: 'Whathappens to a national literaturewhen the very idea of the nation has been set in doubt?' (p. 5) or, echoing the title of E. D. Blodgett's I993 essay, 'Is a History of the Literaturesof Canada Possible?'(p. II). One of the major strengthsof this book is what we might expect from someone interestedin literarytradition,the appeal to history.Kertzer'sresearchmakesplain that debates over the possibility of a Canadian nation and a national literaturego back to pre-Confederation days in fact, with E. H. Dewart's 1864 Selections from Canadian Poets.As he shows, the dominant anglophone literary tradition which defined itselfin relation to nineteenth-centuryEuropean Romantic historicismhas always encountered problems in its attempts to formulate a discourse centred on homeland and national destiny. In his study of two mid-twentieth-centurynationbuildingpoems , E.J. Pratt'sheroicepic about the buildingof Canada'stranscontinental railway(1952) and Dennis Lee's CivilElegies (1972), Kertzerdemonstratesthat they are at best ambiguously celebratory. Pratt's adventurers and politicians encounter the 'uncanny alienness' of the land (p. 76) while Lee's anguished quest for an authenticnation failsto discoverany historicalor contemporarygroundsfor such authenticity.MargaretAtwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide toCanadian Literature, also published in 1972, belongs to this English-Canadian tradition, though her wariness about the future now looks like a harbinger of the radical shifts that Canada's discourse of nationhood is currently undergoing. In a chapter entitled 'The Nation as Monster' Kertzer charts the revisioning of traditional Canadian themes and values in recent ethnic, feminist, and Native writing, showing that in 'Blackness'is neither timeless nor universalbut geographically,culturally,historically , and politicallyconstituted.In fact, Kanneh rightlyargues,whatWalker'snovel fails to analyse is the 'poeticisation and narrativisation of a history which has continuously reinvented Black Americans from the time of slavery onwards' (p. I 6). African Identities is a studyrichlydetailed and admirablysophisticatedin its use of cultural theory and its engagement with the large number of writers it treats. Kanneh weaves highly diverse threads (literature, history, and anthropology) together as he highlights the multivalent meanings that Africa registers on the literaryimagination. The work'sinterdisciplinarynaturewill make it an invaluable resource in African studies, African-American studies, and cultural studies in general. Importantly,African Identities is a decidedly readablework. Forany reader interestedin the politics of literature,without a doubt, thisis a book worth reading. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ MARGO HENDRICKS Worrying theNation:Imagining a NationalLiterature in EnglishCanada. By JONATHAN KERTZER. (Theory/Culture) Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. I998. xi + 243PP. $40;?30. Worrying theNation,or more accurately,worryingabout discoursesof nationhood in contemporary Canada, offers a vigorous contribution to the latest phase...

Public perceptions of health risks from polluted coastal bathing waters: a mixed methodological analysis using cultural theory.

This article explores public perceptions of, and attitudes toward, possible health risks from polluted coastal bathing waters in the United Kingdom. Cultural theory is applied in the present analysis, using a mixed methodology of quantitative analysis from interviews and qualitative interpretation of focus group discussions to provide insights into how different cultural solidarities view a number of issues. These include risks to health; attitudes toward regulation; public consultation and information provision; and trust, blame, and accountability applied to different stakeholders in the bathing-water-quality debate. The results show that individuals' standpoints can be represented on a number of dimensions, consistent with cultural theory, including perceptions of power and authority, beliefs in the efficacy of collective action, and acceptance or rejection of incremental change as opposed to radical solutions. The discussion focuses both on methodological and substantive issues related to the use of cultural theory as a research tool, and on policy recommendations arising from this research.

Political and Theoretical Digressions

Part three of a four-part reply to the previous article, Stuart Cunningham, Jennifer Craik, Tony Bennett and Ian Hunter examine various aspects of John Docker's argument against regulation for Australian content on commercial television. Bennett focuses on Docker's use of cultural theory, examining his use of Bakhtin and offering an alternative account of commercial television's populism.

Dilemmas of presidential leadership from Washington through Lincoln

Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership challenges the widely accepted distinction between traditional and presidencies, a dichotomy by which political science has justified excluding from its domain of inquiry all presidents preceding Franklin Roosevelt. Rather than divide history into two mutually exclusive eras, Richard Ellis and Aaron Wildavsky divide the world into three sorts of people-egalitarians, individualists and hierarchs. All presidents, the authors contend, must manage the competition between these rival political cultures. It is this commonality which lays the basis for comparing presidents across time. To summarize and simplify, the book addresses two general categories of presidencies. The first is the president with a blend of egalitarian and individualist cultural propensities. Spawned by the American revolution, this anti-authoritarian cultural alliance dominated American politics until it was torn asunder by what Charles Beard has called the second American revolution, the Civil War. The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian presidents labored, with varying degrees of success, to square the exercise of authority with their own and their followers' ami-: authoritarian principles. They also were faced with intraparly conflicts that periodically flared up between egalitarian and individualist followers. The president with hierarchical cultural propensities faced different problems. While the precise contours of the dilemma varied, all straggled in one way or another to reconcile their own and their party's preferences with the anti-hierarchical ethos that inhered in the society and the polity. Hierarchical presidents like Washington and Adams were hamstrung by this dilemma, as were Whig leaders like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster who aspired to the presidency but never achieved it. .Abraham Lincoln's greatness resided in part in his ability to resolve the hierarch's dilemma. He operated in wartime when he could invoke the commander-in-chief clause, and he created a new cultural combination in which hierarchy was subordinated to individualism. This, suggest the authors, was a key to his greatness. The unique dimension of this volume is its use of cultural theory to explain presidential behavior. It also differs from other books in that, it deals with pre-modern presidents who are too often treated as only of antiquarian interest in mainstream political science literature on the presidency. The analysis lays the groundwork for a new basis for comparison of early presidents with modern presidents.

Modernization in communist countries: Some questions of methodology

Fast fashion has emerged in the last few decades, clothes have become cheaper, less durable and are purchased more frequently. Shifting consumers away from fast fashion is challenging, even for the more ethically minded. Individuals have different decisionmaking practices and respond differently to social norms. Even the most ethically minded engage in ‘grey’ consumption and are susceptible to planned obsolescence in fashion cycles (McDonald et al., 2012). There is, thus, a value-action gap in relation to clothing where environmental consciousness does not cohere with behaviours. In this paper we use cultural thematic schemata (from cultural theory) as a heuristic device to tailor solutions that could reduce the value-action-gap in relation to sustainable clothing based in-depth qualitative research. Recognising that consumers differ from one another, we suggest targeting the three ‘ideal types’ of personality derived from cultural theory - the egalitarian, the hierarchist and individualist. It is evident from the findings that bottom-up solutions such as making stations, social marketing, wardrobe audits and education are important enablers of slow fashion. They would work alongside a number of industry-led governmental and top down policies. Our novel use of cultural theory to the problem of fast fashion has enabled us to suggest bottom-up solutions, which can be tailored for maximum resonance with a broad range of people. It was clear for the huge majority of our research participants that social interaction was as important in shaping their views and behaviours as the learning of skills. This should be mimicked in any attempt to increase the life of, or upscale our work. Finding ways of expanding our project work from a small niche, to a mass market is crucial.