| 1. |
- Andersson, Karin, 1990-
(författare)
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Finding fun in the fatigue : Exploring healthism among group fitness instructors
- 2024
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The concept of health is culturally contingent, and fitness practices provide a venue to gain insights into the construction of health. In this case study-based article, I focus on group fitness instructors' narratives on healthiness and fitness rituals. By combining Foucault's notion of the 'microphysics of power' and the socio-cultural phenomenon healthism, I employ a genealogical approach that reveals how healthism renders a discursive space for group fitness instructors ('local fitness experts') to navigate their understanding of health norms. A qualitative method consisting of 22 semi-structured interviews was used. Group fitness instructors teaching in Austria for a global group fitness distributor (Les Mills) were interviewed. The results show that eliminating risks to health is the highest imperative to the instructors, which is traced back to a dichotomy between 'disciplined training' and 'fun training', where fun training is seen as feminine and risky. Furthermore, instructors underline their health literacy through skeptical consumerism - choosing health for the sacrifice of fun or finding fun in the fatigue.
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| 2. |
- Andersson, Magnus
(författare)
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Multi-contextual lives : Transnational identifications under mediatised conditions
- 2013
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 16:4, s. 387-404
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Influenced by the call for ‘non-media-centric media studies’, and based on interviews with transnational professionals and forced migrants, this article scrutinises transnational identifications under mediatised conditions. With the point of departure in space/mobility and everyday life practices – the common denominators in the perspectives of transnationalism and mediatisation – the analysis shows that mediated deterritorialisation is conditional due to migrants’ sociocultural resources and earlier life experiences. Hence, experiences of war and conflict may reduce the potential of mediated mobilities. The article demonstrates how media are an integrated part of migrants’ multiple identifications with the city they reside in and their country of origin. Besides establishing multiple identifications, the article shows how these identities are linked to particular contexts, practices and socialities in the migrants’ everyday lives. The conclusion is that mediatisation and transnationalism are complex matters yet a transdisciplinary, contextual and ‘non-media-centric’ approach seems to be a promising way to grasp these complexities.
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| 3. |
- Askanius, Tina
(författare)
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Engaging with The Bridge : cultural citizenship, cross-border identities and audiences as ‘regionauts’
- 2017
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 22:3, s. 271-290
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores civic engagement with the Danish/Swedish crime series The Bridge (Danmarks Radio/Sveriges Television 2011–) based on qualitative interviews with 113 audience members, and drawing on the notion of cultural citizenship. The perspective of cultural citizenship, as understood and operationalized mainly by Hermes, is married with critical perspectives on the crime drama genre and its audiences, along with cultural analysis of the construction of and engagement with the cross-border region in which the drama is set. The analysis shows that civic engagement with the crime series is prompted through the construction of community and allegiances through which audiences feel connected. This argument unfolds in three main analytical sections, detailing how audiences’ articulations of community are focused around distinct yet overlapping dimensions of community as (1) a national social ritual, (2) a sense of Nordic community, and finally (3) community as regional identity and sense of belonging to a borderless Öresund utopia – the integrated region between Denmark and Sweden. In so doing, the article offers rich insights into how audiences shape civic identities as members of nation states, of historical and cultural regions and as border-crossers between these geo-cultural entities - in dialogue with popular culture and around the boundary-work of the different communities offered by such texts.
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| 4. |
- Berglund, Karl, FD, 1983-
(författare)
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Genres at Work : A Holistic Approach to Genres in Book Publishing
- 2021
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 24:3, s. 757-776
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents a holistic approach to the study of genres in book publishing that includes formal aspects of literary texts, marketing strategies and categorisations used by producers, and perspectives on how these labels are perceived by readers and critics, as well as a temporal and spatial understanding of how genres evolve. The empirical point of departure is the recent boom in Nordic Noir, exemplified by the following three Swedish authors successful in the 21st century: Lars Kepler, Jens Lapidus and Camilla Läckberg. The discourses surrounding Nordic Noir and how these authors and their writing relate and get related to it are used as an example of how book-trade genres operate in multiple and complex ways, and how genres produce effects that move back and forth among creators, producers and consumers. It proposes a twofold model, where genres are understood as constituted by all of the relations between these areas together. Through Kepler, Lapidus and Läckberg, the article shows how Nordic Noir has emerged over the years; how it changes with its publishing context; and how the genre’s internal discrepancy between literary content and marketing and reception is a crucial component in understanding Nordic Noir.
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| 5. |
- Bolin, Göran, 1959-
(författare)
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Passion and Nostalgia in Generational Media Experiences
- 2016
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 19:3, s. 250-264
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- One component in the generational experience strongly related to media is the intimate and often passionate relation that is developed towards media technologies and content from one’s formative youth period: musical genres and stars, as well as reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tapes, comics and other now dead media forms. Passion, however, is a dialectic concept that not only refers to the joyful desire and intense emotional engagement of cherished objects but also includes its dialectic opposite in the form of pain and suffering. This passion, it is argued in the article, is activated by the nostalgic relationships to past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to earlier life phases of one’s own. Taking its point of departure in generational theory of Mannheim and others, this article analyses a series of focus group interviews with Swedish and Estonian media users tentatively belonging to four different generations. Based on the analysis of these interviews, it is suggested that passion and nostalgia are produced, first, in relation to old technologies, second, in relation to childhood memories and, third, at the limits of shared intergenerational experience, that is, at the moment when one realises that one’s own experiences of past media forms cannot be shared by younger generations, and especially one’s own children.
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| 6. |
- Bolin, Göran, 1959-, et al.
(författare)
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The soft power of commercialised nationalist symbols : Using media analysis to understand nation branding campaigns
- 2018
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 21:5, s. 527-542
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Since the late 1990s, nation branding has attracted a lot of attention from academics, professional consultants and government actors. The ideas and practices of nation branding are frequently presented by branding advocates as necessary and even inevitable in the light of changing dynamics of political power and influence in a globalised and media-saturated world. In this context, some have argued that nation branding is a way to reduce international conflict and supplant ethno-nationalism with a new form of market-based, national image management. However, a growing body of critical studies has documented that branding campaigns tend to produce ahistorical and exclusionary representations of the nation and advance a form of ‘commercial nationalism’ that is problematic. Importantly, the critical scholarship on nation branding has relied primarily on sociological and anthropological theories of nationhood, identities and markets. By contrast, the role of the media – as institutions, systems and societal storytellers – has been undertheorised in relation to nation branding. The majority of the existing literature tends to treat the media as ‘neutral’ vehicles for the delivery of branding messages to various audiences. This is the guest editors’ introduction to the Special Issue ‘Theorizing Media in Nation Branding’, which seeks to problematise this overly simplistic view of ‘the media’ and aims to articulate the various ways in which specific media are an integral part of nation branding. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach and problematises both the enabling and the inhibiting potentialities of different types of media as they perpetuate nation branding ideas, images, ideologies, discourses and practices.
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| 7. |
- Brock, Maria, et al.
(författare)
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From high camp to post-modern camp : Queering post-Soviet pop music
- 2021
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 25:4, s. 993-1009
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article examines the post-Soviet transformations of Russian popular music culture (Estrada), arguing that its aesthetics can be analysed from the perspective of camp, by looking at two cult music performers bridging the Soviet and post-Soviet realm – Valery Leontiev and Filipp Kirkorov. The analysis is grounded in a close reading of the artists’ career trajectories, selected videos and – to a lesser extent – textual analysis of their lyrics and public statements. The article argues that their performative personas are rooted in a particular version of camp with differing modalities of subversiveness – each responding both to their respective cultural and political climates, audience expectations, and also in accordance with their individual embodiments of (post)-Soviet camp. While Leontiev demonstrates a more earnest commitment to high drama, Kirkorov continues his ironic experimentation with transgression, ambiguity and excess, thereby participating in the queering of post-Soviet popular culture. The article concludes that their appropriation of camp is strategic, as it responds to the temporal, national and global trends such as global gay culture and neo-camp in Russia.
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| 8. |
- Cascone, Miriana
(författare)
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Book review: Koen Leurs, Digital Migration
- 2023
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : Sage Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 26:5, s. 776-777
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Recension (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 9. |
- De Leeuw, Sonja, et al.
(författare)
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Migrant children's digital stories : Identity formation and self-representation through media production
- 2007
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - London : Sage Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 10:4, s. 447-464
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article starts out from the European research project Children in Communication about Migration (CHICAM). It addresses questions about intercultural communication via the internet and about media production as a vehicle for personal expression and identity formation among excluded youth groups. The article starts out from a cultural theoretical perspective linked to an empirical analysis, which is based on a series of selected productions made by 12 to 14-year-old refugees. The productions represent various programme genres and formats. The use of visual language such as representational conventions are highlighted in order to find out how identities are (re)created in the process of media production. The article touches upon these productions as they reflect not only experiences in dealing with cultural tensions between the 'old' and the 'new' world, but also their views on their future life and on the conditions that they find crucial in developing themselves.
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| 10. |
- Doona, Joanna
(författare)
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Civic stage fright: Motivation and news satire engagement
- 2021
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Ingår i: European Journal of Cultural Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1367-5494 .- 1460-3551. ; 24:4, s. 850-868
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores news satire engagement and civic motivation, an area of concern in satire scholarship. Focused on what audiences ‘do’ with media, the ways in which young adults who regularly engage in news satire construct political efficacy is studied. Using a qualitative contextualising audience study, including in-depth interviews and focus groups with 31 young adults, a thematic analysis of transcript data identifies three discursive themes relating to civic anxieties; development and invitation, performance and knowledge, and conflict and ‘packaged deals’. These emphasise news satire as cultural form as well as shifting civic ideals and development processes: exposing how news satire’s ‘kynicism’ (non-nihilist criticism) connects to civic performance anxiety. The identified anxieties are understood as related to fears of exclusion, embarrassment and misrepresentation. The metaphor of civic stage fright is developed to further understand these, underscoring the role of emotion and social interaction in civic performance.
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