Search

Attempts by universities to provide an improved learning environment to students have led to an increase in team-teaching approaches in higher education. While the definitions of team-teaching differ slightly, the benefits of team-teaching have been cited widely in the higher education literature. By tapping the specialist knowledge of a variety of staff members, students are exposed to current and emerging knowledge in different fields and topic areas; students are also able to understand concepts from a variety of viewpoints. However, while there is some evidence of the usefulness of team-teaching, there is patchy empirical support to underpin how well students appreciate and adapt to team-teaching approaches. This paper reports on the team-teaching approaches adopted in the delivery of an introductory journalism and communication course at the University of Queensland. The success of the approaches is examined against the background of quantitative and qualitative data. The study found that team-teaching is generally very well received by undergraduate students because they value the diverse expertise and teaching styles they are exposed to. Despite the positive feedback, students also complained about problems of continuity and cohesiveness. (Contains 1 table.)

The article explores how intercultural relations can be fostered at the level of an undergraduate university degree during the pandemic. It offers one specific intervention within intercultural education to provide new ways of thinking about how intercultural relations can and do happen. By drawing on the self-reflexive narratives of the article's authors – a university lecturer and three students – we consider the ways in which intercultural education can enable people from diverse cultures to build a learning community. On the basis of a thematic analysis, we explore the role of reflection and action in the creation of intercultural knowledge that can lead towards developing meaningful relations and can assist in further supporting students in their well-being. We first map some key issues in intercultural education at the university level and provide a short literature review. Secondly, we briefly describe our intercultural initiative. We put our narratives into conversation in order to facilitate deeper understanding of how to build meaningful intercultural relationships, while learning, and collaborating together. Our goal is to reflect on perceptions of the quality of intercultural relationship experiences at the level of a university degree and to show how complex relational work fostered intercultural collaboration during the pandemic. On the basis of our inductive research, we offer an original approach to fostering intercultural education based on four stages: constructing and fostering an initial encounter; promoting group participation; emphasising reciprocity; and constructing activities to promote trust and care. Our experience demonstrated how forming intercultural relationships can meaningfully help students with their expectations, aspirations, and ultimately, careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the link between the increasingly important role of automated information curation online and the rise of what we call 'commercial populism'. We invoke the term to refer to the convergence of populism as a marketing tool – a way of selling, for example, nutritional supplements or survivalist merchandise – with political strategies that cater to the citizen as consumer (whose freedoms are framed in the individual register of personal taste unfettered from civic concerns or constraints). Perhaps unsurprisingly in this context, we draw on the example of Donald Trump's political rise, which while not unrelated to his particular idiosyncrasies, demonstrates how the automated curation of social media aligns itself with what the aggressive rise of commercial populism. The goal of such an analysis is to consider how the combination of hyper-commercialism with the formal attributes of social media contributes to inter-related political pathologies of polarization and conspiracy theory. The consumer-oriented model of personal taste catered to by algorithmic curation highlights the paradox of 'social' media: they promise to enhance the social by displacing or reframing it fundamental a-social. The offloading of social decisions and formation onto commercial, automated systems for curating news and information reinforces this version of individualism, contributing to the forms of misrecognition that enable it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the international incident sparked by Djokovic's arrival in Australia, unvaccinated, to consider the forms of citizenship associated with the rise of nation branding and its attendant forms of commercial nationalism. The combination of commercial and national identity highlights the convergence of the economic and political characteristics of commercial nationalism. This is a context in which consumer sovereignty reconfigures and displaces civic commitments. To explore the dimensions of this version of citizenship and the tension between its existence and alternative versions, we interviewed 12 Serbian Australians shortly after the Djokovic incident (March-May 2022) and conducted a media textual analysis of Serbian and Australian media. We argue that Djokovic became an avatar for the elevation of a consumerist version of citizenship in which the social contract featured as a form of oppression from which consumers-as-king can exempt themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yugo-nostalgia, which paradoxically recalls a shared cultural history while providing the resources needed for new forms of national identities that continue to divide the former Yugoslav republics, is investigated.

The media education integration into the Slovenian educational system was assessed on the basis of interviews with mass education teachers. Results show that the prescribed media education's objectives are not realized in the daily pedagogical practice, due to the lack of continuous support from the educational, financial, technological, and motivational structure for media education teachers from the Slovenian Ministry of education and Sport.

This article explores the relationship between the nation, the city, narratives, and belonging in Serbia through an analysis of narratives of a set of 30 interviews with young Belgrade intellectuals [...]

Concerns about the impending implementation of facial recognition technology in public and shared spaces go beyond privacy to include the changing relationship between space and power. This article explores the relationship between automated identification and social sorting, decision-making, and response. To develop a theoretical framework for considering the ways in which facial recognition technology reconfigures power relations, the article considers the effects of treating the face as what Harun Farocki calls an "operative image": not a representation, but part of a sequence of operations. These operations deprive the face of its distinctive character to facilitate the automated governance of space. For Foucault, environmentality focused on the governance of populations, but digital technology individualizes and particularizes this process. Facial recognition technology raises issues of public concern not simply because it changes the conditions of privacy and recognition in shared spaces, but because it enables new modes of automated control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a theoretical response to the recent interest in virtual reality (VR) as a technology for enhancing empathy. It argues that the version of empathy envisioned by the champions of the technology—one in which care for the other is a function of being able to collapse the other's experience into one's own—runs counter to the very concept of empathy, as originally construed, which preserves otherness in its alterity. The point is not simply to invoke a historical concept of empathy to contrast with the VR version, but to emphasize its enduring salience in response to recent technological developments. There is little doubt regarding the need for empathy, in the sense explored in this article, as we confront the pathologies of political fragmentation and social polarization facilitated by the current iteration of social media. However, this article argues that the VR version is more likely to exacerbate than redress these concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the local understandings, responses and interpretations of celebrity activist Angelina Jolie and the film she directed in 2011 about the war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: In the land of Blood and Honey. We first provide a brief historical context of the production and promotion of the film. Next, we offer a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of celebrity activism. In the third part, we look at how Jolie’s film has been received and interpreted in the region itself, since Jolie’s stated goal was to ‘raise awareness about war rapes’. On the basis of in-depth interviews with Bosnian public intellectuals, we argue that the film’s story of war rapes and suffering did little to raise awareness about war rape victims generally and was interpreted primarily within two discursive frameworks: celebrity and ethno-nationalistic ones that tend to reinforce the status quo in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina and perpetuate misunderstandings about war crimes. Jolie’s activism, in other words, did not contribute to the reconciliation between different ethnicities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but has, on the contrary, further fostered polarization that continues to plague the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the violent wars of the 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina is heavily promoting its tourism industry with the capital city of Sarajevo as the prime destination. Sarajevo became a city of death during 1992–1995, and its siege remains etched in local and global memories as a time of bombing, horrific shelling of locals, and brutal destruction of the city's cultural heritage. Today Sarajevo faces many dilemmas, including how to remember the 1990s trauma and how to represent the city to citizens and foreign visitors. Here we explore how Sarajevo journalists remember the city's recent violent conflict, and how war memory becomes commodified and branded for tourism. Furthermore, we analyse how prominent global media represent Sarajevo as a tourism destination after the war. On the basis of in-depth interviews with Sarajevo journalists, and an analysis of travel reviews in prominent international publications, we argue that Sarajevo is a place where branding and memories converge. Sarajevo is transformed into a tourist attraction where trauma of the past is being sold, while promising some authentic path towards understanding the violent past. Local journalists and global media alike frame the city as a “brand” while celebrating the inherent authenticity of post-war travel in order to promote and sell Sarajevo. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the way in which the portrayal of gender becomes linked to that of ethno-nationalism on the popular Serbian reality show The Palace. On the basis of a textual analysis of the public reactions to the reality show and its interpretations by the local audiences in Slovenia and Serbia, we claim that the show promotes specifically gendered and sexualized ethno-national identities, and that the interpretation of the show continues to be aligned with discourses of ethno-nationalist belonging. We argue that commercial, ethno-national femininity is currently employed to re-legitimate patriarchal nationalism in the name of freedom and empowerment via self-promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at the emergence and potentials of a Balkan cultural studies. I argue that the productivity of a Balkan cultural studies lies in its willingness to engage with popular culture as a very real political force in the revolutionary transformations from the 1980s on. Some recent cultural developments are presented here to show how the mix of culture and cultural studies contributes to the political relevance and academic vibrancy of Balkan cultural studies, which captures the imagination of students in the region precisely because of its engaged character and its contemporary relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the relationship between journalists and politicians in post-socialist Slovenia, where journalists report increasing political pressures from editors, management and politicians. If socialism supported, even required, an intimate connection between party leaders and journalists, what are some "new" expectations that state or party officials have from journalists? Moreover, what is the self-professed role of journalists in the process of a democratic transition, and what "new" journalistic values are being adopted and challenged the most? On the basis of media political economy and 51 in-depth interviews (30 journalists and 21 politicians) we argue that there is a complex and multilayered relationship being formed between Slovene journalists and politicians. The Slovene case study can tell us more about the troublesome relationship between political economic elites and journalists in the transition to democracy in a new country that has only recently become a nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies recent critiques of branding and marketing to a case study of the nation branding trend. We argue that critical approaches to brand "co-creation"-a reliance upon consumers to build and disseminate brand identity-help illuminate the ways in which nation branding serves as a technique of governance in the era of global capitalism. The article first considers the recent development of nation branding as a global phenomenon and then explores the details of one such campaign in post-socialist Slovenia. The case study illustrates the ways in which nation branding enjoins the populace to "live" the national brand, and to promulgate it nationally and internationally in the name of taking responsibility for the homeland's economic development. The article concludes with a consideration of the way in which nation branding's framing of the state as an "enterprise" fits with the logic of emerging forms of so-called commercial nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]