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This article critically interprets the NBC television program Parks and Recreation, analyzing its main character Leslie Knope as emblematic of an emerging rhetorical figure in public culture: the i...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the significant advantages of cloud technology in digital cultural heritage construction by analyzing public culture cloud platforms in China. The authors hope to provide references for other countries and regions on the applications of cloud computing techniques in digital cultural construction. Design/methodology/approach The primary research methods involved interview and case analysis. A comprehensive understanding of cloud technology and China’s culture cloud platforms were gained through research into extensive amounts of literature. Analyzing 21 culture cloud platforms offers a general understanding of culture clouds, while the Hunan Public Culture Cloud acts as a representative sample that gives detailed insight. Findings This paper explores the considerable advantages of cloud computing in digital cultural construction from four aspects: integration of decentralized heterogeneous resources, coordination and cooperation, accurately matching user needs and promotion of balanced service development. Originality/value Existing studies fall short of comprehensive investigations of culture cloud platforms and in-depth analysis of the advantages of cloud technology applications. This paper uses the construction of public culture cloud platforms in China as the research object. Further, this paper compares the construction status of different culture cloud platforms.

Museums are increasingly placed front-and-centre in police headquarters. Based on interviews, field notes, and observations, we examine the significance of placing museums in the foyers of new police headquarters for public culture and police legitimacy. Drawing from critical heritage, cultural and policing studies literature, we argue the trend represents a strategic means of softening the image of police and creating myths central to reinforcing their legitimacy. We show that studying the representations inside police museums is crucial to comprehend how these entities depict social reality and provide frames through which the public make sense of policing and carcerality more broadly. Conceptualizing police museums as a form of public relations management that has material impacts on urban life and public culture, we reflect on what our findings mean for literature on cultural representations of “criminal justice.”

One of the fundamental issues that Dina Ligaga addresses in her book Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media (2020), is how the Kenyan public culture controls Kenyan femininities. It...

In response to the new principal contradiction between people’s growing needs for a better life and the inadequate and imbalanced development in different social fields in China, Chinese public libraries have fast developed Public Cultural Services (PCS) to meet users’ needs. This study investigates senior library specialists’ perspectives on unbalanced and inadequate development of Chinese public libraries’ PCS. The study collected data from 31 senior library specialists from 10 provinces or municipalities through online survey. In addition, eight experts from public libraries were also interviewed. The data reveals that the main roles of public libraries providing PCS include ensuring equal access to cultural resources, protecting cultural heritage, developing unique cultural products or service, and promoting public cultural products to ensure cultural diversity. Provincial and prefectural libraries take most of the PCS’ responsibilities while county, township, and village libraries’ responsibilities are less. Moreover, there is unbalanced development and inadequate development of library PCS in China. External factors such as economy development, government expenditure on cultural activities, and education development, and internal factors such as internal management weakness and libraries’ investment on cultural service are the top factors. This means that if Chinese public libraries want to better improve PCS, they should try to seek financial resource support and improve their internal management. This study is valuable for public library management and policymakers at different bureaucratic levels to understand issues of PCS in China. It also helps public libraries better learn their strengths and weaknesses in PCS.

In 2011, “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet” (WCUS) was exhibited at the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. Afterward, it toured the country, visiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) David J. Sencer Museum in Atlanta, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka. The exhibition website states that WCUS was “made possible” by candy corporation Mars, Incorporated. WCUS featured over a 100 artifacts tracing “the Government’s effect on what Americans eat.” Divided into four thematic sections (Farm, Factory, Kitchen, and Table), WCUS moves from agrarianism, through industrial food production and into mess halls, cafeterias, and individual kitchens. Photos, documents, news clippings, and colorful propaganda posters portray the government as a benevolent supporter of agriculture, feeder of soldiers and children, and protector of consumer health and safety. Visitors are positioned as citizens in an ideological mélange of paternalism and patriotism. In this rhetorical walk-through of the exhibition, we consider the display of archival materials for purposes of positioning, in consideration of past and present issues of diet and governance. Making explicit unstated assumptions, we claim that, although propagandistic artifacts take on different meanings to those viewing them decades later as memorabilia, they maintain their ideological flavor.

As the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in Guayaquil—foreshadowing one of world’s most devastating outbreaks—the Ecuadorian government paid $324 billion to bondholders, while forgoing much needed investment in pandemic preparation. This was the opening round for a series of struggles over the costs of containment and treatment of the virus; conflicts over debts foreign and domestic, taxes and corruption, wages and working conditions, and the control of public space. While the pandemic provided a context for the renegotiation of public and social obligations, however, the outcome was that the burden of pandemic containment was placed on those least able to sustain it— especially precariously employed, informal sector workers—deepening existing inequalities at the cost of lives and livelihoods. This paper addresses how this process was manifested through controversies in public culture, including traditional and social media, finding that the predominance of middle class and elite interests and preoccupations— together with the prevalence of scandal as a genre—sidelined the defense of popular lives and livelihoods and reinforcing systemic inequalities.

Militarized perception is always leaking into public culture, from the aerial prospect of balloon flight to the soldier’s helmet camera. Increasingly, the mode of militarized perception most powerf...

In 2017, the State Library of Victoria commenced Vision 2020, an AU$88.1 million redevelopment that aims to transition the established 19th century Library into the digital era. Over four years, the Library’s physical spaces, provision of services, organizational structure, and the way it is experienced by users were reimagined and reshaped. Like many other major public library developments internationally, State Library Victoria’s redevelopment is a response to broader economic and cultural shifts shaping the public life of cities and citizens in a digital era. This article situates the redevelopment within this broader transformation. We draw upon interviews with professional staff and users in order to understand the contrasting ways digital technologies and a digital culture are impacting upon libraries and their publics.

The article is a historical study of ethnographic practices in non-academic fields of culture. It examines the practices and artefacts of cultural production in post-war Turkey and reveals that in ...

In recent publications, Harre and Llored (in: Javenovic (ed) Challenges of cultural psychology, Routledge, London, pp 189–206, 2018a; Philosophy, 93:167–186, 2018b; The analysis of practices, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2019) take the role of philosophy of science as a digging out of the ‘hinges’, that are the tacit elements of a discipline. In this perspective, the philosophy of chemistry consists, at least partly, in making explicit the hinges on which chemistry turns and in examining their origins and logical status. In this paper, we propose to query Harre and Llored’s research approach in the case study of the element chlorine. Whereas most early nineteenth-century textbooks define the element as the endpoint of chemical decomposition, the controversy surrounding the element chlorine reveals implicit criteria that surpass operational indivisibility. From 1810 onwards, Davy argued that chlorine was a simple substance; yet, even though it had been known to be indecomposable using the strongest instruments available, the widespread acceptance of chlorine took until 1816–1818. The main factor that contributed to the resolution of the debate was the discovery of iodine, an analogous element which provided new theoretical coherence between explanations of different phenomena (Chabot, in: Du nouveau dans les sciences. Groupe rech. philos. langag., Universite des sciences sociales de Grenoble, St-Martin-d’Heres, pp 121–169, 2006; Golinski in Science as public culture: chemistry and enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992; Gray et al. in An element of controversy: the life of chlorine in science, medicine, technology and war, British Society for the History of Science, London, pp 41–72, 2007; Siegfried in Isis 54(2):247–258, 1959). Thus, the idea that elements should qualitatively resemble each other is an implicit belief which appears to have been shared by many prominent chemists of the time, despite the fact that it was not stated as part of the definition of the chemical element. Could we assert that this idea was a ‘hinge’ around which the notion of chemical element revolved? Our talk will answer this question.

This article provides a detailed description and explanation of the term "popular culture". It also analyzes a number of aspects of "popular culture" that are becoming more widespread today, their role and influence in the formation of the minds and behavior of young people, and draws the necessary conclusions. Most importantly, it also describes ways to protect young people from threats in the form of "popular culture" that negatively affect their morale.

This article explores the divisive nature of social media public culture in which impromptu communities of strangers affirm or antagonize one another in non-face-to-face interactions through memes, hashtags, and other posts. Drawing upon the work of Michael Herzfeld, specifically his notion of cultural intimacy and social poetics, this article analyzes contemporary politicized social media to demonstrate what I call social media poetics, briefly, public online shaming through which antagonists criticize one another and, in so doing, create their own identities; this process relies upon essentializing communities of posters that quickly become polarized. During social media acts of “creative shame,” people “become” their posts, making social media a vehicle for perpetuating both community and disunity based on social identities affirmed or antagonized when somehow “embodied” in the posts.

This Cultural Dynamics Special Issue on “The Intimate Workings of Culture” examines the complex ways power, audience, and imagination are implicated in the social practices and politics of cultural intimacy. First theorized by Michael Herzfeld in 1997, cultural intimacy has proven to be a productive lens through which to explore the dialectic between the construction and contestation of collective identities. The contributors—Joshua Friedman, Jamie Shenton, Christopher Berk, and Tamar Shirinian—expand the concept’s geographical and contextual scope by applying it to Indigenous Australia, post-soviet states, American ethnic identity politics, and social media. The contributors’ shared emphasis on the emergent and indeterminate interrelationships between audience, imagination, power, and politics within the intimate workings of culture provides valuable templates for new arenas of analysis and inquiry.

The relevance of music to African commuting practices and sociocultural experiences offers interesting perspectives, not least, for an ethnomusicology of public culture. Of the different functional...

Author of the article characterizes the active-reasonable foundations of the formation of wórthy living conditions of the Russian population with the participation of a socially strong state and thanks to the All-Civilian Enlightenment the foundations of a mature composite-creating culture of interactions of citizens in society. The political and economic prerequisite for a wórthy life of well-being, and on its basis – a constitutional social state. To implement it, a mature composite-creative culture of interactions of citizens in society (civil-social culture) is needed. It is necessary to start moving in this direction now - with the preparation and experimental testing of the program of the All-Civil Enlightenment, clarification of the foundations and benefits of the mature state of this culture. An initiative by social and humanities professionals to create a project for such a programme is required.

This study explores the relationship between emotional immigrant labor and burnout in the context of individualist versus collectivist culture. Based on immigrant labor samples working in the United States and in east and central Asian countries, the results show that: (1) Migrant labor emotions that pretend are positively related to burnout in individualist culture and collectivism. (2) The othentic Migrant labour emotions are negatively related to burnout of individualist culture and collectivism. (3) Emotional pretensions are positively related to individual performance in the culture of collectivism. (4) There is no difference in the relationship between emotional appearance and performance in individualist culture and collectivism. (5) Working for an individualist culture company is more likely to cause burnout than a culture of collectivism. This finding shows the differences in eastern (Asian) and western (American) cultures, but the view of culture is dynamic.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to outline a reconceptualised view of public education, with specific reference to early twentieth-century Australia, and to revisit the significance of the Carnegie Corporation of New York in this period. Further, in this regard, the paper proposes a neo-Foucaultian notion of philanthropic power, as an explanatory and analytical principle, with possible implications for thinking anew about the role and influence of American philanthropic organisations in the twentieth century. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on mainly secondary sources but also works with primary sources gathered from relevant archives, including that of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Findings The paper concludes that the larger possibilities associated with the particular view of public education outlined here, referring to both public school and public libraries, were constrained by the emergence and consolidation of an increasingly professionalised view of education and schooling. Research limitations/implications The influence of the Carnegie Corporation of New York on early twentieth-century Australian education has been increasingly acknowledged and documented in recent historical research. More recently, Carnegie has been drawn into an interdisciplinary perspective on philanthropy and public culture in Australia. This paper seeks to add to such work by looking at schools and libraries as interconnected yet loosely coupled aspects of what can be understood as, in effect, a re-conceived public education, to a significant degree sponsored by the Corporation. Originality/value The paper draws upon but seeks to extend and to some extent re-orient existing historical research on the relationship between Australian education and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its originality lies in its exploration of a somewhat different view of public education and the linkage it suggests in this regard with a predominantly print-centric public culture in Australia, in the first half of the twentieth century.

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar os principais casos jurídicos das cortes estaduais e federais dos Estados Unidos que envolveram a histórica e controversa disputa entre criacionistas e evolucionistas naquele país. Desde a aprovação das leis antievolucionistas na década de 1920 até a disputa judicial em torno da Teoria do Design Inteligente em Dover, 2005, passando pelas leis que buscavam garantir o tratamento balanceado entre o ensino da perspectiva evolucionista darwinista e da ciência da criação nas escolas e universidades públicas estadunidenses na década de 1980, observa-se, por um lado, o deslocamento do ponto de aplicação da religião a qual paulatinamente foi perdendo para a ciência seu lugar proeminente como exclusiva reserva de sentido válida para explicar a realidade das coisas, e, por outro, uma tendência de politização da religião bem como uma tendência de judicialização nas relações e nas articulações entre religião e ciência especialmente no âmbito da cultura pública norte-americana.

Many of the political debates in Europe call for the strengthening of a national identity that is, somewhat paradoxically, described in universal liberal terms. Yet previous research has not been a...

A key feature of thin populist ideology is a sharp division of the social world into “good people” and “bad elites.” Populist ideology “thickens” when it is combined with another ideology, for instance, when this basic distinction is formulated in terms of a nativist or religious discourse with the aim of defining “aliens” or “enemies.” Ideological thickening of populism is boosted by and contributes to the cultural process we call symbolic thickening. Thin symbolic systems, congruent with some forms of populism, have relatively few symbols with rather simple connotations, are amenable to many interpretations, and are thus potentially attractive to a large group of people. They can be “thickened” by adding new symbols and suggesting tight interrelations between them. The resulting “thick” symbolic system offers a narrower definition of collective identity and thus attracts a narrower group of people. Our central argument is that a powerful cultural-political feedback loop has emerged in Poland. A gradual symbolic thickening of the Polish public culture through the intensification of Catholic and nationalist discourses resulted in the expansion of the discursive opportunity structure. This produced conditions conducive to the thickening of populist ideologies and helped to increase the legitimacy of populist movements and parties. The rising legitimacy and popularity of the increasingly vigorous “thick” populism, in turn, contributed to the further symbolic thickening of public culture. The argument is based on detailed descriptions and interpretations of four performances and visual displays.

Schemas are one of the most popular explanatory concepts in cultural sociology, and are increasingly used in sociology more broadly. In this article we ask the question: have schemas been good to think with? We answer this question by analyzing the ontological, epistemic, and methodological bases of schemas, including the conceptualizations, claims, assumptions, and methods that underpin the use of schemas in sociological inquiry. We show that sociologists have developed two distinct, contradictory, and often conflated perspectives on schemas, what we refer to as culturalist and cognitivist perspectives. We suggest that schemas have acquired a polysemic character in sociology, and that they have become a (more narrow and consequently more scientifically legitimate) proxy for Culture, and that these features have (paradoxically) facilitated the popularity of schemas within the discipline. Sociologists have recently begun to make the necessary advancements to turn schemas into a more useful explanatory concept, through both analytical improvements (by distinguishing schemas from both public culture and other forms of nondeclarative personal culture), and methodological innovations (for better deriving schemas from survey data, texts, and experiments). Yet, some challenges remain, and the analytical value of schemas remains promissory. We conclude by offering some guidelines for making more specific and measured claims about schemas in sociological research.

History pervades public culture and everyday life: through family histories, political discourses, popular culture and media, classroom instruction, museum experiences, and commemorative events. Historical sites such as memorials, museums, and heritage places can be interpretive sites to help students actively participate in public debates about the meaning of the past and how the past is represented. Well-designed historical fieldwork offers students authentic learning experiences in historical investigation and gives them opportunities to more fully consider the “variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard” (Gadamer in Truth and Method. Continuum, New York, NY, p. 285, 2006). This chapter provides a framework based on the systematic questioning of historical sites to support rigorous fieldwork as a central part of history education to develop students’ historical reasoning skills, conceptual understanding, and knowledge about the past. It focuses on the ways history is represented and how it has been used to communicate meanings about identity (individual and collective)—past, present, and future (Nordgren in Theory Res Soc Educ 44:479–504, 2016). The chapter calls for an interpretive approach to fieldwork to help students think about the ways different historical sites represent the past, the ways they “work” to convey particular pasts, and the different kinds of “readings” that can be done to more critically interrogate these representations. Inquiry-based fieldwork can support this kind of work by scaffolding students to more critically question sites as “representations” of the past and providing them with the means to consider how histories get constructed, for what purposes, and for whom.

Museum websites usually possess a large number of high-quality content and their information is relatively objective and authoritative. So these websites are often used by researchers, visitors and other external users. The usability of museum website has a great impact on user’s experience, which determines whether users can quickly obtain information and services in the easiest way especially for public culture site such as museum, which few have been done. In this paper, Guangzhou Museum of Art is selected as the experimental object of usability evaluation museum website. Through the methods of observation, discussion, thinking aloud protocol, questionnaire and mouse tracking, the usability of the website is evaluated by 10 university researchers in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. The results show that there are some problems in the usability of the website, such as content service form, overall structure, navigation design and so on. The lack of attention to user habits causes users’ cognitive pressure. Suggestions are provided in the study to enhance the usability of these websites.

The main of this study is to identify the motivation for using social media among grade (11-12) school students at Al-Buraimi governorate in Oman through the following variables (class, gender, time, type of media mostly visited & the purpose of using the site). Among sample (240 male & female) students, who were distributed into 13 different schools from Al-Buraimi, mahdah & as-sunaynah. A questionnaire of motivation for using Social Media has been used. The sample percentage was 13% of the whole population target. The results showed that there are no statistical differences between grade 11 and grade 12 students in using social media. In addition, there is no significant difference in (gender) in using social media. Also, the study revealed that the most highlighted usage of social media amongst the study sample was for exploring the public culture. While the results showed that the number (155) of the study sample, which means (60%), they are using social media according to the available conditions. (47.9%) percentage of the sample was on social media about (1-3 hours). The most popular site was Instagram. The study recommended activating the role of the school administration, teacher & social worker in the school for helping students to take the benefit from social media & address the negative aspects of these means through school radio, lectures, seminars, scientific journals & etc.

In order to realize the concept of sharing economy, enrich our public culture,decrease the idling rate of piano, in this paper, guided by the Yii2.0 framework, B/S architecture and MAMP is used as the system structure and integrated development environment respectively. PHP, Ajax and Boostrap are used as key development technologies; a sharing piano system based on PHP is designed and implemented to meet the actual demand of society. Through this platform, the requirements of both suppliers and demanders for using piano can be quickly got, so as to meet users’ multi-level and personalized using piano trading objectives.

This chapter examines the cultural history and discursive construction of play and learning, drawing attention to the way that both human activities have been differentiated but are now becoming ever more blurred. This is analysed in the context of changes brought about both by the technical affordances of digital technologies and the political economy of digital culture which has focused on turning learning into a commodity purchased and used in the home as much as in the school. The existential open-ended nature of play itself has been significantly influenced by video gaming and the turn to playfulness in public culture more generally. The chapter argues that it is important not to subordinate play as an instrumental developmental function of learning and that learning itself should not be conflated with the outcomes of the formal education system.

As the literary field in India begins to become more complex, layered and diverse in terms of its gender representation despite the stubborn persistence of many aspects of its “tradition” male bastion character, the most celebrated and successful literary festival in the country emerges as a microcosmic manifestation of this tussle for power. Based on an autoethnographic account of the literary festival over eight editions and a close narrative of the sessions in its 2018 and 2019 editions along with a look at how these editions were reported in the media, and placing them within the frame of scholarship researching literary festivals as representations or fragments of “public culture”, this article looks at gender representation at the Jaipur Literature Festival in the immediate aftermath of the two waves of the MeToo Movement in India., Le champ littéraire, en Inde, se complexifie, et gagne en strates et en diversité quant à la représentation du genre, malgré la durabilité à maints égards du personnage masculin archétypal et traditionnel. Dans ce contexte, le festival littéraire le plus réputé et le plus couru du pays apparaît comme une manifestation microcosmique de cette lutte pour le pouvoir. Le présent article s’appuie sur un récit autoethnographique s’échelonnant sur huit éditions du festival, sur le récit détaillé des séances des éditions 2018 et 2019, ainsi que sur ce qui s’est écrit à propos de ces éditions dans les médias. Dans le cadre de la recherche sur les festivals littéraires en tant que représentations ou fragments de la « culture publique », l’article examine la représentation du genre au Festival de littérature de Jaipur, au lendemain des deux vagues du mouvement MeToo qu’a connues l’Inde.

Public memory and its various manifestations – monuments, memorials, museums, commissions, memory tourism, political address, memoirs – is a persistent and contested topic in contemporary U.S. and ...

This paper proposes a novel framework for information exchange in public-culture service domain, which leverages: (i) a widely available translation language (i.e., eXtensible Markup Language (XML)), and (ii) a consistent implementation methodology framework provided for within the China Information Exchange Model (CIEM). The evaluation about public-culture effectiveness measurement mission, demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed framework.

Digital media are seen as important instruments of increasing participation and diversity in arts and culture. To examine whether this view is justified, this article draws on two bodies of research that have hitherto remained disconnected: research on cultural participation and research on the digital divide. Building on these insights, the article examines the Taking Part Survey data on digital media and cultural participation in the United Kingdom between 2005/2006 and 2015/2016, focusing on museums and galleries. While the results confirm that digital media provide an important means of engaging new audiences, they also show that the engagement with museums and galleries both online and offline remains deeply unequal. Most worryingly, the gaps between the haves and the have-nots are even wider online than in the case of physical visits. Rather than helping increase the diversity of audiences, online access seems to reproduce, if not enlarge, existing inequalities.

This article details the ways in which the executives of Du Pont used the chemical company’s 150th-anniversary festivities in 1952 and its associated sponsored media as an opportunity to explicitly link the history of the company with the history of the nation. This was an attempt to legitimatize the company’s existence and its ultraconservative worldview, espouse free trade, and fight antitrust litigation. This article explores the conflation of private and public history in Du Pont-sponsored anniversary materials to illustrate how corporate public relations meant for private corporate consumption reverberated into a shared American public culture.

Sociology has increasingly drawn on concepts from the cognitive sciences to better theorize and measure culture, particularly nondeclarative personal culture beneath the level of conscious awareness. Despite several advances, these “cognitive cultural” concepts are drawn on selectively, and limited work has attempted to assemble them into a coherent framework, leading to conceptual murkiness and ambiguous use of terms like “schema.” This article synthesizes literature on culture and cognition to develop a conceptual model of four interrelated but distinct types of cultural knowledge beneath the level of explicit discourse. Drawing on emergence theories, the author theorizes how these types relate to each other, as well as to discourse and public culture. The utility of the model is then illustrated using the empirical case of American religious understandings. These types of cultural knowledge have distinct qualities and, consequently, distinct roles in influencing thought, speech, and action. Assembling them into a coherent framework can improve scholarly accounts of how culture influences important substantive outcomes, how culture and cognition interact, as well as methods for studying nondeclarative cultural knowledge.

In 2013, the Gezi Park protests created a wave of optimism in Istanbul – until it was brutally suppressed by the government. Although the ephemeral movement ended without having achieved its immediate goals, it continues to have ripple effects on the public culture of Istanbul. The ruling party, for example, has emulated the forms and formats of performance that emerged during the protests in order to mobilize its own support base. In a post-Gezi Istanbul, however, the occupation of public spaces in protest of the government has become nearly impossible, rendering alternative artistic and activist practices all the more important.