Cross-Cultural Patterns in Dynamic Ratings of Positive and Negative Natural Emotional Behaviour

Background: Studies of cross-cultural variations in the perception of emotion have typically compared rates of recognition of static posed stimulus photographs. That research has provided evidence for universality in the recognition of a range of emotions but also for some systematic cross-cultural variation in the interpretation of emotional expression. However, questions remain about how widely such findings can be generalised to real life emotional situations. The present study provides the first evidence that the previously reported interplay between universal and cultural influences extends to ratings of natural, dynamic emotional stimuli.

Methodology/Principal Findings: Participants from Northern Ireland, Serbia, Guatemala and Peru used a computer based tool to continuously rate the strength of positive and negative emotion being displayed in twelve short video sequences by people from the United Kingdom engaged in emotional conversations. Generalized additive mixed models were developed to assess the differences in perception of emotion between countries and sexes. Our results indicate that the temporal pattern of ratings is similar across cultures for a range of emotions and social contexts. However, there are systematic differences in intensity ratings between the countries, with participants from Northern Ireland making the most extreme ratings in the majority of the clips.

Conclusions/Significance: The results indicate that there is strong agreement across cultures in the valence and patterns of ratings of natural emotional situations but that participants from different cultures show systematic variation in the intensity with which they rate emotion. Results are discussed in terms of both ‘in-group advantage’ and ‘display rules’ approaches. This study indicates that examples of natural spontaneous emotional behaviour can be used to study cross-cultural variations in the perception of emotion.

Discourses of Demonisation: Chechens, Russians, and the Stavropol’ Riots of 2007

In the summer of 2007, the geopolitics of Russo-North Caucasian relations were once again manifest in inter-ethnic violence. During the course of six weeks of rioting between ethnic Russian (russkii) and non-ethnic Russian (rossiiskii) citizens, three students were killed (one Chechen and two Russians) and pogroms were conducted widely. This article addresses these events through a focus on the nature and politics of the riots and those involved. I argue that a range of tensions came together to form a localised geopolitics, and that this contributes to an understanding of why these events took place. Ultimately, the riots are important as an event which reveals much about the complexity of power, space, and identity in contemporary Russia.

The spaces of knowledge: Contributions towards a historical geography of science

Reprinted in Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory (eds), Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry, (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 27-48

Banking in Crisis: The Rise and Fall of British Banking Stability, 1800 to the Present

Can the lessons of the past help us to prevent another banking collapse in the future? This is the first book to tell the story of the rise and fall of British banking stability in the past two centuries, and it sheds new light on why banking systems crash and the factors underpinning banking stability. John Turner shows that there were only two major banking crises in Britain during this time: the crisis of 1825–6 and the Great Crash of 2007–8. Although there were episodic bouts of instability in the interim, the banking system was crisis-free. Why was the British banking system stable for such a long time and why did the British banking system implode in 2008? In answering these questions, the book explores the long-run evolution of bank regulation, the role of the Bank of England, bank rescues and the need to hold shareholders to account.

The Other Side of the Fence:Reconceptualizing the “Camp” and Migration Zones at the Borders of Spain

This article explores the dynamics of the space of exception at the borders of Europe in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, and the neighboring Moroccan city of Oujda. Building upon field research conducted in the spring of 2008, I ask how we can understand the political space of migration not simply as exceptional, but as shaped by the mobility of the irregular migrants moving outside of the frameworks, policies, and practices of the state. By privileging the migrant narrative and making use of Rancière's conception of politics as shaped by the demands of those who “have no part,” I suggest an alternative way of understanding the politics of exception and agency of non-citizens—that is, one of disruption and demands to open up powerful potentials for change in an otherwise rigid regime.

'Sometimes I wish I was an "ex" ex-prisoner': identity processes in the collective action participation of former prisoners in Northern Ireland

Since the signing of the Northern Ireland peace agreement a plethora of community based prisoner self-help organisations have been established wherein former prisoners staff, manage and deliver services to colleagues. By forging and maintaining their collective identities through community based mutual aid, members of these self-help organisations have progressed to create not only individual change/assistance but have also developed and evolved to tackle serious wider social issues which impact on the members of their organisations. This article critically analyses how the conditions of a post conflict society can influence both the development and evolution of these organisations and also how members situate their claims about the self in the organisation and beyond. Using the social movement framework it is argued that the work of these self-help organisations have given rise to a new politics of identity … that is the ‘politically motivated’ ex-prisoner. ©2013 Taylor & Francis

If Music Be the Food of Love:An Acoustic ‘Fourth World’ in Ong Keng Sen’s Awaking”

Staged as an attempt to ‘bring together Shakespeare’s plays and Tang Xian Zu’s classical Kunqu opera, The Peony Pavilion,’ (Ong, Programme Notes) Awaking stands as Singapore Director Ong Keng Sen’s most recent and prominent attempt at engaging issues of the intercultural through music and sound. While Ong’s previous intercultural projects sought to explore the politics of intercultural performance through the exchange, layering, confrontation and inter-mixing of Asian performance modes as visual aesthetics, Awaking is a performance at the borders of theatrical and musical conventions, as it features the music and musicians as central performative devices of staging the intercultural. Northern Kunqu opera, Chinese classical music and Elizabethan folk tunes from Shakespeare’s plays were re-moved, re-contextualised, and juxtaposed to explore ‘differing yet connected philosophies on love, death, and the afterlife’ (Awaking, Publicity). These humanist and ‘universal’ themes found expression in the ‘universal’ language of music. Through a study of the musicalities and sonic expressions of Awaking, the paper seeks to explore the implications of such cultural-musical juxtapositions. The paper engages, specifically, with the problematics and possibilities of music as a ‘universal language’ as implied by Ong’s concordance of Eastern and Western sounds in the final act. It further considers the politics of an intercultural soundscape and the acoustemologies of such an intercultural approach.

The Challenge of Consociation in Northern Ireland

This article assesses the role played by the principle of consociational government in promoting Northern Ireland's peace agreement. It reviews the central concept of consociation as it has evolved in recent comparative studies of the politics of divided societies. It describes the stages by which this concept moved to the centre of the political agenda in Northern Ireland, resting on contributions by policy-makers, academics, journalists and others. It reviews the difficult history of efforts to translate this principle into practice, contrasting the failed attempt to promote this formula in 1973 with the much more successful experiment in 1998. Using the classical literature on consociation, an effort is made to explain the difference between these outcomes, a difference with implications for Northern Ireland's future stability.

Speaking Out Against Rape:Feminist (Her)Stories and Anti-Rape Politics

In 1976, Susan Brownmiller published 'Against Our Will', widely credited as the founding text of feminist anti-rape theory, in which she famously declared that rape was 'nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear'.While the scholarship and politics of Against Our Will have been subjected to numerous and compelling critiques, the work retains canonical and even foundational status within feminist anti-rape politics. In this article I attempt a critical re-examination of feminist (her)story telling practices. By situating the story told in Against Our Will beside and within Brownmiller's story of the creation of the book and her own coming-to-consciousness, a more general reexamination of the role of women's speech and (her)story-telling in feminist anti-rape politics is afforded. This re-reading draws out two central aspects of the politics of (her)story-telling which can be found in Brownmiller's work and in the Joan W. Scott quotation above. Firstly, the need to be recognised as a 'just source' of women's stories has resulted in the granting of epistemological primacy to stories of women's experience or personal statements. Secondly, the desire to compensate for the lack of a 'classical myth' to authorise women's claims, resulting in an attempt to imbue these feminist (her)stories with their own mythology.

Non-apologies and prolonged silences in post-conflict settings: The case of post-colonial Cyprus

Despite the growing use of apologies in post-conflict settings, cases of non-apology remain unaddressed and continue to puzzle scholars. This article focuses on the absence of apology by non-state and anti-state actors by examining the case of the Cypriot armed group EOKA, which has refused to offer an apology to the civilian victims of its ‘anti-colonial’ struggle (1955–1959). Using field data and parliamentary debates, and drawing on comparisons, this article analyses the factors that contributed to a lack of apology. It is argued that the inherited timelessness of Greek nationalism, and the impression of a perpetual need for defence, set up textbook conditions for the development of a hegemonic discourse and prevented an apology for human rights violations.

On Not Reading Fifty Shades:Feminism and the Fantasy of Romantic Immunity

This paper explores the politics of feminist criticism of the Fifty Shades novels as seen in both traditional media commentary and popular online news and cultural websites and blogs. I argue that much media commentary, in broadsheet and other ‘respectable’ outlets particularly, has featured avowedly feminist writers dismissing the books as ‘bad’, not only containing bad writing and bad sex but, ultimately, as being bad for their women readers. Situating these responses within a history of feminist discomfort with popular erotic and romantic fiction marketed to women I read these responses as a form of ‘anti-romantic’ fantasy in which the reader/critic is able to assert both her immunity from the romantic fantasy offered in the text and her cultural distance from those women who are subject to it. Further, this act of disavowal is often linked to a professed concern for the women who read the novel who the critic argues will, inevitably, replicate the abusive and harmful relationship dynamics that the novel represent. Such a move then positions the feminist critic as not only more culturally intelligent than women readers of the novel but enacts a fantasy of respectable, middle-class feminist cultural custodianship. Such a fantasy, I argue, is connected to the post-feminist era in which we live, which has produced a class of self-appointed ‘feminist’ cultural critics who seek to contest their own cultural marginalisation through enacting a governmental authority to worry about other women. This paper, therefore, is a critical investigation of the pleasures and politics of very publicly not reading Fifty Shades and its significance for analysing the contemporary politics of popular culture and feminism.

The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism

How do the large scale structures of capitalism and the local social relations of workplaces and organisations shape each other? Through a series of European studies of capital and labour's shifting struggles and compromises; of the politics of welfare, industrial relations and labour markets; and the transformation of post-industrial networked workplaces, this edited collection shows how capitalist workplaces and economies are changing today. The first section explores how European capitalism developed and the different national forms of the struggle between capital and labour for a bigger share of national income. In the second part of the volume, the contributors investigate the institutions that are the building blocks of these different national forms, and how they are changing as labour markets are increasingly shaped by globalisation, feminisation and liberalisation. The final chapters examine how these institutions of capitalism play out in the contemporary workplace – where the most dynamic sectors are based on loose networks and external labour markets and a shifting, uncertain alliance between employers and workers. The authors argue for a new integration of political economy and the sociology of work and organisations.