After Charlie: free speech and the political economy of communication

Three significant events at the start of 2015 have put freedom of speech firmly on the global agenda. The first was the carry-over from the December 2014 illegal entry to the Sony Corporation’s file servers by anonymous hackers, believed to be linked to the North Korean regime. The second was the horrible attack on journalists, editors, and cartoonists at the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo on 7 January. The third was the election of leftwing anti-austerity party Syrzia in Greece on 25 January.While each event is different in scope and size, they are important to scholars of the political economy of communication because they all speak to ongoing debates about freedom of expression, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I name each of these concepts separately because, despite popular confusion, they are not the same thing (Patching and Hirst, 2014) . Freedom of expression is the right to individual self-expression through any means; it is an inalienable human right. Freedom of speech refers to the right (and the physical ability) to utter political speech, to say what others wish to repress and to demand a voice with which to express a range of social and political thoughts. Freedom of the press is a very particular version of freedom of expression that is intimately bound with the political economy of speech and of the printing press. Freedom of the press is impossible without the press and, despite its theoretical availability to all of us, this principle is impossible to articulate without the material means (usually money) to actually deploy a printing press (or the electronic means of broadcasting and publishing).Freedom of expression is immutable; freedom of speech subject to legal, ethical and ideological restriction (for better, or worse) and freedom of the press is peculiar to bourgeois society in that it entails the freedom to own and operate a press, not the right to say or publish on a level playing field. Access to freedom of the press is determined in the marketplace and is subject to the unequal power relationships that such determination implies.It is fitting to start with the Charlie Hebdo massacre because the loss of 17 lives makes this the most chilling of the three events and demands that it be given prominence in any analysis. No lives have been lost yet because Sony’s computers were hacked and the election of Syriza has not (yet) led to mass deaths in Greece.

Determinants of political tolerance : a literature review

This paper reviews the current literature on political tolerance with particular reference to its individual- and aggregate-level determinants. Individual-level determinants such as authoritarianism, education, contact, and threat perception are found to have robust effects on tolerance. What are less known are the mediating factors that enhance or reduce these effects. In recent years, increasing attention has been directed toward the impact of contextual factors on threat and contact effects.

From left to right -- Israel's repositioning in the world

第二次大戦時に大量のユダヤ人避難民を受け入れたイスラエルは、1946年の建国時には共産主義的な社会改革思想に基づくキブツ運動などの左翼的思潮を国家建設の支柱にしていたが、その後の政治過程のなかで一貫して右傾化の方向をたどり、現在では国際的にみても最も保守的な軍事主義的思想傾向が国民のあいだで広く共有され、国内のアラブ系住民の経済的従属が永く固定化するに至った。現在のイスラエル国家を思想的にも実体経済的にも支えている基本的な理念は、建国時のそれとは全く対極的な新保守主義とグローバル化された「新自由主義」的な資本主義であり、それは当然ながら国内における安価な労働力としてのアラブ系住民の存在を所与の前提条件として組み込んでいる。これは具体的にどのような経緯によるものであり、またイスラエル国家のどのような性格から導き出されるものなのか。本論稿では政治的シオニズムがイスラエル建国後から現在までにたどってきた思想的な系譜を改めて確認し、現在のイスラエルが国際的に置かれている特異な立場とその背後にある諸要因を説明する。

Obituary of Carmina Virgili i Rodón (Spanish INHIGEO member)

Carmina Virgili was born in Barcelona, on 19 July 1927, and died in her native town, at the age of eighty seven. Her father, Guillem Virgili was Head of the Revenue Office of the Generalitat of Catalonia, during the second Spanish Republic. He displeased the Catholic community when required by the Catholic Church to pay taxes. Her mother, Carme Rodon, was a pharmacist, and a professor in the Agricultural High School. After the Spanish Civil War, due to their political thoughts, both parents were removed from their workplaces. During her childhood and youth, Virgili stood out as a good student. She did her primary and secondary studies in her hometown, and then she completed teacher training in Tarragona. She obtained her degree in Natural History from the University of Barcelona in 1949, where Carmina Virgili 1927-2014

Thoughts on a few subjects of political economy.

Mode of access: Internet.

The Strategic Utility of ‘Chineseness’ in the Political Cultures of Diasporic Chinese Communities: Some Preliminary Thoughts

It is not especially controversial to suggest that the academic literature on Chineseness has for some time been focused upon the ‘porousness’ and ‘strategic’ possibilities of identity categories. This is most clearly observable in the legacy of cultural theory upon identity politics. In particular, terms such as hybridity have not only expanded the political potential for fragmenting conventional identifications, but also symbolised the sorts of ‘complicated entanglements’ within which individuals and communities are perpetually caught. The discursive mileage of hybridity has meant, over time, that it has also attracted criticism. Some of this criticism comes from academics engaged in more materialist forms of research. These sorts of contrary perspectives have often sought to ground hybrid identifications within the cultural and historical milieu from which they are enacted, whenever they are enacted.

From users to citizens: Some thoughts on designing for polity and civics

This paper presents an essay aimed at prompting broad discussion crucial in keeping the interaction design discourse fresh, critical, and in motion. We trace the changing role of people who have advanced from consumers to producers, from stationary office workers to mobile urban nomads, from passive members of the plebs to active instigators of change. Yet, interaction designers often still refer to them only as ‘users.’ We follow some of the historic developments from the information superhighway to the smart city in order to provide the backdrop in front of which we critically analyse three core areas. First, the issue of echo chambers and filter bubbles in social media results in a political polarisation that jeopardises the formation of a functioning public sphere. Second, pretty lights and colourful façades in media architecture are increasingly making way for situated installations and interventions fostering community engagement. And third, civic activism is often reduced to forms of slacktivism. We synthesise our discussion to propose ‘citizen-ability’ as an alternative goal for interaction designers to aspire to in order to create new polities and civics for a better quality of life.

Homogeneity and heterogeneity of political traditions in the remaking of world order

Deux décennies après la chute de l'URSS (1991), ce mémoire propose une réévaluation de la thèse de Francis Fukuyama sur la Fin de l'Histoire, élaborée en 1989, qui postule qu'avec la chute de l'URSS aucune idéologie ne peut rivaliser avec la démocratie libérale capitaliste; et de la thèse de Samuel P. Huntington sur le Choc des civilisations, élaborée en 1993, qui pose l'existence d'un nombre fini de civilisations homogènes et antagonistes. Pourtant, lorsque confrontées à une étude approfondie des séquences historiques, ces deux théories apparaissent pour le moins relatives. Deux questions ont été traitées: l'interaction entre Idéologie et Conditions historiques, et la thèse de l'homogénéité intracivilisationnelle et de l'hétérogénéité antagoniste intercivilisationnelle. Sans les invalider complètement, cette recherche conclut toutefois que ces deux théories doivent être nuancées; elles se situent aux deux extrémités du spectre des relations internationales. La recherche effectuée a montré que les idéologies et leur poids relatif sont tributaires d'un contexte, contrairement à Fukuyama qui les pose dans l'absolu. De plus, l'étude de la Chine maoïste et particulièrement de la pensée de Mao Zedong montre que les traditions politiques locales sont plus hétérogènes qu'il n'y paraît au premier abord, ce qui relativise la thèse de Huntington. En conclusion, les rapports entre États sont plus dynamiques que ne le laissent penser les thèses de Fukuyama et de Huntington.

Surrender to the market : thoughts on anthropology, the body shop, and intellectuals

The direction of anthropology over the last century is tied to the shifts from colonialism to postcolonialism and from modernism to postmodernism. These shifts have seen the thoroughgoing incorporation of the world population into the economic, political and juridical domain established through the last throes of colonialism and the transmutations of capitalism and the State. Anthropology, a discipline whose history shows close and regular links with colonial government, also transforms in association with the world it describes and partly creates. Two dominant trends in contemporary anthropology--applied consultancy and historicist self-reflexivity--are compared for the ways they represent the transmutation, which is characterised, following Fredric Jameson as 'the surrender to the market'. In this way it is asserted that just as the discipline had hitherto revealed its links to colonialism, it now reveals its links to globalisation through a form of commodified self-obsession. To illustrate this quality the paper considers the global chain of cosmetics stores, The Body Shop, as an example of 'late capitalism' and the moral juridical framework of globalisation. Finally, it treats these developments in anthropology as more generally affecting intellectuals and knowledge production through the promotion of intellectual 'silence'.

The politics of medical curriculum accreditation : thoughts, not facts?

The medical profession needs to adapt to the socio-political challenges of the 21st century. These have been described as the ‘Health Society’. Medical professionalism, however, is characterised by conservative values that are perpetuated by the professional attributes of autonomy, authority, and state-sanctioned altruism. The medical education enterprise is a replication and continuation of these values, sanctioned by its accreditation agencies. The Australian Medical Council through its accreditation standards only sanctions the formal curriculum. The status quo, however, is maintained by social, cultural and political parameters enmeshed in the informal and hidden curricula. By not addressing informal and hidden value constructs that maintain elitist medical arrogance the accreditation agency fails to uphold its remit. This paper explores the philosophical and empirical bases of these phenomena and illustrates them by means of a case study. Medical education and its sanctioning structure and agency are confirmed as forceful political enterprises. We conclude that explicit review of the informal and hidden curriculum is a feasible and necessary prerequisite for medical education reform and change.

Realities and ideals; social, political, literary and artistic.

Partly republished from various sources.

Thoughts on the laws, government, and morals /

Mode of access: Internet.