Space, authenticity and utopia in the hip-hop teen dance film

The dance film flourished in the 2000s in the form of the hip-hop teen dance film. Such films as Save the Last Dance (Thomas Carter, 2001), Honey (Billy Woodruff, 2002) and Step Up (Anne Fletcher, 2006) drew on hip-hop’s dominance of the mainstream music industry and combined the teen film’s pre-existing social problem and musical narratives. Yet various tension were created by their interweaving of representations of post-industrial city youth with the utopian sensibilities of the classical Hollywood musical. Their narratives celebrated hip-hop performance, and depicted dance’s ability to bridge cultural boundaries and bring together couples and communities. These films used hip-hop to define space and identity yet often constructed divisions within their soundscapes, limiting hip-hop’s expressive potential. This article explores the cycle’s celebration of, yet struggle with, hip-hop through examining select films’ interactions between soundscape, narrative and form. It will engage with these films’ attempts to marry the representational, narrative and aesthetic meanings of hip-hop culture with the form and ideologies of the musical genre, particularly the tensions and continuities that arise from their engagement with the genre’s utopian qualities identified by Richard Dyer (1985). Yet whilst these films illustrate the tensions and challenges of combining hip-hop culture and the musical genre, they also demonstrate an effective integration of hip-hop soundscape and the dancing body in their depiction of dance, highlighting both form’s aesthetics of layering, rupture and flow (Rose, 1994: 22).

The effects of acute fluoxetine administration on temporal discounting in youth with ADHD

Background Serotonin is under-researched in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), despite accumulating evidence for its involvement in impulsiveness and the disorder. Serotonin further modulates temporal discounting (TD), which is typically abnormal in ADHD relative to healthy subjects, underpinned by reduced fronto-striato-limbic activation. This study tested whether a single acute dose of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) fluoxetine up-regulates and normalizes reduced fronto-striato-limbic neurofunctional activation in ADHD during TD. Method Twelve boys with ADHD were scanned twice in a placebo-controlled randomized design under either fluoxetine (between 8 and 15 mg, titrated to weight) or placebo while performing an individually adjusted functional magnetic resonance imaging TD task. Twenty healthy controls were scanned once. Brain activation was compared in patients under either drug condition and compared to controls to test for normalization effects. Results Repeated-measures whole-brain analysis in patients revealed significant up-regulation with fluoxetine in a large cluster comprising right inferior frontal cortex, insula, premotor cortex and basal ganglia, which further correlated trend-wise with TD performance, which was impaired relative to controls under placebo, but normalized under fluoxetine. Fluoxetine further down-regulated default mode areas of posterior cingulate and precuneus. Comparisons between controls and patients under either drug condition revealed normalization with fluoxetine in right premotor-insular-parietal activation, which was reduced in patients under placebo. Conclusions The findings show that a serotonin agonist up-regulates activation in typical ADHD dysfunctional areas in right inferior frontal cortex, insula and striatum as well as down-regulating default mode network regions in the context of impulsivity and TD.

White youth: the Far Right, Punk and British youth culture

‘White Youth’ recovers and explains the relationship between far-right organisations and British youth culture in the period between 1977 and 1987. In particular, it concentrates on the cultural spaces opened up by punk and the attempts made by the National Front and British Movement to claim them as conduits for racist and/or ultra-nationalist politics. The article is built on an empirical basis, using archival material and a historical methodology chosen to develop a history ‘from below’ that takes due consideration of the socio-economic and political forces that inform its wider context. Its focus is designed to map shifting cultural and political influences across the far right, assessing the extent to which extremist organisations proved able to adopt or utilise youth cultural practice as a means of recruitment and communication. Today the British far right is in political and organisational disarray. Nonetheless, residues tied to the cultural initiatives devised in the 1970s–80s remain, be they stylistic, nostalgic or points of connection forged to connect a transnational music scene.

Mediated addiction: The drug discourses of Hong Kong youth

This paper examines the ways young people in Hong Kong at different stages of involvement with illegal drugs respond to government produced anti-drug television commercials through a methodology which provided them with the technical skills and equipment to make their own short videos about drugs. An analysis of the videos they produced and their interaction while producing them reveals that participants with different drug-taking experiences have very different and often multiple ways of talking about drugs, and that these different ‘discourses’ and the ways they are deployed in different contexts affect how ‘at-risk’ they are for new or continued drug use and how they respond to anti-drug messages designed to mitigate this risk.

Frontline safety: understanding the workplace as a site of regulatory engagement

The concept of frontline safety encapsulates an approach to occupational health and safety that emphasizes the 'other side of the regulatory relationship' – the ways in which safety culture, individual responsibility, organizational citizenship, trust, and compliance are interpreted and experienced at the local level. By exploring theoretical tensions over the most appropriate way of conceptualizing and framing frontline regulatory engagement, we can better identify the ways in which conceptions of individuals (as rational, responsible, economic actors) are constructed and maintained through workplace interactions and decision-making, as part of the fulfilment of the ideological and constitutive needs of neoliberal labor markets.

Altered engagement of autobiographical memory networks in adult offspring of postnatally depressed mothers

Maternal depression is associated with increased risk for offspring mood and anxiety disorders. One possible impact of maternal depression during offspring development is on the emotional autobiographical memory system. We investigated the neural mechanisms of emotional autobiographical memory in adult offspring of mothers with postnatal depression (N = 16) compared to controls (N = 21). During fMRI, recordings of participants describing one pleasant and one unpleasant situation with their mother and with a companion, were used as prompts to re-live the situations. Compared to controls we predicted the PND offspring would show: greater activation in medial and posterior brain regions implicated in autobiographical memory and rumination; and decreased activation in lateral prefrontal cortex and decreased connectivity between lateral prefrontal and posterior regions, reflecting reduced control of autobiographical recall. For negative situations, we found no group differences. For positive situations with their mothers, PND offspring showed higher activation than controls in left lateral prefrontal cortex, right frontal pole, cingulate cortex and precuneus, and lower connectivity of right middle frontal gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, thalamus and lingual gyrus with the posterior cingulate. Our results are consistent with adult offspring of PND mothers having less efficient prefrontal regulation of personally relevant pleasant autobiographical memories.

Assessment as Engagement, Assessment as Outreach: Understanding Student Learning About Research at the Trinity College Library

This presentation was offered as part of the CUNY Library Assessment Conference, Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment, held at the City University of New York in June 2014.

The state of the youth: prisons, drugs and car crashes

By virtue of the volume and nature of their attributions, including secondary school as well as problem-areas such as security and traffic, the Brazilian states are the ultimate responsible entities for young people. This study argues in favour of granting greater freedom for the states to define their own public policy parameters to deal with local features and to increase the degree of learning about such actions at the national level. In empirical terms, the study assesses the impacts of new laws, such as the new traffic code (from the joint work with Leandro Kume, EPGE/FGV doctor’s degree student) and traces the statistics for specific questions like drugs, violence and car accidents. The findings show that these questions produce different results for young men and women.The main characters in these dramas are young single males, suggesting the need for more distinguished public policies according not only to age, but also by gender. The study also reveals that the magnitude of these problems changes according to the youth’s social class. Prisons concern poorer men (except for the functional illiterate) while fatal car accidents and the confessed use of drugs concern upper-class boys.

Essays on consumer brand engagement

Apesar do crescente interesse no conceito de engajamento da marca ainda existe discordância quanto aos seus conceitos fundamentais. Esta tese de doutorado explora a natureza da construção engajamento da marca do consumidor (EMC). No primeiro artigo, EMC é avaliada no âmbito da Teoria da Expectância para explicar e esclarecer como a antecipação de possíveis resultados de se envolver com uma marca, sendo tais resultados classificados como “primeiro nível” (resultante do esforço pessoal alocado para interagir com uma marca) e “segundo nível” (ou nível final, representando a consequência dos resultados de primeiro nível) e uma nova definição de EMC é formulada. Um arcabouço teórico abrangente é proposto para engajamento da marca, usando o Teoria Organizacional de Marketing para Expansão de Fronteiras (TOMEF) como referência para os pontos de contato entre o consumidor e a marca. A partir dos fundamentos teóricos das dimensões cognitivas, emocionais e comportamentais do EMC, quinze proposições teóricas são desenvolvidas para incorporar uma perspectiva multilateral às doutrinas teóricas do construto. No segundo artigo, quatro estudos são usados para desenvolver uma escala de engajamento da marca do consumidor. O Estudo 1 (n = 11) utiliza revisão da literatura e entrevistas em profundidade com os consumidores para gerar os itens da escala. No Estudo 2, oito especialistas avaliam 144 itens quanto a validade de face e validade de conteúdo. No Estudo 3 dados coletados com alunos de graduação (n = 172) é submetida à análise fatorial exploratória (AFE) e confirmatória (AFC) para redução adicional de itens. Trezentos e oitenta e nove respostas de um painel de consumidores são usados no Estudo 4 para avaliar o ajuste do modelo, usando a análise fatorial confirmatória (AFC) e Modelagem por Equações Estruturais (MEE). A escala proposta possui excelentes níveis de validade e confiabilidade. Finalmente, no terceiro papel, uma escala de engajamento do consumidor de Vivek et al. (2014) é replicada (n = 598) junto à consumidores em uma feira automotiva, para estender o debate sobre formas de medição do constructo usando a perspectiva da Teoria de Resposta ao Item (TRI). Embora o modelo desenvolvido com base na teoria clássica de teste (TCT) usando AFC, um modelo de resposta gradual (MRG) identifica cinco itens que têm baixos níveis de poder discriminante e com baixos níveis de informação. A abordagem usando TRI indica um possível caminho para melhorias metodológicas futuras para as escalas desenvolvidas na área de marketing em geral, e para a escala engajamento do consumidor, em particular.

Content marketing and brand engagement on social media: a study of Facebook´s posts in the ecommerce industry in Brazil

Content marketing refers to marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. It is focused not on selling, but on communicating with customers and prospects. In today world´s, a trend has been seen in brands becoming publishers in order to keep up with their competition and more importantly to keep their base of fans and followers. Content Marketing is making companies to engage consumers by publishing engaging and value-filled content. This study aims to investigate if there is a link between brand engagement and Facebook Content Marketing practices in the e-commerce industry in Brazil. Based on the literature review, this study defines brand engagement on Facebook as the numbers of "likes" "comments" and "shares" that a company receives from its fans. These actions reflect the popularity of the brand post and leads to engagement. The author defines a scale where levels of Content Marketing practices are developed in order to analyze brand posts on Facebook of an ecommerce company in Brazil. The findings reveal that the most important criterion for the company is the one regarding the picture of the post, where it examines whether the photo content is appealing to the audience. Moreover, it was perceived that the higher the level of these criterion in a post, the greater the number of likes, comments and shares the post receives. The time when a post is published does not present a significant role in determining customer engagement and the most important factor within a publication is to reach the maximum level in the Content Marketing Scale.