Cultural challenges to secondary prevention: Implications for Saudi women

Like other highly developed countries, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) are major health problems in Saudi Arabia. The aetiology of cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden within the Saudi population is similar to Western countries with atherosclerosis, hypertension, ischemic heart disease and diabetes highly prevalent with the main risk factors being smoking, obesity and inactivity. There are differences between Saudi men and women in epidemiology, risk factors and health service provision for CHD. These sex and gender based factors are important in considering the health and well-being of Saudi women. Currently, there is limited focus on the cardiovascular health of Saudi women. The aim of this paper is to examine culturally specific issues for Saudi women and the implications for secondary prevention.

Communication, Cultural and Media Studies : The Key Concepts (4th Edition)

This fourth edition of Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts is an indispensible guide to the most important terms in the field. It offers clear explanations of the key concepts, exploring their origins, what they’re used for and why they provoke discussion. The author provides a multi-disciplinary explanation and assessment of the key concepts, from ‘authorship’ to ‘censorship’; ‘creative industries’ to ‘network theory’; ‘complexity’ to ‘visual culture’. The new edition of this classic text includes: * Over 200 entries including 50 new entries * All entries revised, rewritten and updated * Coverage of recent developments in the field * Insight into interactive media and the knowledge-based economy * A fully updated bibliography with 400 items and suggestions for further reading throughout the text

Project management deployment : the role of cultural factors

This paper investigates the role of cultural factors as possible partial explanation of the disparity in terms of project management deployment observed between various studied countries. The topic of culture has received increasing attention in the management literature in general during the last decades and in the project management literature in particular during the last few years. The globalization of businesses and worldwide Governmental/International organizations collaborations drives this interest in the national culture to increase more and more. Based on Hofstede national culture framework, the study hypothesizes and tests the impact of the culture and development of the country on the PM deployment. Seventy-four countries are selected to conduct a correlation and regression analysis between Hofstede’s national culture dimensions and the used PM deployment indicator. The results show the relations between various national culture dimensions and development indicator (GDP/Capita) on the project management deployment levels of the considered countries.

Project management deployment : the role of cultural factors

This paper investigates the role of cultural factors as possible partial explanation of the disparity in terms of Project Management Deployment observed between various studied countries. The topic of culture has received increasing attention in the management literature in general during the last decades and in the Project Management literature in particular during the last few years. The globalization of businesses and worldwide Governmental / International organizations collaborations drives this interest in the national culture to increase more and more. Based on Hofstede national culture framework, the study hypothesizes and tests the impact of the culture and development of the country on the PM Deployment. 74 countries are selected to conduct a correlation and regression analysis between Hofstede’s national culture dimensions and the used PM Deployment indicator. The results show the relations between various national culture dimensions and development indicator (GDP/Capita) on the Project Management Deployment levels of the considered countries.

Using virtual reality modelling in cultural management, archiving and research

This paper outlines how the Ortelia project’s 3D virtual reality models have the capacity to assist our understanding of sites of cultural heritage. The VR investigation of such spaces can be a valuable tool in 'real world' empirical research in theatre and spatiality. Through a demonstration of two of Ortelia's VR models (an art gallery and a theatre), we suggest how we might consider interpreting cultural space and sites as contributing significantly to cultural capital. We also introduce the potential for human interaction in such venues through motion-capture to discuss the potential for assessing how humans interact in such contexts.

Studying Mobile Media : Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone

The iPhone represents an important moment in both the short history of mobile media and the long history of cultural technologies. Like the Walkman of the 1980s, it marks a juncture in which notions about identity, individualism, lifestyle and sociality require rearticulation. This book explores not only the iPhone’s particular characteristics, uses and "affects," but also how the "iPhone moment" functions as a barometer for broader patterns of change. In the iPhone moment, this study considers the convergent trajectories in the evolution of digital and mobile culture, and their implications for future scholarship. Through the lens of the iPhone—as a symbol, culture and a set of material practices around contemporary convergent mobile media—the essays collected here explore the most productive theoretical and methodological approaches for grasping media practice, consumer culture and networked communication in the twenty-first century.

Free our cultural archives.

Australians are the creators and custodians of a broad range of cultural materials. This material includes literary, photographic, video and audio archives. These archives should be made available to all Australians for access and reuse, as part of a pre-competitive platform which promotes the interests of the Australian public in gaining access to a diverse range of content that contributes to the development of national and cultural identity. This does not mean that all material must be made available for access and reuse for free and in an unrestricted fashion. But for publicly funded content, free and unrestricted access should be the default. The Venturous Australia report on the National Innovation System recommended that “[t]o the maximum extent possible, information, research and content funded by Australian governments – including national collections – should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons.”1 The report further stated that “both for its direct and indirect benefits to Australia and for the greater global good, Australia should energetically and proudly maximise the extent to which it makes government funded content available as part of the global digital commons...

Creative suburbia : cultural research and suburban geographies

Suburbanisation today is not necessarily what it used to be: rather than suburbs being outer urban commuter zones for people who work in the central business district, people living in new suburbs are increasingly likely to work in those suburbs, or to commute to other outer suburbs as their places of work. At one level, such trends affirm the analyses of the ‘Los Angeles School’ of urban geographers about the shift from the classical modernist city, with radial zones spreading out from a city centre where core businesses were located, to a more decentralised, ‘postmodern’ city. But they increasingly move beyond this postmodern perspective, in that the many suburbs are themselves centres of work and industry, and not simply centres of lifestyle and consumption. This article critically reflects upon the contemporary dynamics of the suburbs, and the public discourses that surround their development, in the context of the rise of the creative industries.

Creativity and the Australian suburbs : the appeal of suburban localities for the creative industries workforce

The locus of creative inspiration and production is commonly associated with either the dynamism of the inner city or with the natural landscape, with its Arcadian transformative associations. This article considers the spatiality of creative work in an in-between site: the outer suburbs in Australia. The outer suburbs occupy a conflicted status in the national imaginary: frequently regarded as the locus of consumption and materialism, they are localities which few associate with creativity or creative industries. Creative city discourse further instils the idea that all things creative occur only in the inner city. Yet Australia is a highly suburbanised country: the middle and outer suburbs are where most Australians live and work. This article challenges the perception that creativity is spatially clustered in the inner city. It is based on empirical and qualitative research that maps and investigates the experience of creative industries workers in outer-suburban localities of Brisbane and Melbourne. One of the key findings is the significance of the relationship between work and place for creative workers located in outer-suburban localities, rupturing assumptions about suburbia and “creative” inner-city enclaves.

Documentary as history, memory, dream and film

A century ago, as the Western world embarked on a period of traumatic change, the visual realism of photography and documentary film brought print and radio news to life. The vision that these new mediums threw into stark relief was one of intense social and political upheaval: the birth of modernity fired and tempered in the crucible of the Great War. As millions died in this fiery chamber and the influenza pandemic that followed, lines of empires staggered to their fall, and new geo-political boundaries were scored in the raw, red flesh of Europe. The decade of 1910 to 1919 also heralded a prolific period of artistic experimentation. It marked the beginning of the social and artistic age of modernity and, with it, the nascent beginnings of a new art form: film. We still live in the shadow of this violent, traumatic and fertile age; haunted by the ghosts of Flanders and Gallipoli and its ripples of innovation and creativity. Something happened here, but to understand how and why is not easy; for the documentary images we carry with us in our collective cultural memory have become what Baudrillard refers to as simulacra. Detached from their referents, they have become referents themselves, to underscore other, grand narratives in television and Hollywood films. The personal histories of the individuals they represent so graphically–and their hope, love and loss–are folded into a national story that serves, like war memorials and national holidays, to buttress social myths and values. And, as filmic images cross-pollinate, with each iteration offering a new catharsis, events that must have been terrifying or wondrous are abstracted. In this paper we first discuss this transformation through reference to theories of documentary and memory–this will form a conceptual framework for a subsequent discussion of the short film Anmer. Produced by the first author in 2010, Anmer is a visual essay on documentary, simulacra and the symbolic narratives of history. Its form, structure and aesthetic speak of the confluence of documentary, history, memory and dream. Located in the first decade of the twentieth century, its non-linear narratives of personal tragedy and poetic dreamscapes are an evocative reminder of the distance between intimate experience, grand narratives, and the mythologies of popular films. This transformation of documentary sources not only played out in the processes of the film’s production, but also came to form its theme.

Do you see what I mean? charting changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in contemporary and pop cultural performance

The meaning of the body emerges through acts of seeing, looking and staring in daily and dramatic performances. Acts that are, as Maike Bleeker argues1, bound up with the scopic rules, regimes and narratives that apply in specific cultures at specific times. In Western culture, the disabled body has been seen as a sign of defect, deficiency, fear, shame or stigma. Disabled artists – Mat Fraser, Bill Shannon, Aaron Williamson, Katherine Araniello, Liz Crow and Ju Gosling – have attempted, via performances that co-opt conventional images of the disabled body, to challenge dominant ways of representing and responding such bodies from within. In this paper, I consider what happens when non-disabled artists co-opt images of the disabled body to draw attention to, affirm, and even exoticise, eroticise or beautify, other modalities of or desires for difference. As Carrie Sandahl has noted2, the signs, symbols and somatic idiosyncrasies of the disabled body are, today, transported or translated into theatre, film and television as a metaphor or "master trope" for every body’s experience of difference. This happens in performance art (Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s use of a wheelchair in Chamber of Confessions), performance (Marie Chouinard's use of crutches, canes and walkers to represent dancers’ experience of becoming different or mutant during training in bODY rEMIX /gOLDBERG vARIATIONS), and pop culture (characters in wheelchairs in Glee or Oz). In this paper, I chart changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in such contexts. I use analysis of this cultural shift as a starting point for a re-consideration of questions about whether a face-toface encounter with a disabled body is in fact a privileged site for the emergence of a politics, and whether co-opting disability as a metaphor for a range of difference differences reduces its currency as a category around which a specific group might mobilise a politics.

Renegades on the frontier of innovation: The shanzhai grassroots communities of Shenzhen in China's creative economy

Two Australian researchers specializing in China's creative industries examine recent developments in southern China commonly associated with the shanzhai phenomenon (e.g., production and sale of cheap local facsimiles of globally branded goods). While shanzhai is often condemned as the embodiment of China's "knock-off" industries, the authors argue that it might be more appropriately viewed as an instance of China's emerging creative economy and an example of rapid prototyping. The paper traces the evolution of shanzhai mobile phones and the materialization of the shanzhai ethos in popular culture. In arguing that shanzhai provides inputs into creative industries, the paper describes the fuzzy boundary between formal and informal culture and notes the interaction between three spheres of activity: official culture, the market, and grassroots culture.

The film studio: film production in the global economy

The Film Studio sheds new light on the evolution of global film production, highlighting the role of film studios worldwide. The authors explore the contemporary international production environment, alleging that global competition is best understood as an unequal and unstable partnership between the 'design interest' of footloose producers and the 'location interest' of local actors. Ben Goldsmith and Tom O'Regan identify various types of film studios and investigate the consequences for Hollywood, international film production, and the studio locations.

Local Hollywood: global film production and the Gold Coast

Hollywood films and television programs are watched by a global audience. While many of these productions are still made in southern California, the last twenty years have seen new production centres emerge in the US, Canada and other locations worldwide. Global Hollywood has been made possible by this growing number of Local Hollywoods: locations equipped with the requisite facilities, resources and labour, as well as the political will and tax incentives, to attract and retain high-budget, Hollywood-standard projects. This new book gives an unprecedented insight into how the Gold Coast became the first outpost of Hollywood in Australia. When a combination of forces drove Hollywood studios and producers to work outside California, the Gold Coast's unique blend of government tax support, innovative entrepreneurs and diverse natural settings made it a perfect choice to host Hollywood productions. 'Local Hollywood' makes an essential contribution to the field of film and media studies, as well as giving film buffs a behind-the-scenes tour of the film industry.