Culture

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Cancel Culture

Wiki
Cancel Culture encapsulates the acts of withholding support or endorsement from individuals or institutions on social media due to a collective disagreement or disapproval of their actions, beliefs, or behaviors.

Ecofeminism

Wiki
Ecofeminism, as a theoretical framework, delves into the intricate web of oppression, examining the linkages between the subjugation of marginalized communities and the exploitation of the natural world (Warren, 2000). At its core, this perspective underscores the interdependence of various forms of injustice, weaving together the threads that connect the mistreatment of nature, women, animals, and the environment (Gaard, 2009).

Children's Literature

Wiki
Children’s Literature (often abbreviated as CL) is literature written specifically for children, about children, consumed by children and even written by children. It is often also referred as Children and Young Adult Literature because its general audience is less than eighteen years old but also often addresses people in their mid twenties. For instance, picturebooks and YA novels are important book publishing formats in this literature. However, it is mainly adults who are responsible for the production, distribution and reception of children's books. 

YA novel

Wiki
Young Adults novel (shortened as YA novel) is a literature subcategory within the Young Adult fiction genre. The concept of the young adult (YA) refers to adolescence and youth, though it is very context-dependent. According to the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) YA books are those aimed at people from 12 to 18 years old (teenagers). In most of the cases, the protagonists of the novels fall within those age ranges, and the story is told through teenage eyes.

Graphic Novel

Wiki
Graphic novels are a contemporary literature form of long stories told in comics format. They have the same characteristics of comics: multimodality, cartooning techniques and elements (panels, gutters).

Comics

Wiki
Comics (generally referring to comic books and comic strips) are a popular form of visual storytelling that combines still images and text.

Picturebook

Wiki
The picturebook is a storytelling medium that presents its text in both verbal and visual language. According to Barbara Bader (1976), a picturebook is words and illustrations in a total design, “an item of manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historic document; and foremost, an experience for a [reader / beholder]. As an art form it hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of the turning page” (ibid., p.1).

Intangible heritage

Wiki
According to UNESCO, the concept of ‘intangible heritage’ can be described as “the practices, expressions, knowledge and skills that communities, groups and sometimes individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage."

Authorized Heritage Discourse

Wiki
The ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ (AHD) is a concept that was introduced by Laurajane Smith in 2006 to describe how attention is focused on “aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places and/or landscapes” through the dominance of “technical and aesthetic experts, and institutionalized in state cultural agencies and amenity societies”.

Heritage Participation

Wiki
Heritage participation refers to a variety of practices that focus on involving the public in relation to cultural heritage. Some of these practices might support co-creation and empowerment, while other practices might merely inform or consult the public — two activities that are not always considered 'genuine' participation.

Subculture

Wiki
Subcultures consist of people who participate in a lifestyle that is typically regarded as deviant in dominant society. Engagement in such deviant activities usher people to find other like-minded individuals and interact with them in order to build a culture. This helps in the development of perspectives about oneself with relation to others in society (Becker 1963).

Online-offline nexus

Wiki
The online-offline nexus is a description of social reality in the post-digital age. We live our social lives increasingly at the intersection of online and offline forces.

Culture

Wiki
Culture is shorthand for the stuff that makes human interactions meaningful and comprehensible.

Ideology

Wiki
Ideology is any set of socially structured ideas guiding behavior and thought in particular domains of life.

Orientalism

Wiki
Orientalism refers to a long tradition of Western representations of the Orient as exotic and 'non-coeval' with the West.

Indexicality

Wiki
Meaning that emerges out of text-context relations. Apart from (often) having a denotational meaning, linguistic and other signs are indexical in that they suggest metapragmatic, metalinguistic, metadiscursive features of meaning. Thus, an utterance may indexically invoke social norms, roles, identities.

Enoughness

Wiki
Enoughness is a theory of contemporary identity that states that identities are constructed out of a particular portion ("enough") of emblematic identity features.

Ethnography

Wiki
Ethnography can be defined as the small-scale study of human behavior through "clinical" observation and intersubjective participation.

Debating Tilburg's 'beautiful ugliness' online: The case of The Blue Building

Article
Inge Beekmans
27/02/2023
16 minutes to read

What is it like to live in a city that is considered 'ugly' by most of the people you know? Online discussions about the planned demolition of The blue building demonstrate how some inhabitants of Tilburg construct narratives regarding their city's 'beautiful ugliness', while other Tilburgers reject their ironic and humorous attitude.

Deviating from the mainstream: Amish or Uber-Hipsters?

Paper
Femke van Bree
17/10/2022
8 minutes to read

In this paper, we intend to find out if the hipster subculture is inspired by the Amish subculture. We will investigate this by analyzing two typical cultural features: appearance (fashion) and food. 

Promotional material for GLOW

GLOW: Critiquing the Stereotypes of American Identities on TV (Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch)

Review
Marit van Dijck
05/10/2022
8 minutes to read

Glow critiques how stereotypes in the media do not do justice to the complex lived realities of multicultural individuals in America through the juxtaposition of stereotypical performances with the lived realities of individuals.

 

Getting through Amazon's The Rings of Power for the memes

Article
Inge Beekmans
18/09/2022
21 minutes to read

Various media have highlighted the racism that imbues the angry reactions of Lord of the Rings fans to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. An analysis of the memes that were created in response to the series.

Designers rethink social boundaries with gender-neutral fashion

Paper
Stefan Immens
12/09/2022
14 minutes to read

Society is in constant change adapting to what is happening in the global environment. The fashion industry is getting stronger every day because it has been adapting in unique ways to society such as gender-neutral fashion.

Five of the main characters of Skam walking, with yellow text saying SKAM in front of them.

The lived experience of teenagers in Norway and beyond in Skam (Julie Andem)

Review
Marieke Weeda
07/09/2022
7 minutes to read

This review explains how greatly the Norwegian show SKAM deals with themes of identity in both globally universal and locally specific ways.