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Union Organizers and Their Stories

Melanie Simms, Jane Holgate, and Edmund Heery

in Union Voices: Tactics and Tensions in UK Organizing

This chapter introduces the work of organizers, who they are, and what they do. As specialist actors in the process of organizing, their training and work experiences inform a great deal about how ... More

This chapter introduces the work of organizers, who they are, and what they do. As specialist actors in the process of organizing, their training and work experiences inform a great deal about how organizing is managed and focused in British unions. Organizers are at the sharp end of the difficulties and tensions inherent in trying to manage a cultural shift in unions toward organizing activity. They have competing views about how these tensions can and should be addressed, and they are, generally, a highly reflective group of practitioners. The chapter considers the work they do and what it says about how British unions approach organizing. Their challenges, stresses, and dilemmas, as well as victories and failures tell a great deal about how tensions are managed.Less

Second Thoughts

Catherine Parsons Smith

in Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular

This chapter identifies the event that led music aficionados and audiences to rethink the ultramodern performances which were introduced in Los Angeles, arguing that the negative reaction to the ... More

This chapter identifies the event that led music aficionados and audiences to rethink the ultramodern performances which were introduced in Los Angeles, arguing that the negative reaction to the ultramodern is actually a symptom of a wider cultural shift. It states that the changes in music making were the technological, the gender related, the entrepreneurial, and the now redefined popular, emphasizing that, after 1926, the Progressive-era culture of music making went through significant changes.Less

Psychopomps, Oracles, and Spirit Mediums

Nancy Mandeville Caciola

in Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages

This chapter analyzes several spiritist cults in Southern France that formed around individuals who claimed to be in regular contact with the dead. These spirit mediums, though at first taken aback ... More

This chapter analyzes several spiritist cults in Southern France that formed around individuals who claimed to be in regular contact with the dead. These spirit mediums, though at first taken aback when the dead began to appear to them, ultimately learned to control their interactions with the latter. They became voluntary oracles who opened up the world of the afterlife to crowds of other people, and they acted as psychopomps for the dead, helping them to find rest in the afterlife. Clerics also evaluated local popular beliefs according to their own religious values, sometimes condemning mediums as heretics, at other times arrogating oracular roles to themselves. Such accusations from the medieval Christian church often inverted the true character of ongoing cultural shifts: the “crime” of many dissenters was in fact to fail to keep pace with novelties that were pioneered by church institutions, rather than the reverse.Less

Unhomely Travels; or, the Haunts of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald

in Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing

This chapter examines how the travelogues of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald thematically explore and stylistically convey the liminality and in-betweenness of spectral presences. It focuses on ... More

This chapter examines how the travelogues of Daphne Marlatt and W. G. Sebald thematically explore and stylistically convey the liminality and in-betweenness of spectral presences. It focuses on Marlatt's Ghost Works and Sebald's Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn. It discusses the plot of these works and suggests that innovative travel narratives of Marlatt and Sebald are emblematic of a cultural shift in modes and media of textual production that illustrates the concern to push the boundaries of generic and textual responses to travel.Less

When We Grow Up

Trey McIntyre

in When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children's Classic and the Difference It Made

This chapter illustrates how important the broadcast premiere of Free to Be … You and Me was to the author's family—so much so, that they had to invent the VCR. They arranged a borrowed reel-to-reel ... More

This chapter illustrates how important the broadcast premiere of Free to Be … You and Me was to the author's family—so much so, that they had to invent the VCR. They arranged a borrowed reel-to-reel video camera from his dad's school and set it up on a tripod across from the TV set in his mom's new third-floor apartment. They had to watch silently so that the family's voices wouldn't be recorded in the background, the first of many times the author would watch that tape. From that first viewing, he watched it with a strange reverence. The author didn't really know why it was important, but there was no mistaking that it was. Free to Be, he has come to understand, represented a cultural shift that extended ideas of progressive feminism and equality to child rearing, a lightning bolt shift away from the repressive images of the 1960s recreated on Mad Men today.Less

Baryalay: Between Cultural and Personal Representational Worlds

Andrea Chiovenda

in Crafting Masculine Selves: Culture, War, and Psychodynamics in Afghanistan

This chapter follows Baryalay, a college-educated man in his early thirties who hails from, and still lives in, a volatile rural village in Nangarhar province, marred by the conflict between the ... More

This chapter follows Baryalay, a college-educated man in his early thirties who hails from, and still lives in, a volatile rural village in Nangarhar province, marred by the conflict between the insurgent Taliban, the Islamic State, and the Afghan government. The chapter introduces the concept of self-representation, as the locus where different, even conflicting, self-images and subjective states find coherence and eventually lead to the “illusion” of the unity of the self. Baryalay in fact has to struggle between his concurrent identifications as a pacha (a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad), and as a Pashtun, which hold at times contrasting social requirements in terms of appropriate masculinity. Additionally, via the analysis of the personal experiences that Baryalay had in a geographical area of intense violent conflict and intimate danger, the chapter also elaborates on the way in which forty years of continuous war have considerably changed the understanding and performance of masculinity among Pashtun men.Less

Rahmat: The Dilemmas of a “Perfect” Pashtun

Andrea Chiovenda

in Crafting Masculine Selves: Culture, War, and Psychodynamics in Afghanistan

The chapter revolves around Rahmat, a young man, father of two, who lives in a rural village on the border with Pakistan. His case is different from the previous ones in that he embodies apparently ... More

The chapter revolves around Rahmat, a young man, father of two, who lives in a rural village on the border with Pakistan. His case is different from the previous ones in that he embodies apparently all the characteristics that would be expected from an appropriate Pashtun masculinity. He is in fact a well-known and respected figure in his district. Under the surface, however, lies the conflicted personal history of a man who straddled the geographical border of the two countries to engage in drug trafficking and production, and who secretly longs to escape elsewhere to regain the sense of an ideal masculinity, of which he feels he was metaphorically robbed by the distortions of a war-ravaged social context. The sense of responsibility to embody the features of the “perfect” Pashtun man clashes with the inability to do so in the “right” way, due to the perceived degeneration of modern life in Afghanistan.Less

Styling for the Modern Age

Christopher Innes

in Designing Modern America: Broadway to Main Street

This chapter discusses the “style” of twentieth-century America, which was deliberately designed and created by specific individuals. The particular cultural shift followed by this style, copied ... More

This chapter discusses the “style” of twentieth-century America, which was deliberately designed and created by specific individuals. The particular cultural shift followed by this style, copied around the world, marks the start of industrial design in a modern sense. Perhaps surprisingly, this type of design came out of theater. In fact, the magic of the stage turns out to be crucial to its development, since the people who led the way in consciously designing a new lifestyle for America made their reputations on Broadway and carried its theatricality over into everything they did. The objects and styles created by these individuals, or by their descendants in the industrial process, surround us still and continue to condition the way we live.Less

Conclusion: ‘The problem of leisure’: millennial sophistication

in Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the term sophistication. It traces how sophistication developed from a derogatory term referring to falsification or adulteration ... More

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the term sophistication. It traces how sophistication developed from a derogatory term referring to falsification or adulteration to a term of praise suggesting distinction and discriminating taste, and discusses some of the cultural shifts underlying this change. It also argues that it was English playwright and actor Noël Coward who ‘took sophistication out of the refrigerator and set it bubbling on the hob’. This chapter also considers the meaning of sophistication in late twentieth– and twentieth–first–century culture.Less