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Building on the controversial charge of Netflix imperialism made in 2019 by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation president Catherine Tait, this piece attempts to develop a theoretical and technical framework for understanding whether the American content provider/streaming service is engaging in 'media imperialism' by rapidly and expansively importing its service into other nations--often to the chagrin of governments and other media companies. Reading a variety of textual sources ranging from trade publications to industry press outlets to popular autobiographies, we will argue that the company is engaged in a hybrid form of media imperialism and platform imperialism through a variety of industrial practices: vertical integration built around a proprietary platform, transnational scaling up of production at a rapid pace, and engaging in corporate practices that systematically disregard accountability and legal regulation. The article ends with examining how national governments and inter-imperialist rivalries might complicate Netflix's ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of roughly 700 articles published on the Breitbart News 'Cartel Chronicles' site between 2015 and 2021, this article analyzes the ways conservative citizen journalism projects strategically mobilize key tropes from international human rights to justify calls for militarization on the US/Mexico Border. Specifically, it details how widely accepted human rights frameworks like freedom of the press and protection of the rights of children are used both as evidence of humanitarian breakdown within Mexico and as a condemnation of the Mexican government. I argue that through its selective and motivated employment of human rights, Breitbart is promoting a form of 'bullshit human rights', defined as the purposefully misleading mobilization of rights claims deracinated from their context and repurposed without consideration for the truth they hold for the individuals who experience them. The suffering documented by 'Cartel Chronicles' serves only as fuel for Breitbart's larger political project of militarizing the US/Mexico Border without consideration of human costs. Paradoxically, bullshit human rights call for an increase in violence in order to protect against human suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the case of La Gordiloca, a Facebook-based journalist from Laredo, TX, to interrogate the increasing role of social media within news-making processes. Applauded by The New York Times as a paragon of twenty-first century journalism and under scrutiny from local businesses and law enforcement for defamation and misuse of official information, she occupies a space between digital journalist and social media celebrity. Combining a content analysis with focus groups of Laredo residents, we argue that her work reflects a constitutive paradox unique to social media journalism: Whereas new technologies expand opportunities for citizens to participate in the process of news production, they also enable the corrosion of norms/practices that oriented previous forms of news production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon music training programmes developed by Afro-Brazilian activists in the city of Salvador, Bahia, as a strategy for connecting training in musical production with computer skills. Though a seemingly incongruous pairing, we argue that for Afro-Brazilian young people learning how to create music helps provide a sense of cultural identity and consciousness that helps them then move into learning about technology. This two-step process creates a sense of “transformative empowerment” where a transformation in individuals’ sense of cultural identity facilitates changes in more professionalised areas addressed through the discourse on information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses an innovative experiment in transforming citizen journalism from a general discourse to a specific set of criteria that can be reproduced in classroom settings. Specifically, it discusses how the Rio de Janeiro-based non-governmental organization Viva Rio created a set of classes called Citizen Health Journalism that attempted to train community health workers (titled “health agents”) in the technical and philosophical dimensions of this mode of journalistic production. The classes looked to capitalize on the unique identities of these agents. Recruited from the favelas (or unincorporated urban slums) of Rio to be public health workers within their own communities, these individuals had both the life experiences (as residents) and professional experience (as healthcare workers) to offer unique insights about their communities. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of training materials and participant observation in 2013 at the training courses, I argue that while turning citizen journalism into a curriculum can help make the discourse more accessible to neophytes, it also potentially sacrifices the convictions and attitudes that encourage individuals to act as citizen journalists in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This piece examines the historical construction of a Lusophone cultural-linguistic media space and market that spans portions of Europe, Africa, and South America. Beginning with the Portuguese colonization of Brazil and Lusophone Africa in the 17th century and continuing to the contemporary moment, our discussion examines how a combination of political, ideological, and economic patterns created linkages between Portugal, Brazil, and Portuguese-speaking colonies in Africa (namely Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique). After examining how Brazil grew to become the dominant cultural producer in this transnational matrix (most explicitly expressed through the massive exports of telenovelas and music since the late 1970s), we examine how other countries are beginning to carve out distinctive national niches, including the contemporary music scene in Cape Verde and the rise of domestically produced telenovelas in Portugal and Angola that are increasing in circulation in the contemporary transnational Lusophone media space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews several books including "Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain," by Richard L. Kagan, "The Laughter of the Saints. Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain," by Ryan D. Giles, and "The Religious Patronage of the Duke of Lerma, 1598-1621," by Lisa A. Banner.

The article focuses on canon, that has been used by literary critics and literary theorists. It states that canon has been a debatable topic in the English literature culture wars. It states that the debate over canon is because of the post-structuralist deconstruction of master narratives, techniques and values previously assumed as standard by literary critics and scholars.

The article aims to explore ways in which archetypal images of storytelling can be subverted both in the process of writing and reformulating archetypal characters, but also in ways of engaging with these models in the reading process. In the short story 'La casa de Asterión', by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the classical monster known as the Minotaur is re-represented as a sensitive loner whose home, the labyrinth, is as complex a space as the character's mentality, The story ends with the revelation that the first-person narrator is the Minotaur, previously only known by his human name: Asterión. In typical fashion, Borges thus forces his reader to confront the Otherness of the monster as both a distanced human character, and also later, after the revelation, through a traditional perspective. The article therefore explores the objectification of the monster as the abject, drawing on the theories of Julia Kristeva, and the importance of Asterión's mother, the Queen, as a key to his identity. The abjectification of the monster is shown to be connected to his femininity, demonstrating just one way in which Borges twists conventions in both his charactetization and his narrative style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the movement towards broadening the range of texts studied and the introduction of interdisciplinary Cultural Studies in the university of Spain. Role of the educational institution; Appropriation of the canon debate in Hispanic studies; Discussion on the Hispanic canon by the Modern Languages Association.

Focuses on the promotion and demotion of phonological constraints in the acquisition of Japanese language. Proposition of three phonological constraints; Analysis on misarticulation system; Results of surface free variation.