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BRICS as formation to study visual online communication? A dialogue on historical origins, perspectives on theory and future directions
Abstract
In this paper, contributions from scholars working in the field of visual communication and/or online communication are gathered whose scholarly work falls into the BRICS countries realm. The interviews are framed by brief sketch of the relevance of BRICS countries research in communication and media studies and some prospective comments on this novel field. The contributing scholars in this issue focus on China and Brazil in particular and work across the globe in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, China and Brazil. They shared their ideas on the subject even though they are scholarly roots lie in fields as diverse as regional studies, political studies, communication and media studies and educational studies. Their thoughts were collected through email interviews and they are presented here in form of a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the issue of visual online communication in BRICS countries and the De-Westernization discourse. Gratefulness goes out to all the ones who have contributed and hopefully this project will contribute to many future dialogues between scholars from across the world.
... The multimodal discourse has gone far beyond entertainment, enhances its areas, bridges past, present and future through coordinating words and images concerning historical and contemporary world stakeholders' opinions and aspirations (Faust et al., 2018). ...
The paper explores the conceptual vision of BRICS in the contemporary world. The study focuses on language and images that are used within BRICS-related institutional communication. We argue that the research is important because of the increasing impact of BRICS on the development of the multilateral and multipolar world. The research aims to offer preliminary considerations with regard to key topics, features and tools of multimodal discourse that comes from the BRICS nations and representatives of other international/regional organisations. This area has not been subject to academic analysis so far. This confirms the novelty of the present study.
The research material includes 600 image-text correlated items from BRICS official sources of information and from organisation and institutions, which are not affiliated with the BRICS and refer to national or international actors. The research combined theoretical analysis of literature, empirical investigation of materials within qualitative paradigm, through content-based analysis and manual coding on thematic and pragmatic criteria.
The findings reveal different approaches to BRICS that are introduced by different actors through specific coordination of verbal and visual tools, in explicit and implicit ways. The findings show that BRICS sources contain proportioned use of texts and photos of high-ranking official events, socio-cultural features of BRICS countries, and pictures of youth with regard to BRICS mission, values, goals, and policies. This strengthens the concept of equality and human rights provision in the modern world in general and leads to the understanding of the need to include the issues of youth rights and their equality on the BRICS agenda in an explicit way.
... Such elements as loyalty and flexibility, personal relationships, and "jeitinho" exist side-by-side with Western cultural components, manifested in the use of codes of ethics and formal ethics programs (Ardichvili et al., 2012). This means that the BRICS countries are challenged to develop their own approaches from their own cultural perspectives (Faust et al., 2018). ...
Goal: This article aims to identify the reasons that lead to the low expression of entrepreneurship in the BRICS through a literature review on cultural dimensions by the main authors.
Design / Methodology / Approach: The study was carried out through a bibliographic survey of the cultural dimensions in the cited authors, and of entrepreneurship in each one of the BRICS, in order to first define the cultural dimensions and values present in each nation and then explain the national entrepreneurial culture.
Results: The results reveal that the entrepreneurial attitude of a population is influenced by the cultural traits of the nation to which it belongs and by some economic aspects. Even though economic aspects influence the initiative to entrepreneur, they could be influenced by the main sector in the economy, by the nature of the entrepreneurship (opportunity or necessity), and by the dimensions of the authors under study.
Limitations of the investigation: The limitation of bibliographic research is the secondary source, which can produce contradictions.
Practical implications: The study shows to the nations (and their governments) what aspects of their cultures they must invest more time to motivate people to entrepreneur (culture dimensions). Governments can propose to industries present in the main sector and financial institutions to support research and entrepreneurship in the universities, in incubators and in technology parks. Some laws can be created to support entrepreneurial activities, and reduce the number of people who entrepreneur by necessity.
Originality / Value: The bibliometric study showed that there were not an article that united all five countries in a study about cultural dimensions and the low rate of entrepreneurship. This article contributes with this gap in the literature.
Drawing on the observations from the 6th ILGA-Asia Conference in 2015 as well as both Queer Asia Conferences in 2016 and 2017 at the SOAS, University of London, ‘Queer Asia’ may have a three-fold connotation: queers in Asia; queerness of Asia(ns); and to queer Asia(ness). They indicate, respectively yet simultaneously, the temporal-spatiality, epistemology and assemblage of two intelligible Bodies of queer and Asian studies. This essay first reflects the aforementioned meanings in situ, identifying three primary elements of Queer Asia; that is, how to make queer studies more Asian, how to make Asian studies more queer, and how to transform ‘Asia’ with queer critiques. Considering many doubts regarding the political utility of ‘queerness’ cast by activists I interviewed before, particular attention is given to the last element. This essay then inquire into the intellectual curiosity about ‘what makes queer theory practical in Asia’ and ‘what makes Asia critical of queer theory’. Everything is and should be political, but, following Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987:213) contention, ‘every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’. I thus argue that, for Queer Asia, there is no queer-friendly or -hostile Asia; there are Asias in terms of macropolitics. Queer Asia is not just a prima facie Body, constructed and functioned by the existence of sexual and gender diversity. It also serves, deriving from the variable positions of Asian societies concerning international sexuality norm polarisation, to challenge the concept of ‘Asia’ as a stable regional geopolitical reference. Meanwhile, ‘Queer Asia’, as a body without organs, is permeated by flows in all directions in its micropolitics. Yet, all the disorientations are however politically useful for both academic and activist communities, if not necessarily in the conventional sense of solidarity, to animate queer coalitional politics between and beyond Asias.
The article examines how emerging powers - namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China and SouthAfrica - have behaved in multilateral debates around human rights, gender and sexuality, especially at Ibsa and Brics fora. Th e arguments presented are derived from the first roundof conversations held in 2013 by the Sexuality Policy Watch, a forum of researchers andactivists which invited partners based in the Global South to launch a cross-country effort tocontribute to sexuality related global policy debates. After exposing the distinct foreign policiesof the five countries regarding sexuality and gender, the paper analyses their performance andshifting alliances both within the Ibsa and Brics blocks and across North-South relationshipsin several multilateral fora. Although the frequent use of the terms Brics, Ibsa or 'emergingpowers' might lead to forming an image of cohesion, the article concludes by highlightingtheir heterogeneity, still more pronounced in relation to sexual and reproductive rights, forthese formations are comprised by States whose interests do not fully coincide and which, not rarely, compete with each other in a variety of fronts.
Profit and Pleasure, Second Edition is a classic intervention into the relationship between capitalism and sexual identity. Rosemary Hennessy boldly reorients queer theory toward an up-close analysis of the structures of consumption, labor, and commodification, revealing how sexual identity-in the varied ways it has been culturally differentiated and lived-has been fundamentally affected by these principles of capitalism. In this second edition, a new introduction by the author reasserts a Marxist feminist standpoint as the most theoretically developed feminist analysis of capitalism's cultural logics. She presents a range of key concepts-among them totality, overdetermination, social reproduction-outlining their evolution and continued relevance to analysis of sexuality since the book's first publication in 2000. The introduction addresses important developments in materialist approaches to sexuality during the past two decades and concludes by returning to the notion of "love" as defined in the original edition, making a call for the common potential of human collaboration and action to ignite a radical sexual politics. This seminal text will appeal to students and scholars of feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, and cultural and literary studies.
Since the 1960s, queers have become increasingly visible in the media. Queer identities in community life and politics may rely in the twenty-first century on the prevailing media landscape. And yet visibility, like other semantic and semiotic forms, contains its own contradictions. The paradoxes of visibility are many: spurring tolerance through harmful stereotyping, diminishing isolation at the cost of activism, trading assimilation for equality, and converting radicalism into a market niche. Signaling the existence of queer persons may aim for inclusion in public discourse, but, through simultaneous contrast, the assertion contains its inevitable opposition:Queers are different and cannot go unremarked.
Through a meta-literature review, this paper examines the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China. It unfolds the different theoretical orientations and methodologies that construct the modern male homosexual subject under major socio-economic and political changes. Chinese sociology of homosexuality started in the reform era and has been dominated by Western knowledge production and the political ideology of the communist party-state. Fused with the bio-medical model and the state's modernization project in the 1980s-1990s, the sociological study adopted a functionalist and positivistic approach with survey-based methodology in the main which focused on the etiology of homosexuality. A new transnational knowledge production of sociology of homosexuality has formed since the 2000s which has shifted towards a constructivist/ post-structuralist approach and reflexive qualitative methodology. The new sociological study examines the rise of male (as well as female) homosexual identity in China, questions the hetero/homosexual binary and discusses how an individual makes sense of homosexual identity to form same-sex intimate relationships. By tracing the epistemology of homosexuality in contemporary China, this paper rethinks the dominance of the Western construction and the role of the state in shaping the knowledge of homosexuality and proposes alternative spaces for theorizing Chinese sexual identities, desires and practices.
This article questions the utility of considering Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa as a single grouping-the BRICS. Not only are there at least as many differences between the countries' economies and media as there are similarities, but many of their characteristic features are shared with a much wider range of societies. The scale and rates of growth of the five economies are very different. Politically, they range from a long-established democracy to an equally long-established one-party state. They all have high levels of corruption, including of journalists, but estimates of the degree of media freedom and the degree to which journalists are jailed or murdered vary widely. Overall, there is little to warrant considering these countries as a homogenous bloc. Of these countries, China is by far the largest and the only one that is today a serious challenger to Western domination.
Introduction: The New Queer Chinese CinemaQueer MainstreamingQueer AuteursQueer DocsConclusion
How to achieve a new understanding of the Chinese revolution, of the legacy of socialism, and of the achievements as well as the tragedies of this legacy are major questions urgently in need of address from Chinese intellectuals, but to which they have so far been unable to respond. — Wang Hui "The 1989 Social Movement and China's Neoliberalism" Almost every generalization about China — that it is a communist-led socialist society as before, that at its core it is a society of traditionally centralized power, that it has nearly become capitalist, that it is a full-fledged consumer society, or even that it is already "postmodern" — can be supported, while the characterization diametrically opposed can be backed with an equal number of examples. — Wang Xiaoming "China on the Brink of a 'Momentous Era' " positions 18:2 doi 10.
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