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South Africa's media often portrays foreigners in a bad light. This fuels xenophobia

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

In the light of this we set out to understand how South Africa’s print media writes about foreigners.

Key Points:

In the light of this we set out to understand how South Africa’s print media writes about foreigners.
Our recently published study looked at the representation of foreigners in some of South Africa’s biggest print and online newspapers.
Their presence in the country receives a great deal of media attention and has sparked a number of xenophobic attacks.
As researchers in Political Science and Sociology, we were interested in how South Africa’s print media portrays foreign nationals.
Our findings showed that the media often used language that portrayed foreigners in a bad light, and dehumanised them.

How the media portrays foreign nationals

We found a common trend in the way the South African media describes the immigrant population.
For instance, without incorporating academic or other credible research, there is loose use of adjectives such as “undocumented” or “illegal” when referring to African foreign nationals.
The media frequently used expressions such as “huge numbers”, “many foreigners”, “thousands of immigrants”, “millions of foreign nationals”, “over 300 illegal foreigners”, and “a vast number”.
Read more:
Integrating languages should form part of South Africa's xenophobia solutions
Another issue our study investigated was how the media attached meanings to words.

Us versus them

Corresponding to the negative depiction was the creation of separate identities (us versus them).
Mostly, this was done by downplaying the negative traits of South Africans while emphasising their positive traits.
The positive traits of African foreign nationals were minimised and their negative traits highlighted.

What should be done

Nevertheless it’s plausible to argue that the media has the potential to shape public attitudes.
Sikanyiso Masuku receives funding from the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Aﬀairs.

This university class uses color and emotion to explore the end of life

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

In both contexts, I work with advanced oncology patients and with people at the end of life.

Key Points:

In both contexts, I work with advanced oncology patients and with people at the end of life.
After decades working with university students and people facing the end of life, I found myself working with people at the beginning of life – with children.
The end of life is all about life itself and the many different types of love that we experience as human beings.
The class provides a window into a vital aspect of life that is often overlooked and avoided – namely, serious illness and the end of life.

Prosecraft has infuriated authors by using their books without consent – but what does copyright law say?

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Prosecraft requires an algorithm to crawl through millions of words of text to produce an analysis of the language.

Key Points:

Prosecraft requires an algorithm to crawl through millions of words of text to produce an analysis of the language.
It drew on “more than 25,000 books” to allow authors to compare their text to writers they admire.
Not by faux data analysis.” Smith believed Prosecraft could help uncover the intricacies of the writing techniques of famous authors that their otherwise dense prose might obscure.
Read more:
Explainer: what is 'fair dealing' and when can you copy without permission?

Shadow libraries: the ‘Achilles heel’ of AI

None of this would be possible without a “shadow library”: the Achilles’ heel of AI technologies.
In copyright terms, the copying of a book so it can be stored in a shadow library is an act of infringement.
Yet, thousands of authors suing the creator of a shadow library is a different question altogether.

Copyright depends on human actions

However, if the AI technology they have developed then trawls through that shadow library to produce many different forms of language analysis, this is not likely to be an infringement of copyright: almost all the relevant laws contemplate human actions.
The opening line of the infringement provisions of the US Copyright Act reads, “Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner …” (Emphasis added.)
Further references within section 501 of the US Copyright Act also make the assumption of human action and human agency quite plain.
Fair use is an open-ended exception where the use of a copyright work is considered against four factors.

‘Transformative use’ and Australian law

Australia amended its laws after the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement, to mirror some of the principles of US copyright law.
In amending its laws, Australia legislated that parody or satire could form the basis of a fair dealing exception.
Australia has either missed a trick or dodged a bullet by failing to include transformative use as a fair dealing exception.

Do phrases like 'global boiling' help or hinder climate action?

Retrieved on:

Thursday, August 3, 2023

People, Coral, United Nations, Climate, Politics, Fear, Foot, Hope, Dignity, Fire, Guterres, Phrase, Wind, Landslide, Climate change, Traction, IPCC, False alarm, Flood, COP27, Risk, Water, UN, Horn, United Kingdom, Weather, Black Summer, Food, Tremor, News, Farm, Fossil fuel, Renewable energy, Film industry, Design

The era of global warming has ended, he declared dramatically, and the era of “global boiling” has arrived.

Key Points:

The era of global warming has ended, he declared dramatically, and the era of “global boiling” has arrived.
Do phrases like this actually help drive us towards faster and more effective climate action?
Or do they risk making us prone to climate doomism, and risk prompting a backlash?

Rhetoric and reality

In many ways, it’s one of the only tools he has, given the UN has global influence but limited real power.
It’s designed to sound the alarm and trigger more radical action to stave off the worst of climate change.
At one level, “global boiling” is clearly an exaggeration, despite the extreme summer heat and fire during the northern summer.
Fewer doubters are trying to discredit the fundamental science than during the long period of manufactured scepticism in Western nations.
In this context, we can see “global boiling” as an expression of humanitarian concern backed by rigorous science showing the situation continues to worsen.

The hazards of theatrical language

Or the warnings can add to climate anxiety and make people feel there’s no hope and therefore no point in acting.
Catastrophic language often has moral overtones – and, as we all know, we don’t like being told what to do.
Hot language can motivate us, just as quieter, process-heavy, technocratic language can.
It can be folded into a discourse of hope and aspiration for the future, rather than of fear and trembling.

Rethinking calamity

The poor and marginalised, both authors observe, are already living through crises, year-in and year-out.
They suffer what Nixon dubs “slow violence”, punctuated by dramatic environmental events such as landslides and failed harvests.
What he’s hoping is to make people listen – and act – now we can see what climate change looks like.
Read more:
The climate crisis is real – but overusing terms like 'crisis' and 'emergency' comes with risk

Hyper-femininity can be subversive and empowering – just ask Barbie

Retrieved on:

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Fantasy, Ice Spice, Workforce, Biography, Male, Hair, Teen Talk Barbie, Noise, RealDoll, Aqua, Clothing, Woman, COVID, History, Phrase, Scream, Man, Enchanted, Mattel, Barbie Girl, Feminism, Femininity, Love, Juicy Couture, Social media, Female, Toy, Cosmetics, Film industry

Indoors, confined to Juicy Couture tracksuits, I was missing excuses to express my hyper-femininity through clothing, as I had done pre-pandemic.

Key Points:

Indoors, confined to Juicy Couture tracksuits, I was missing excuses to express my hyper-femininity through clothing, as I had done pre-pandemic.
Collecting Barbie dolls became a way to display my love of femininity in all it’s fun, ridiculous and pink-saturated possibilities.
My shelf of Barbies – from Western Winking Barbie (1981) to Enchanted Evening Barbie (1995) – is now my favourite part of my home.
But for many, her rediscovery will come through Greta Gerwig’s upcoming movie, Barbie – the doll’s first live action film, starring Margot Robbie.

Barbie’s complicated feminism

Lord describes Barbie as a complicated and contradictory pop-culture figure.
Lord sees Barbie as a “reflection of American popular cultural values and notions about femininity”.
Over its 64-year history, the doll’s evolution has reflected the often contradictory demands and ideals placed on women.
Some feminists argue that Barbie’s hyper-femininity isn’t self aware in the way that, for example, the hyper-femininity of drag queens is.

Rebranding Barbie

The company alleged that the band’s song Barbie Girl, released the same year, infringed upon Mattel’s trademark and imposed an adult image onto Barbie.
Fast forward 20 years and the soundtrack to the Barbie movie features a song by rappers Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj entitled Barbie World, which samples Aqua’s Barbie Girl.
With lyrics such as “I’m a Barbie girl, pink Barbie Dreamhouse/The way Ken be killin’ shit got me yellin’ out like the Scream House”, the pair position Barbie-branded hyper-femininity as a source of sexual empowerment.
In the trailers for the upcoming Barbie movie, Barbie Land is a matriarchal society where hyper-femininity is a sign of power.

Lizzo proudly calls herself a 'fat' woman. Are we allowed to as well?

Retrieved on:

Monday, July 17, 2023

If you don’t know Lizzo yet, she shot to fame in 2019 with the release of her third studio album Cuz I Love You.

Key Points:

If you don’t know Lizzo yet, she shot to fame in 2019 with the release of her third studio album Cuz I Love You.
The re-release of sleeper hit Truth Hurts launched Lizzo to number one on the charts and made her a household name.
The catchy lyrics still have people around the world singing, “I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100% that bitch”.

Thick and juicy

She also uses descriptors such as big, thick and juicy.
Lizzo’s reclamation of the word is rooted in a queer-feminist led and disability-related activist movement: fat activism.
The fat activist movement emerged in the United States in the 1970s, and includes early figures such as Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran.
Fat studies has since emerged as an interdisciplinary field that documents and theorises the work of fat activists.
For years fat activists have been drawing attention to the assimilationist nature of body positivity and its toxic and exclusionary mechanisms.

Fatness in society and culture

We have the added complication that fatness, in many ways, is in the eye of the beholder: conceptions of fatness tend to be individually, socially and culturally shaped.
She says,
I am a Black woman, I am making music from my Black experience, for me to heal myself.
I am a Black woman, I am making music from my Black experience, for me to heal myself.

So should we say ‘fat’?

If an individual like Lizzo self-identifies as fat, an invitation emerges for us to also pick up and use the term to describe her body.
Doing so, it feels like we, too, might participate in a process of fat liberation and size acceptance.

Fresh air has long been seen as important for our health, even if we haven't always understood why

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

And we have good reasons for looking at indoor air quality.

Key Points:

And we have good reasons for looking at indoor air quality.
From wildfire smoke, to industrial pollution, many of us have felt the impacts of poor air quality and turned to air filters and respirators to cope.
The White House held a summit last year on improving indoor air quality to reduce the transmission of COVID-19.

Ventilation and eighteenth-century medicine

In the 1700s, British physicians took advantage of new scientific approaches but had little technology to see what was going on.
They believed that most contagious illnesses spread through smelly decaying matter, or miasma, from rotting food, sick bodies and so on.
Eighteenth-century physicians saw diseases spreading easily in crowded, poorly ventilated structures, from ships and jails to the homes of the poor.
Ventilation made sense as a way to make people safer: blow out the bad air.

Outbreaks in the Navy

In his 1797 book on naval medicine, physician and poet Thomas Trotter drew on his extensive experience at sea.
He questioned both miasma and germ theory.
Trotter explains how they ended an outbreak of a “malignant fever” on a navy ship in 1791.

Ventilation spreads

Like eighteenth-century doctors, nineteenth-century writers promoted ventilation and fresh air.
In fiction, Jane Austen had her characters “breathing fresh air,” while Lady Morgan complained about “thickly populated and ill ventilated” streets helping to spread disease.
Abrams remarked, “That the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, [and] Byron should be so thoroughly ventilated is itself noteworthy.”

Ventilation comes back

But advances in germ theory couldn’t erase the benefits of breathing fresh air from the public consciousness.
Around 1850, journalist Henry Mayhew interviewed one Londoner who said the following about the city’s cheap housing:
“Nothing can be worse to the health than these places, without ventilation, cleanliness, or decency, and with forty people’s breaths perhaps mingling together in one foul choking steam of stench.”
“Nothing can be worse to the health than these places, without ventilation, cleanliness, or decency, and with forty people’s breaths perhaps mingling together in one foul choking steam of stench.” In 1859, Florence Nightingale helped revive ventilation in healthcare.
Now, another pandemic has got us talking about the importance of fresh air.

English dialects make themselves heard in genes

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Such words have their origins in migrations and conquests that took place during the Middle Ages.

Key Points:

Such words have their origins in migrations and conquests that took place during the Middle Ages.
Cultural evolution researchers like us know that it’s not just mountain ranges or oceans that can be barriers to interaction.
This can be seen most clearly when cultural traditions lead people to marry people from the same community.
Can smaller things, like the different dialects between neighboring villages, shape the genetic landscape of populations?

Combining two sets of data

Ideally, we could use a unified data set capturing information about the genetics and dialects of people living in a region.
Instead, we used data from two separate studies that focused on people from approximately the same time and place.
For linguistic data, we relied on the Survey of English Dialects.
Over time, dialects can persist in similar locations if geographic or cultural barriers influence how often and with whom people interact.

The echo of sounds long gone

Our results suggest that language, or some other aspect of culture, has limited how people interacted to some degree over the past thousand years.
This is the first time that information about linguistic dialects has been compared with modern genetic data within a population, particularly at such a granular level.
Notably, people speaking different dialects have no obvious reason to avoid marrying one another, as would be expected from groups with specific marriage customs.
At the same time, immigrants from the former British Empire and elsewhere have brought a new influx of language.

What to do if your child is struggling: Steps caregivers can take to help kids and teens with their mental health

Retrieved on:

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Emerging research suggests that child and adolescent mental health problems are on the rise.

Key Points:

Emerging research suggests that child and adolescent mental health problems are on the rise.
As clinicians and researchers, we have interacted with thousands of caregivers, many of whom have asked us how they can better understand and support their children’s mental health.

Recognize signs of distress

Talk to your children about mental health

We encourage caregivers to have conversations about mental health early and often, whether their child or teen is struggling or not.
In this scenario, make a statement about children’s mental health generally, such as “I hear there’s a lot of kids and teens struggling with their mental health right now” and then ask open-ended questions, such as: “what do you think about that?” or “what have you noticed about your own mental health lately”?
When you have conversations about mental health with your child or adolescent, try to minimize any potential discomfort.
Also, some children find it hard to have face-to-face conversations about their mental health.

Talk with their teacher

If you remain concerned about your child, and want to gather additional information, you could speak with their teacher or guidance counsellor.
Up to 80 per cent of children get their knowledge about mental health from schools.
Guidance counsellors are specifically trained to address mental health concerns and other school staff are used to having conversations about mental health with students.

Talk with your health-care provider

With this knowledge, health-care providers can offer strategies and resources to support children and caregivers.
They will work with caregivers and children directly to decide on the best approaches to addressing the child’s mental health struggles.

Immediately address urgent mental health problems

Although supportive in nature, taking care of our children’s mental health can also be taxing and/or triggering for many caregivers.
We encourage caregivers to prioritize their own mental health, so that they can feel energized and empowered to attend to their children’s mental health.

Sheri Madigan receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Alberta Children's Hospital Foundation, an anonymous donor, and the Canada Research Chairs program.

Mission trips are an evangelical rite of passage for US teens – but why?

Retrieved on:

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Their T-shirts sport biblical verses or phrases like “Here I am, send me” or “Called to serve,” and the teens may gather for prayer before boarding.

Key Points:

Their T-shirts sport biblical verses or phrases like “Here I am, send me” or “Called to serve,” and the teens may gather for prayer before boarding.
According to some estimates, as many as 2 million youth and adults per year participated in Christian mission trips before the pandemic, including overseas trips and trips to poor communities at home.
While it is difficult to confirm these numbers, mission trips are now especially commonplace within evangelical churches, with larger and more affluent churches offering multiple trips throughout the year.

‘White man’s burden’

Protestant missionaries spread throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific, seeking to win souls for Christ.
But they left lasting impacts through the many institutions they established around the world, including schools, universities and hospitals.

Missions 2.0

Historically, mission work was a lifelong calling and profession, one that often meant never coming home.
Career missionaries continue to have a role in missions today, sometimes financially supported by denominational organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Missions Board or by donations from individual churches.
Another distinctive feature of short-term missions is their approach to faith.

Sacred and secular

The language used to describe and promote trips is remarkably similar to secular overseas volunteering or “voluntourism,” as well as gap-year programs before college.
Another similarity is that both Christian and secular programs usually involve some kind of service project: building a house, digging a well or leading recreational activities for children.

‘Walk with the poor’

Not all evangelicals see the value of mission trips.
Warning against a “white savior” attitude, they suggest that the purpose of short-term missions is to “walk with the poor” and build lasting relationships that will lead people to Christ.

Beyond the bubble

Trip organizers want to open American Christians’ eyes to realities of the world outside of their bubbles.
Yet their messages tends to imply the effects of poverty can be overcome through personal faith in Christ.
Trip leaders felt that such information would bore participants and detract from the spiritual aims of the trip.