Search Results (7)

During a 2-year period, the depictions of religious figures and their interactions with secular individuals in urban daily life became an integral feature of Turkish soap operas that gained popularity in the world after the 1990s. While previous studies have explored the portrayal of various actors in them in terms of age, gender, socio-economic status, and historical perspectives, there is a lack of analysis regarding the interaction between secular and religious urban representations. This research aims to investigate the differences in everyday cosmopolitan perspectives in terms of spatiality and temporality between the two groups. To examine this, the soap opera Kızılcık Şerbeti (One Love) was analysed. Research has shown that when two groups develop their identities in opposition to one another, it leads to the emergence of different temporal and spatial dimensions within the same urban setting. While it seems unfeasible to reconcile the daily routines of both groups in the same place, age, gender, education, and class make negotiation possible in shared spaces. This draws attention to the intersectional approach rather than the binary positions of identities in the placemaking process. The main contribution of this research is to integrate religion, which has been forgotten in human geography, into geographical and sociological discussions by focusing on an intersectional approach in an urban context. Full article

For several decades, Brazil’s Grupo Globo, which controls radio, TV, and newspaper, served as the hegemonic voice controlling the audio, visual, and narrative dimensions of social phenomena that formed and informed social, political, and cultural attitudes among Brazilians. Of all their divisions, none has been more influential than the TV Globo network. Lately, with the popularization of free access to digital media, such as those offered by YouTube, TV Globo’s viewership has substantially declined. This paper discusses the concept of controlling images to analyze examples of TV Globo’s constructed visual image of the hypersexualized Afro-Brazilian female body in the network’s soap operas. It also analyzes cases of TV Globo’s constructed narrative over another subaltern Brazilian group: the LGBTQIA+ community. Recently, Afro-Brazilian and Queer-centric YouTube channels have attracted subscribers by emphasizing content centered on negritude, gender politics, and place of speech while deconstructing and de-normalizing Eurocentric and patriarchal controlling images. Against examples of TV Globo’s normative discourse of the past decades, the YouTube channels discussed in this paper represent alternative mediums for agency, visibility, and unbiased representations of gender and racial identities in Brazil. Full article

Systemic oppression creates a context in which Latinx LGBTQ+ youth experience social isolation. Social isolation has been associated with mental and physical health disparities, including disproportionate levels of depression, substance use, self-harm, and attempted suicide. These disparities are often magnified in rural and suburban areas with fewer identity-affirming spaces. This community-engaged study reports on the formative process of developing a Latinx LGBTQ+ telenovela (soap opera) allyship intervention based on critical consciousness theory. We conducted eight focus groups with community advisory boards, which included Latinx LGBTQ+ youth (n = 12), health and social service providers serving LGBTQ+ youth (n = 10), 4-H Latinx alumni youth (n = 12), and 4-H Latinx parents (n = 8). We interviewed nine Latinx LGBTQ+ youth enrolled in a film-making workshop. As a result of our multi-stakeholder approach, we: (1) described how stakeholders reflected on and decoded intersectional isolation on the individual, community, and structural levels; and (2) identified ways that stakeholders suggested taking action by improving access to resources to address social isolation, provide culturally competent healthcare, and co-create an enabling social environment. Our study indicated the importance of tapping into core values and intersectional identities to build solidarity among and within marginalized groups to dismantle oppressive systems. Full article

Understanding of the perception of emotions or affective states in humans is important to develop emotion-aware systems that work in realistic scenarios. In this paper, the perception of emotions in naturalistic human interaction (audio–visual data) is studied using perceptual evaluation. For this purpose, a naturalistic audio–visual emotion database collected from TV broadcasts such as soap-operas and movies, called the IIIT-H Audio–Visual Emotion (IIIT-H AVE) database, is used. The database consists of audio-alone, video-alone, and audio–visual data in English. Using data of all three modes, perceptual tests are conducted for four basic emotions (angry, happy, neutral, and sad) based on category labeling and for two dimensions, namely arousal (active or passive) and valence (positive or negative), based on dimensional labeling. The results indicated that the participants’ perception of emotions was remarkably different between the audio-alone, video-alone, and audio–video data. This finding emphasizes the importance of emotion-specific features compared to commonly used features in the development of emotion-aware systems. Full article

Soap operas are an integral part of Brazilian popular culture and the daily lives of Brazil’s people. In 2018, the biggest TV channel in the country, Globo, broadcast a six-month-long soap opera called ‘Pride and Passion’, centered on the story of the Benedito family and their five unmarried daughters, who live in the small village of ‘Vale do Café’ (‘Coffee Valley’) around the 1910s, surrounded by the rural aristocracy and its coffee plantations. The obvious inspiration is Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and its choice is an indication of Austen’s growing popularity outside English-speaking countries. This adaptation, which incorporates characters from her other novels as well, is the quintessential amalgamation of cultures and media, combining a canonical author of the English language with a Brazilian TV genre commonly seen as ‘lowbrow’. It was not, however, Austen’s first incursion in Brazil’s popular culture. During the 1960s and 1970s, photonovels were an extremely popular genre there, usually translated into Portuguese from Italian productions, as was the case of the 1965 Pride and Prejudice photonovel, sold as a literary supplement to a widely circulated women’s magazine. This essay analyses both cases of different, although connected, adaptations of Austen, arguing that Austen’s presence in Brazil was always mediated by the expectations and appropriation of new media, while showing that the dialogue with popular culture can only enhance our understanding of the ‘global Austen’ phenomenon and her appeal across time and cultures. Full article

The influence of the cult television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991) can be detected in a wide range of videogames, from adventure, to roleplaying to survival horror titles. While many games variously draw upon the narrative, setting and imagery of the series for inspiration, certain elements of the distinctive uncanniness of Twin Peaks are difficult to translate into gameplay, particularly its ability consistently disrupt the expectations and emotional responses of its audience. This paper examines the ways in which the 2010 survival horror title Deadly Premonition replicates the uncanniness of Twin Peaks in both its narrative and gameplay, noting how it expands upon conceptualizations of the gamerly uncanny. It contends that Deadly Premonition’s awkward recombination of seemingly inconsistent and excessive gameplay features mirrors the ways in which David Lynch and Mark Frost draw upon and subvert audience expectations for police procedurals and soap operas in the original Twin Peaks in order to generate an uncanny effect. Furthermore, Deadly Premonition uses the theme of possession—a central element of the television series—to offer a diegetic exploration of the uncanny relationship between the player and their onscreen avatar. In these regards, Deadly Premonition provides a rare example of how the subversive uncanniness of Twin Peaks can be addressed through gameplay, rather than solely through the game’s narrative or representational elements. Full article

This paper describes the Internet adaptation of an evidenced-based intervention for Hispanic families, eHealth Familias Unidas, and explores whether an Internet-based format is feasible and acceptable to Hispanic families. Core intervention components from the evidence-based intervention, Familias Unidas, were transposed into a video format and edited for content. Additionally, interactive exercises and a soap opera series were incorporated to reinforce intervention content and optimize participant engagement and retention. To understand the feasibility and acceptability of eHealth Familias Unidas, we conducted a pilot study and examined findings from: (1) session completion rates for both e-parent group sessions and family sessions (n = 23 families); and (2) qualitative data collected from Hispanic parents (n = 29) that received the eHealth intervention. Engagement and attendance in the intervention showed that 83% of families engaged in the intervention and that there was an overall session completion rate of 78%. Qualitative interviews were conducted mid and post intervention with a combined total of 29 participants. A general inductive approach was used to derive themes from the collected data. Overall, parents expressed positive feedback in regards to the intervention and stated that there were multiple lessons learned from participating in eHealth Familias Unidas. Findings indicate that an Internet-based family intervention is not only feasible and acceptable for Hispanic families, but also offers a viable option to ameliorate barriers to participation and implementation of preventive interventions. Full article