popular culture Archives

Laughter in the Classroom

Set in a London secondary modern school and televised between 1968 and 1972, the situation comedy Please Sir! was produced for the Independent Television (ITV) network by the newly formed company London Weekend Television (LWT). Popular with audiences and recognised by many critics as an innovative contribution to the sitcom genre as it evolved during the late 1960s, Please Sir! has nevertheless received remarkably little sustained attention from scholars. That silence is filled by this volume.

Please Sir! featured the lives of young working-class people in a distinctive manner that blended realism and romanticism. In an engaging narrative, Gillian Mitchell explores the programme’s background, its comedic style, cast of characters and depictions of contemporary issues, from educational matters to questions of gender, generation, race and ethnicity. She explores the positive contribution of LWT’s early ambitions to the success of Please Sir!, then turns to the impact on the programme’s immediate and long-term reputation of crises that afflicted LWT as it failed in its audacious bid to alter the ‘popular’ image of ITV with its highbrow programming. Ultimately, the book argues that Please Sir! reveals much about the social, cultural and televisual era in which it was produced.

Playing the Archive

Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the digital playground reflects on a major study inspired by the work of citizen scholar folklorists Iona and Peter Opie. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Opies built a vast collection of children’s street and playground games, stories, sayings, rhymes, beliefs and habits as told to them by children all over Britain. These accounts are now held in the Bodleian Libraries and were the focus and inspiration for the new study. New stories and games were gathered from today’s children, and comparisons drawn between play experiences at these two different points in time.

The book explores how the Opie Archive was made publicly available online by the project through digital images, innovative cataloguing and playful digital media interfaces, such as a red telephone kiosk at the Young V&A. Chapters analyse the ethnographic strands of the project, collecting evidence of new and old forms of play on today’s playgrounds using state-of-the-art digital methods. The book proposes new ways of thinking about changes and adaptations to play and games, theorising on the workings of interfaces, repertoires and archives. It also considers the Opies’ ways of working, landscapes of play over time, and intergenerational dialogue about play. The collection presents research evidence and theory which speak back to the often reductive public discourse around children’s play and digital media. It positions children as creative, agentive and engaged participants in their play cultures.

Palaeontology in Public

Since the establishment of concepts of deep time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, palaeontology has been one of the most high-profile sciences. Dinosaurs, mammoths, human ancestors and other lost creatures from Earth’s history are some of the most prominent icons of science, and are essential for our understanding of nature and time. Palaeontology and its practitioners have had a huge impact on public understandings of science, despite their often precarious and unsteady position within scientific institutions and networks.

Palaeontology in Public considers the connections between palaeontology and public culture across the past two centuries. In so doing, it explores how these public dimensions have been crucial to the development of palaeontology, and indeed how they conditioned wider views of science, nature, the environment, time and the world. The book provides a history of vertebrate palaeontology through a series of compelling case studies. Dinosaurs feature, of course, including Spinosaurus, Winsor McCay’s ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ and the creatures of Jurassic Park and The Lost World. But there are also the small mammals of the Mesozoic, South American Glyptodons, and human ancestors like Neanderthals and Australopithecines. This book shows how palaeontology is defined by its relationship with public audiences and how this connection is central to our vision of the past and future of the Earth and its inhabitants.

American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today.

Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction.

Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins.

O Smartphone Global: Uma tecnologia para além dos jovens

O smartphone está tão frequentemente debaixo de nosso nariz, que assumimos saber o que ele é. Mas sabemos mesmo? Para descobrir, 11 antropólogos realizaram pesquisa de campo de 16 meses em países da África, Ásia, Europa e América do Sul, tendo como foco pessoas mais velhas.

O livro O Smartphone Global apresenta perspectivas inéditas a partir desta pesquisa comparativa. A primeira descoberta é: os smartphones não são mais uma tecnologia restrita aos jovens, estando nas mãos de todos, independente da idade. Além disso, observou-se uma grande ambivalência entre aquilo que as pessoas falam sobre os smartphones e os modos como elas os usam na prática. Os smartphones se tornaram tanto um lugar em que vivemos, como apetrechos que providenciam um tipo de “oportunismo perpétuo”, por estarem sempre conosco. Vão além de um “repositório de aplicativos”. São um dispositivo sem precedentes em termos de potencial de transformação, assimilando rapidamente valores pessoais. Para compreender esse processo, considerou-se um leque de nuances nacionais e culturais, como a comunicação visual na China e no Japão, o dinheiro móvel em Camarões e Uganda, e acesso a informação sobre saúde no Chile e na Irlanda – juntamente com trajetórias variadas em relação ao envelhecimento em Al-Quds, no Brasil e na Itália. É dessa perspectiva global, e a partir do mapeamento de contextos diversos, que o livro se propõe a responder à pergunta O que é um smartphone? e a analisar suas consequências.

Music and Digital Media

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies.

Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max.

The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory.

The Global Smartphone

The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young.

The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide ‘perpetual opportunism’, as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an ‘app device’ and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them.

The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland – all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people’s lives around the world.

Global Sceptical Publics

Global Sceptical Publics is the first major study of the significance of different media for the (re)production of non-religious publics and publicity. While much work has documented how religious subjectivities are shaped by media, until now the crucial role of diverse media for producing and participating in religion-sceptical publics and debates has remained under-researched. With some chapters focusing on locations hitherto barely considered by scholarship on non-religion, the book places in comparative perspective how atheists, secularists and humanists engage with media – as means of communication and forming non-religious publics, but also on occasion as something to be resisted. Its conceptually rich interdisciplinary chapters thereby contribute important new insights to the growing field of non-religion studies and to scholarship on media and materiality more generally.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy

‘Who am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?’ These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond.

Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people live, work and retire, and how they communicate and care for each other.

Based on 16 months of urban digital ethnographic research in Milan, the smartphone is shown to be a ‘constant companion’ in, of and for contemporary life. It accompanies people throughout the day and night, and through individual and collective experiences of movement, change and rupture. Smartphone practices tap into and reflect the moral anxieties of the present moment, while posing questions related to life values and purpose, identities and belonging, privacy and sociability.

Through her extensive investigation, Shireen Walton argues that ageing with smartphones in this contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with and to others. Ageing with smartphones is about figuring out how best to live together, differently.

Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland

There are not many books about how people get younger. It doesn’t happen very often. But Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland documents a radical change in the experience of ageing.

Based on two ethnographies, one within Dublin and the other from the Dublin region, the book shows that people, rather than seeing themselves as old, focus on crafting a new life in retirement. Our research participants apply new ideals of sustainability both to themselves and to their environment. They go for long walks, play bridge, do yoga and keep as healthy as possible. As part of Ireland’s mainstream middle class, they may have more time than the young to embrace green ideals and more money to move to energy-efficient homes, throw out household detritus and protect their environment.

The smartphone has become integral to this new trajectory. For some it is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has brought back the extended family and old friends, and helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though facilitating new forms of grandparenting. It has also become central to health issues, whether by Googling information or looking after frail parents. The smartphone enables this sense of getting younger as people download the music of their youth and develop new interests.

This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland. How do older people in Ireland experience life today?