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Backed by Brazil’s wealthy agribusiness groups, a growing evangelical movement, and an emboldened military and police force, Jair Bolsonaro took office as Brazil’s president in 2019. Driven by the former army captain’s brand of controversial, aggressive rhetoric, the divisive presidential campaign saw fake news and misinformation shared with Bolsonaro’s tens of millions of social media followers. Bolsonaro promised simple solutions to Brazil’s rising violent crime, falling living standards and widespread corruption, but what has emerged is Latin America's most right-wing president since the military dictatorships of the 1970s. Famous for his racist, homophobic and sexist beliefs and his disregard for human rights, the so-called ‘Trump of the Tropics’ has established a reputation based on his polemical, sensationalist statements. Written by a journalist with decades of experience in the field, Beef, Bible and bullets is a compelling account of the origins of Brazil's unique brand of right-wing populism. Lapper offers the first major assessment of the Bolsonaro government and the growing tensions between extremist and moderate conservatives.
Brands are introduced into the lives of consumers from an early age. Even before they start school, they can recognise brand names and ask for brands by name. The meaning of brands to children can vary dramatically with age. As with other aspects of consumer socialisation, children’s initial orientation towards brands occurs at a superficial level because their level of cognitive development does not allow them to understand deeper-seated symbolic meanings of brands.
This book examines these processes and how they evolve over the different stages of childhood. It considers specific models of cognitive development and how they inform what we know about the way children engage with brands. It also examines the way brands have adopted new promotional platforms in the digital era and in consequence the ways in which they have taken on new forms that often disguise their true purpose.
While children can begin the understand the nature and purpose of advertising from well before their teen years, when advertising is less overt and more subtle – as it often is in the promotional techniques used by brands in online social media and virtual environments – this can impede a child’s ability to recognise what is going on. This book examines these phenomena and considers their implications for the future regulation of brand promotions.
Beautyscapes explores the rapidly developing global phenomenon of international medical travel, focusing specifically on patient-consumers seeking cosmetic surgery outside their home country and on those who enable them to access treatment abroad, including key figures such as surgeons and facilitators. Documenting the complex and sometimes fraught journeys of those who travel for treatment abroad, as well as the nature and power relations of the transnational IMT industry, this is the first book to focus specifically on cosmetic surgery tourism. A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Beautyscapes draws on key themes in studies of globalisation and mobility, such as gender and class, neoliberalism, social media, assemblage, conviviality and care, to explain the nature and growing popularity of cosmetic surgery tourism. The book challenges myths about vain and ill-informed travellers seeking surgery from ‘cowboy’ foreign doctors, yet also demonstrates the difficulties and dilemmas that medical tourists – especially cosmetic surgery tourists – face. Vividly illustrated with ethnographic material and with the voices of those directly involved in cosmetic surgery tourism, Beautyscapes is based on a large research project exploring cosmetic surgery journeys from Australia and China to East Asia and from the UK to Europe and North Africa.
The book reports on a major mixed-methods research project on dining out in England. It is a re-study of the populations of three cities – London, Bristol and Preston – based on a unique systematic comparison of behaviour between 2015 and 1995. It reveals social differences in practice and charts the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out.
It addresses topics including the changing frequency and meaning of dining out, patterns of domestic hospitality, changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with eating out. It shows how the practice of eating out in the three cities has evolved over twenty years. The findings are put in the context of controversies about the nature of taste, the role of social class, the application of theories of practice and the effects of institutional change in the UK.
The subject matter is central to many disciplines: Food Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, Hospitality and Tourism Studies, Media and Communication, Social History, Social and Cultural Geography. It is suitable for scholars, researchers, postgraduate students and advanced undergraduate students in the UK, Europe, North America and East Asia. Academic interest in the book should be accentuated by its theoretical, methodological and substantive aspects. It will also be of interest to the catering trades and a general readership on the back of burgeoning interest in food and eating fostered by mass and social media.
Critical theory and demagogic populism provides a detailed analysis of the relevance of the Frankfurt School’s work to understanding contemporary populism. It draws on the research that the Institute for Social Research conducted concerning domestic demagogues during its period of ‘exile’ in the USA. The book argues that the figure of the demagogue has been neglected in both orthodox ‘populism studies’ and in existing critical approaches to populism such as that of Ernesto Laclau. Demagogic ‘capture’ of populist movements and their legacies is thus a contingent prospect for ‘left’ and ‘right’ populist movements. An account of ‘modern demagogy’ is thus detailed, from the Institute’s own dedicated demagogy studies through to their dialogue with Weber’s work on charismatic leadership, the US liberal critique of demagogy and Freud’s group psychology. The Institute’s linkage of ‘modern demagogy’ to the culture industry speaks to the underestimation in ‘populism studies’ of the significance of two other ‘modern phenomena. The first is ‘cultural populism’ – the appeal to a folkloric understanding of ‘the people’ and/or ‘their culture’. The second is the pivotal role of modern means of communication, not only in the recent prominence of social media but demagogic exploitation of all media since the rise of literacy and the widening of the suffrage in the nineteenth century. The dialectical dimensions of these processes are also highlighted in reconstructing the Institute’s work and in extending these analyses through to the present. The book so concludes by weighing up potential counter-demagogic forces within and beyond the culture industry.
This chapter analyses how hiloni millennials have experienced what has been called religionization of the Israel Defence Forces over the past 20 years. It argues that for this generation, serving as IDF conscripts and reservists during and after the 2005 Disengagement, two things have become clear. First, that army service during this period has helped shape both millennial hiloni and Jewish identity post-Oslo. Second, despite bitter recriminations between political left and right on social media, the frequency of wars post-Oslo has reinforced Jewish national solidarity, across religious lines. It provides new interview data with young hilonim as well as teachers in mechinot (pre-army colleges), speaking about Jewish identity education in the IDF.
This chapter builds on the previous chapter and places more emphasis on the concept of the ‘brand’ and how children become aware of it. We know that as children pass through different stages of psychological development, their abilities to understand the world in increasingly complex ways evolves. How does this knowledge of child developmental psychology translate into a model for enabling us to comprehend children’s growing awareness of brands? Research is examined that shows the extent of brand awareness at different ages and how this can be linked back to what we might expect given a child’s level of cognitive or social development. It also introduces the new phenomena or subtle or disguised forms of advertising such as product placement and the use of branded social media sites or virtual environments. How do these different forms of marketing affect children?
This chapter presents the rise of the avant-garde milieu of designers in Tokyo, which revolutionised visual and material culture beginning in the 1960s and continues to impact it in the present. This milieu included designers such as Ishioka Eiko and Tanaka Ikkō (graphic design), Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo (fashion design), Kuramata Shirō and Uchida Shigeru (interior and product design), and Andō Tadao and Isuzaki Arata (architecture). These designers all made decisions and created artefacts that radically altered and reshaped the course of Japanese design history. The development of their critical design is presented in the context of the aesthetic, economic, social, and political forces operating during this period and is linked to the rise of critical theories. Moreover, this chapter presents the development of social media and the rich working relations and collaborations among these designers and between them and members of the artistic avant-garde active during these years.
During the lockdowns of the COVID-19 crisis, every middle-class home became an office, adopting the same routines that projectarians have practised for decades. The projectarian will often transform a home into an office, with help of personal computers, mobile devices, spreadsheets, text editors, social media interfaces, email clients and newsletters. These technologies are indispensable components of the → assemblages that sustain ultra-mobile and scattered lifestyles. In March 2020, they formed an essential infrastructure for most of the
advertising agency in DRC, with a string of local and international brands (including Brasimba, Ecobank and Shoprite) whose social media accounts they managed. Voila Nights also started producing a terrestrial TV show. Other African countries, including Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, already had growing online content and services markets. But it was more surprising that DRC – a country that had experienced several decades of civil war – was now moving into the digital age. In 2017, the country's most-used apps were Facebook (2.7 million users