Feature: JOMEC Journal no. 12

We’re happy to announce that JOMEC Journal no. 12 is now available at: https://jomec.cardiffuniversitypress.org/ . JOMEC Journal is an online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal interested in highest-quality innovative academic work in the fields of journalism, media and cultural studies.  

In contrast to previous issues, we decided to make an exception and do an open issue that wouldn’t be dedicated to a specific theme. The submissions we received were fascinating, along with the surprising connections we found between them. 

The issue begins with an editorial, and the seven articles that follow can be divided into two groups.

The first group takes us on a fascinating cultural studies journey through China: its ancient sexual practices, queering singlehood to queer filmmaking. Douglas Wile’s Debaters of the bedchamber: China reexamines ancient sexual practices addresses the ancient art of the bedchamber and traditional sex practices in China, a subject of controversy for more than two thousand years. Queering singlehood in mainland China by Benny Lim and Samson Tang discusses singlehood in relation to traditional Chinese culture, suggesting that state-backed media encourages marriage and stigmatizes those who don’t conform to this direction in life. From “celluloid comrades” to “digital video activism”: queer filmmaking in postsocialist China by Hongwei Bao gives a rich historical overview of Chinese ‘new queer cinema’ in the postsocialist era. It identifies a turn from an ambiguous portrayal of queer people by heterosexual filmmakers to an active participation of LGBTQ members in the production of film portrayals of their own lives.

After these China-focused articles, the next four papers belong to the field of media and journalism studies. Antje Glück’s Do emotions fit the frame? A critical appraisal of visual framing research approaches focuses on television news and asks whether the concept of visual framing can be enriched by the integration of emotive elements. It argues that emotions can best be conceptualised as a frame element. The conclusion discusses the extent to which they are suitable for analysing emotions in the visual. Garrisi and Johanssen’s Competing narratives in framing disability in the UK media uses discourse analysis to compare and contrast the journalistic coverage of the story of a beauty blogger with facial disfigurement with that of her own work on her blog. It examines the extent to which a self-representational account may align with the journalistic coverage, showing that journalism and blogging can play a complementary role in shaping society’s understanding of the issue. Press coverage of the debate that followed the News of the World phone hacking scandal: the use of sources in journalistic metadiscourse by Binakuromo Ogbebor uses content and discourse analyses of news articles on the press reform debate that followed this scandal. The author has found that press coverage of media policy debates is characterised by a doubly narrow spectrum of sources. The final article, “Spying for the people”: surveillance, democracy and the impasse of cynical reason by Michael Kaplan, examines the Snowden affair as a sort of Rorschach test that traces the contours of what the author calls ‘the impasse of cynical reason’.

Visit our webpages to learn more about the journal and to find our call for papers: https://jomec.cardiffuniversitypress.org/ 

Paul Bowman and Petra Kovacevic

 

Feature: Martial Arts Studies no. 5

We are pleased to announce that Martial Arts Studies no. 5 is now available at https://mas.cardiffuniversitypress.org/6/volume/0/issue/5/. Martial Arts Studies is the premier scholarly source for interdisciplinary work on a variety of topics surrounding the practice, sociology, history and media representation of the modern combat sports and traditional martial arts. Published twice yearly, it presents the best research written and reviewed by leaders in the field.  

This issue begins with an editorial discussion, followed by five articles and three book reviews. The editorial asks how we as scholars can demonstrate to colleagues that the martial arts, and by extension martial arts studies, really matter. 
In Affective Mythologies and “The Notorious” Conor McGregor, Darren Kelsey asks what role mysticism, and the notion of the ‘monomyth’, might have played in the career of one of MMA’s most successful and famous fighters. He finds that it is probably impossible to understand this without tackling the role of mysticism, myth and ideology in popular culture. 

The second paper takes us to the kung fu schools of Singapore’s red-light district. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in ‘Hong Shen Choy Li Fut’ kung fu, anthropologist D. S. Farrer asks searching questions about the purpose and outcome of taolu (also known as ‘sets’, ‘forms’, or ‘kata’) training in traditional Chinese martial arts. 

In the third paper, Thomas, Lugo, Channon and Spence investigate The Influence of Competitive Co-action on Kata Performance in Japanese Karate. Their paper adds to the literature on ‘social facilitation’ within competitive sports by demonstrating that co-action has a notable impact on measurable outcomes within the martial arts. 
Martin Minarik then discusses the relationship between theatrical performance, social values and the martial arts in Ideological Efficacy Before Martial Efficacy. While his basic findings are likely broadly applicable, in this paper Minarik focuses on Japanese gendai budo.

The final research article in the issue is Tales of a Tireur: Being a Savate Teacher in Contemporary Britain.  Produced by the practitioner/scholar team of Southwood and Delamont, this paper offers an ethnographic examination of the classes and career of one of the UK’s top Savate instructors.  The paper is also important as Savate (popular in France, Belgium and Eastern Europe) has been neglected in the English language martial arts studies literature. 

In the first of three book reviews, Emelyne Godfrey provides an assessment of Wendy Rouse’s recent volume Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement (New York UP, 2017). Russell Alexander Stepp brings his own medievalist background to bear in an examination of Daniel Jacquet, Karin Verelst and Timothy Dawson’s (eds.) Late Medieval and Early Modern Fightbooks (Brill, 2016). Finally Craig Owen reviews Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Diaspora Capoeira by Sara Delamont, Neil Stephens and Claudio Campos (Routledge, 2017). He also asks important questions about the role of video and other media sources in academic publishing.

As always, this issue is freely available at https://mas.cardiffuniversitypress.org/6/volume/0/issue/5/. Visit our webpages to learn more about the journal or to find our call for papers. https://mas.cardiffuniversitypress.org/ and http://masjournal.org.uk/