Academic literature on the topic 'Commuting college students – Sociological aspects'

In these sociological analyzes we will pay attention to selected aspects of religious experience in the consciousness of Polish youth. On one hand, these will be the contents of a religious experience, that is, everything that a person experiences in his relation to God and that gives him grounds for believing; on the other hand, to approximate the function of religious experience in shaping attitudes towards faith and living it every day. In the light of the results of sociological research carried out in youth circles, we analyze three issues: the experience of God’s presence in the consciousness of young people, religious experience in everyday life, religious faith and a sense of security. If we characterize a person’s religiosity from the point of view of believing in a personal God whom a person wants to trust and expects help from, the examined youth turned out to be moderately religious. Various manifestations of religious experience were emphasized more often by women than by men, college students more often than secondary school students, youth living in the countryside more often than those living in the city, having parents with primary education more often than with higher education.

A brief overview of the modern system of secondary special and higher education in the Russian Federation has been given. The problem of competitiveness of educational institutions in the Russian Federation and the world in General has been raised. Statistical data conducted at the end of 2019 questionnaires among the students of the Department of Advertising and Public Relations the State University of Management (Moscow) and students of the Faculty of Advertising and Internet Communications, the International College of Arts and Communications (Moscow).The influence of several factors on the choice by learners of studying educational institutions has been explored, key factors for choice has been highlighted. The opinions of students in terms of the applicability of disciplines in their future profession, assessment of students of the faculty of the institution, the relevance of the cost of education quality and prospects for future employment in the profession after graduation have been analysed.According to the results of the survey, answers were given to such questions as: how do applicants themselves choose an educational program – their future profession? How do they perceive the educational service provided to them by the educational institution? How do applicants who have already become students evaluate their choice of educational institution, the quality of educational service and prospects for their future employment? What is necessary for the formation of demand for educational service?Based on the conducted sociological research, conclusions regarding the choice of educational institution by applicants have been made. The authors’ recommendations to educational institutions to attract applicants and increase their competitiveness in the market of educational services are given.

Introduction. For a long time, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV infection were considered independently of each other. However, at present, these infections, in addition to similar mechanisms of spread and social causation, are inextricably linked with forms of sexual behavior. Young people are a socially active part of the population, which makes them a risk group for the incidence and spread of STIs and HIV infection. Consequently, analyzing the young p¬eople’s awareness of HIV and STIs is of particular importance. Aim. To assess the characteristics of sexual behavior and the awareness of young people regarding STIs and HIV infection, as well as to study the attitude and degree of readiness to provide medical assistance to HIV-infected patients among students of a medical university. Materials and Methods. We used the data of a sociological survey of young people, performed in the period 2016–2020 among students of higher (medical, pedagogical and transport universities) and secondary specialized educational institutions (College of Hairdressing Art, Faculty of secondary vocational education of the Agrarian University) in Novosibirsk. Results. The sexual behavior of students of higher and secondary specialized (vocational) educational institutions is characterized as risky. The awareness and knowledge about STIs and HIV infection among students in Novosibirsk seems insufficient. The majority of students (69%) of the medical university experiences fear of contracting HIV while providing medical assistance to HIV-infected patients. The level of professional communicative tolerance of future doctors is assessed as high (80%). Conclusion. There is a low awareness of sexual health among young people. The lack of knowledge of the legal aspects of providing medical care to HIV-infected patients revealed in the course of the survey among students of the medical university requires a more detailed study of these issues during the training of future doctors for professional activities.

This article presents the principles of construction and validation of a questionnaire on the phenomenon of school dropout by illustrating various aspects from a measurement tool prepared to study the different factors of this reality. The standardized theoretical models were adapted and completed for the needs of the study. Educational institutions and, in particular, middle school must establish a clear vision and mission regarding the training that every social professional will demand. School has always played the role of a pupil’s education, but the fact that a significant number of secondary students are abandoning their programs without having completed their course of studies, is a specific symptom of an educational crisis that is occurring within them. For this reason, the present study aimed to validate a key tool to establish the causes, whether endogenous or exogenous as to why pupils leave college without having completed their qualification. Different aspects of validation are discussed: The acceptability by studying data concerning the description of school dropout, the validity of constructing a score on the causes of school dropout, the reliability of the components of the questionnaire, the validity of the construct of the tool. The full questionnaire, with the origin of the questions, instructions for the interviewers and coding mode are presented in the methodology. The questionnaire design, consisting to determine the reasons of early dropout Tunisian pupils. The questionnaire took into account the theoretical proposals of several scientific researches. The instrument developed was validated with a sample of 750 pupils (including 675 respondents) in Tunisian colleges with a national dropout rate of 10%. The respondents (317 girls and 358 boys) have an average age of 14.11 years. The 68 items questionnaire was designed to identify, among the population of pupils quitting their school, 7 categories of factors that potentially lead to Tunisian children dropping out, Institutional, Sociological, Economic, Personal, Family, Cultural and Geographical- with their respective subcategories. Knowing the reasons why college pupils abandon a middle school in particular will allow educational actors to analyze administrative and/or academic requirements and take mitigation measures to minimize school dropout.

The training of Further Education teachers has been debated since the incorporation of Further Education colleges in the UK in 1992 but, to date, moves by governments and their agencies to professionalise the FE teaching sector have been unsuccessful. The continuation of a homogenous initial teacher training programme within the FE sector has resulted in this sector failing to respond to the changing needs of society and the complex needs of the new FE teacher. This study explored the FE teacher training programme within one college in the UK. The research questions focussed on four elements: the concept of professionalism in FE teaching, the FE teacher as an agent of change, the changing professional identity of the participants and the ways new FE teachers managed multiple professional identities. Using a case study approach, twenty-two new FE teachers undertaking the initial teacher training programme participated in the research as they took on their new professional role as FE teachers. The project used mixed methods of data collection including self-completion questionnaires, focus groups, observations and semi-structured interviews. Thematic content analysis identified that the FE teachers experienced changing and multiple professional identities, from vocational experts to qualified educators, whilst retaining elements of their previous professional identities. Through this process of change, new FE teachers acted as change agents and helped FE students realise their own aspirations. This research demonstrates that Further Education teaching can be categorised into three distinct areas based on the subjects taught: the vocational teacher, the professional teacher, and the academic teacher. Teachers from each area require a different focus in their initial teacher training. The study identifies the need for different approaches to Further Education initial teacher training for the three areas and offers opportunities to develop distinct teaching qualifications and career pathways whilst capturing the generic sociological aspects of FE teaching.

This research is an initiating reserach atempting to support the main project of developing pragmatic-based English teaching model at vocational college. Specifically, it is aimed examining whether (or not) sociocultural aspects of power, distance, and rank of imposition (PDR) proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) is applicable for hotel context. In addition, it was aimed at designing oral role play card used for the main research data collecting. The role play card focuses on speech act (SA) of request and refusal. Twenty hotel staff were involved in doing exemplar generation, and activity undertaken to list situations at hotel dealing with request and refusal, and to inventory two most widely occured situation of each SA to be used as topic of role play card. The card was piloted by involving three students to see whether they were appropriate and obtain input of correction both content and language before being used. It was concluded that PDR is not tottaly suitable sosiological aspect used for criteria in doing verbal interaction at hotel context as power and distace (P D) are not distinctive aspects.

The issue of education acquires new connotations in contemporary society, given by unprecedented changes in all areas of social life. The emphasis shifts from the informative to the formative. Education transcends the boundaries of the school curriculum and tends towards lifelong learning. A unitary curriculum can no longer respond to human diversity alone, and the goal of lifelong learning tends to become an indisputable reality. Thus, without denying the importance of curricular education, it becomes increasingly obvious that extracurricular education, i.e. that achieved beyond the educational process, has its role and place well established in shaping the personality of young people. Sociological research, conducted in four colleges in Bacau, Romania (National College "Vasile Alecsandri", Technical College of Communications "Nicolae Vasilescu-Karpen", National College "Ferdinand" and National College "Gheorghe Vrănceanu") during September - October 2020 on a sample of 210 people (130 high school students, 80 parents), aimed to identify the opinions of students and their parents on the main aspects of extracurricular activity: the degree of involvement of students in extracurricular activities; the level of partnership relationship of the school with the family in carrying out extracurricular activities; types of extracurricular activities; the ways of organizing them; the level of motivation to participate in extracurricular activities.

This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisement plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.

“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies Popular music is firmly rooted within realist practice, or what has been called the "culture of authenticity" associated with modernism. As Lawrence Grossberg notes, the accelleration of the rate of change in modern life caused, in post-war youth culture, an identity crisis or "lived contradiction" that gave rock (particularly) and popular music (generally) a peculiar position in regard to notions of authenticity. Grossberg places rock's authenticity within the "difference" it maintains from other cultural forms, and notes that its difference "can be justified aesthetically or ideologically, or in terms of the social position of the audiences, or by the economics of its production, or through the measure of its popularity or the statement of its politics" (205-6). Popular music scholars have not adequately addressed issues of authenticity and individuality. Two of the most important questions to be asked are: How is authenticity communicated in popular music? What is the site of the interpretation of authenticity? It is important to ask about sound, technology, about the attempt to understand the ideal and the image, the natural and artificial. It is these that make clear the strongest connections between popular music and contemporary culture. Popular music is a particularly appropriate site for the study of authenticity as a cultural category, for several reasons. For one thing, other media do not follow us, as aural media do, into malls, elevators, cars, planes. Nor do they wait for us, as a tape player paused and ready to play. What is important is not that music is "everywhere" but, to borrow from Vivian Sobchack, that it creates a "here" that can be transported anywhere. In fact, we are able to walk around enveloped by a personal aural environment, thanks to a Sony Walkman.1 Also, it is more difficult to shut out the aural than the visual. Closing one's ears does not entirely shut out sound. There is, additionally, the sense that sound and music are interpreted from within, that is, that they resonate through and within the body, and as such engage with one's self in a fashion that coincides with Charles Taylor's claim that the "ideal of authenticity" is an inner-directed one. It must be noted that authenticity is not, however, communicated only via music, but via text and image. Grossberg noted the "primacy of sound" in rock music, and the important link between music, visual image, and authenticity: Visual style as conceived in rock culture is usually the stage for an outrageous and self-conscious inauthenticity... . It was here -- in its visual presentation -- that rock often most explicitly manifested both an ironic resistance to the dominant culture and its sympathies with the business of entertainment ... . The demand for live performance has always expressed the desire for the visual mark (and proof) of authenticity. (208) But that relationship can also be reversed: Music and sound serve in some instances to provide the aural mark and proof of authenticity. Consider, for instance, the "tear" in the voice that Jensen identifies in Hank Williams's singing, and in that of Patsy Cline. For the latter, voicing, in this sense, was particularly important, as it meant more than a singing style, it also involved matters of self-identity, as Jensen appropriately associates with the move of country music from "hometown" to "uptown" (101). Cline's move toward a more "uptown" style involved her visual image, too. At a significant turning point in her career, Faron Young noted, Cline "left that country girl look in those western outfits behind and opted for a slicker appearance in dresses and high fashion gowns" (Jensen 101). Popular music has forged a link with visual media, and in some sense music itself has become more visual (though not necessarily less aural) the more it has engaged with industrial processes in the entertainment industry. For example, engagement with music videos and film soundtracks has made music a part of the larger convergence of mass media forms. Alongside that convergence, the use of music in visual media has come to serve as adjunct to visual symbolisation. One only need observe the increasingly commercial uses to which music is put (as in advertising, film soundtracks and music videos) to note ways in which music serves image. In the literature from a variety of disciplines, including communication, art and music, it has been argued that music videos are the visualisation of music. But in many respects the opposite is true. Music videos are the auralisation of the visual. Music serves many of the same purposes as sound does generally in visual media. One can find a strong argument for the use of sound as supplement to visual media in Silverman's and Altman's work. For Silverman, sound in cinema has largely been overlooked (pun intended) in favor of the visual image, but sound is a more effective (and perhaps necessary) element for willful suspension of disbelief. One may see this as well in the development of Dolby Surround Sound, and in increased emphasis on sound engineering among video and computer game makers, as well as the development of sub-woofers and high-fidelity speakers as computer peripherals. Another way that sound has become more closely associated with the visual is through the ongoing evolution of marketing demands within the popular music industry that increasingly rely on visual media and force image to the front. Internet technologies, particularly the WorldWideWeb (WWW), are also evidence of a merging of the visual and aural (see Hayward). The development of low-cost desktop video equipment and WWW publishing, CD-i, CD-ROM, DVD, and other technologies, has meant that visual images continue to form part of the industrial routine of the music business. The decrease in cost of many of these technologies has also led to the adoption of such routines among individual musicians, small/independent labels, and producers seeking to mimic the resources of major labels (a practice that has become considerably easier via the Internet, as it is difficult to determine capital resources solely from a WWW site). Yet there is another facet to the evolution of the link between the aural and visual. Sound has become more visual by way of its representation during its production (a representation, and process, that has largely been ignored in popular music studies). That representation has to do with the digitisation of sound, and the subsequent transformation sound and music can undergo after being digitised and portrayed on a computer screen. Once digitised, sound can be made visual in any number of ways, through traditional methods like music notation, through representation as audio waveform, by way of MIDI notation, bit streams, or through representation as shapes and colors (as in recent software applications particularly for children, like Making Music by Morton Subotnick). The impetus for these representations comes from the desire for increased control over sound (see Jones, Rock Formation) and such control seems most easily accomplished by way of computers and their concomitant visual technologies (monitors, printers). To make computers useful tools for sound recording it is necessary to employ some form of visual representation for the aural, and the flexibility of modern computers allows for new modes of predominately visual representation. Each of these connections between the aural and visual is in turn related to technology, for as audio technology develops within the entertainment industry it makes sense for synergistic development to occur with visual media technologies. Yet popular music scholars routinely analyse aural and visual media in isolation from one another. The challenge for popular music studies and music philosophy posed by visual media technologies, that they must attend to spatiality and context (both visual and aural), has not been taken up. Until such time as it is, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to engage issues of authenticity, because they will remain rootless instead of situated within the experience of music as fully sensual (in some cases even synaesthetic). Most of the traditional judgments of authenticity among music critics and many popular music scholars involve space and time, the former in terms of the movement of music across cultures and the latter in terms of history. None rely on notions of the "situatedness" of the listener or musicmaker in a particular aural, visual and historical space. Part of the reason for the lack of such an understanding arises from the very means by which popular music is created. We have become accustomed to understanding music as manipulation of sound, and so far as most modern music production is concerned such manipulation occurs as much visually as aurally, by cutting, pasting and otherwise altering audio waveforms on a computer screen. Musicians no more record music than they record fingering; they engage in sound recording. And recording engineers and producers rely less and less on sound and more on sight to determine whether a recording conforms to the demands of digital reproduction.2 Sound, particularly when joined with the visual, becomes a means to build and manipulate the environment, virtual and non-virtual (see Jones, "Sound"). Sound & Music As we construct space through sound, both in terms of audio production (e.g., the use of reverberation devices in recording studios) and in terms of everyday life (e.g., perception of aural stimuli, whether by ear or vibration in the body, from points surrounding us), we centre it within experience. Sound combines the psychological and physiological. Audio engineer George Massenburg noted that in film theaters: You couldn't utilise the full 360-degree sound space for music because there was an "exit sign" phenomena [sic]. If you had a lot of audio going on in the back, people would have a natural inclination to turn around and stare at the back of the room. (Massenburg 79-80) However, he went on to say, beyond observations of such reactions to multichannel sound technology, "we don't know very much". Research in psychoacoustics being used to develop virtual audio systems relies on such reactions and on a notion of human hardwiring for stimulus response (see Jones, "Sense"). But a major stumbling block toward the development of those systems is that none are able to account for individual listeners' perceptions. It is therefore important to consider the individual along with the social dimension in discussions of sound and music. For instance, the term "sound" is deployed in popular music to signify several things, all of which have to do with music or musical performance, but none of which is music. So, for instance, musical groups or performers can have a "sound", but it is distinguishable from what notes they play. Entire music scenes can have "sounds", but the music within such scenes is clearly distinct and differentiated. For the study of popular music this is a significant but often overlooked dimension. As Grossberg argues, "the authenticity of rock was measured by its sound" (207). Visually, he says, popular music is suspect and often inauthentic (sometimes purposefully so), and it is grounded in the aural. Similarly in country music Jensen notes that the "Nashville Sound" continually evoked conflicting definitions among fans and musicians, but that: The music itself was the arena in and through which claims about the Nashville Sound's authenticity were played out. A certain sound (steel guitar, with fiddle) was deemed "hard" or "pure" country, in spite of its own commercial history. (84) One should, therefore, attend to the interpretive acts associated with sound and its meaning. But why has not popular music studies engaged in systematic analysis of sound at the level of the individual as well as the social? As John Shepherd put it, "little cultural theoretical work in music is concerned with music's sounds" ("Value" 174). Why should this be a cause for concern? First, because Shepherd claims that sound is not "meaningful" in the traditional sense. Second, because it leads us to re-examine the question long set to the side in popular music studies: What is music? The structural homology, the connection between meaning and social formation, is a foundation upon which the concept of authenticity in popular music stands. Yet the ability to label a particular piece of music "good" shifts from moment to moment, and place to place. Frith understates the problem when he writes that "it is difficult ... to say how musical texts mean or represent something, and it is difficult to isolate structures of musical creation or control" (56). Shepherd attempts to overcome this difficulty by emphasising that: Music is a social medium in sound. What [this] means ... is that the sounds of music provide constantly moving and complex matrices of sounds in which individuals may invest their own meanings ... [however] while the matrices of sounds which seemingly constitute an individual "piece" of music can accommodate a range of meanings, and thereby allow for negotiability of meaning, they cannot accommodate all possible meanings. (Shepherd, "Art") It must be acknowledged that authenticity is constructed, and that in itself is an argument against the most common way to think of authenticity. If authenticity implies something about the "pure" state of an object or symbol then surely such a state is connected to some "objective" rendering, one not possible according to Shepherd's claims. In some sense, then, authenticity is autonomous, its materialisation springs not from any necessary connection to sound, image, text, but from individual acts of interpretation, typically within what in literary criticism has come to be known as "interpretive communities". It is not hard to illustrate the point by generalising and observing that rock's notion of authenticity is captured in terms of songwriting, but that songwriters are typically identified with places (e.g. Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Liverpool, etc.). In this way there is an obvious connection between authenticity and authorship (see Jones, "Popular Music Studies") and geography (as well in terms of musical "scenes", e.g. the "Philly Sound", the "Sun Sound", etc.). The important thing to note is the resultant connection between the symbolic and the physical worlds rooted (pun intended) in geography. As Redhead & Street put it: The idea of "roots" refers to a number of aspects of the musical process. There is the audience in which the musician's career is rooted ... . Another notion of roots refers to music. Here the idea is that the sounds and the style of the music should continue to resemble the source from which it sprang ... . The issue ... can be detected in the argument of those who raise doubts about the use of musical high-technology by African artists. A final version of roots applies to the artist's sociological origins. (180) It is important, consequently, to note that new technologies, particularly ones associated with the distribution of music, are of increasing importance in regulating the tension between alienation and progress mentioned earlier, as they are technologies not simply of musical production and consumption, but of geography. That the tension they mediate is most readily apparent in legal skirmishes during an unsettled era for copyright law (see Brown) should not distract scholars from understanding their cultural significance. These technologies are, on the one hand, "liberating" (see Hayward, Young, and Marsh) insofar as they permit greater geographical "reach" and thus greater marketing opportunities (see Fromartz), but on the other hand they permit less commercial control, insofar as they permit digitised music to freely circulate without restriction or compensation, to the chagrin of copyright enthusiasts. They also create opportunities for musical collaboration (see Hayward) between performers in different zones of time and space, on a scale unmatched since the development of multitracking enabled the layering of sound. Most importantly, these technologies open spaces for the construction of authenticity that have hitherto been unavailable, particularly across distances that have largely separated cultures and fan communities (see Paul). The technologies of Internetworking provide yet another way to make connections between authenticity, music and sound. Community and locality (as Redhead & Street, as well as others like Sara Cohen and Ruth Finnegan, note) are the elements used by audience and artist alike to understand the authenticity of a performer or performance. The lived experience of an artist, in a particular nexus of time and space, is to be somehow communicated via music and interpreted "properly" by an audience. But technologies of Internetworking permit the construction of alternative spaces, times and identities. In no small way that has also been the situation with the mediation of music via most recordings. They are constructed with a sense of space, consumed within particular spaces, at particular times, in individual, most often private, settings. What the network technologies have wrought is a networked audience for music that is linked globally but rooted in the local. To put it another way, the range of possibilities when it comes to interpretive communities has widened, but the experience of music has not significantly shifted, that is, the listener experiences music individually, and locally. Musical activity, whether it is defined as cultural or commercial practice, is neither flat nor autonomous. It is marked by ever-changing tastes (hence not flat) but within an interpretive structure (via "interpretive communities"). Musical activity must be understood within the nexus of the complex relations between technical, commercial and cultural processes. As Jensen put it in her analysis of Patsy Cline's career: Those who write about culture production can treat it as a mechanical process, a strategic construction of material within technical or institutional systems, logical, rational, and calculated. But Patsy Cline's recording career shows, among other things, how this commodity production view must be linked to an understanding of culture as meaning something -- as defining, connecting, expressing, mattering to those who participate with it. (101) To achieve that type of understanding will require that popular music scholars understand authenticity and music in a symbolic realm. Rather than conceiving of authenticity as a limited resource (that is, there is only so much that is "pure" that can go around), it is important to foreground its symbolic and ever-changing character. Put another way, authenticity is not used by musician or audience simply to label something as such, but rather to mean something about music that matters at that moment. Authenticity therefore does not somehow "slip away", nor does a "pure" authentic exist. Authenticity in this regard is, as Baudrillard explains concerning mechanical reproduction, "conceived according to (its) very reproducibility ... there are models from which all forms proceed according to modulated differences" (56). Popular music scholars must carefully assess the affective dimensions of fans, musicians, and also record company executives, recording producers, and so on, to be sensitive to the deeply rooted construction of authenticity and authentic experience throughout musical processes. Only then will there emerge an understanding of the structures of feeling that are central to the experience of music. Footnotes For analyses of the Walkman's role in social settings and popular music consumption see du Gay; Hosokawa; and Chen. It has been thus since the advent of disc recording, when engineers would watch a record's grooves through a microscope lens as it was being cut to ensure grooves would not cross over one into another. References Altman, Rick. "Television/Sound." Studies in Entertainment. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 39-54. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Death and Exchange. London: Sage, 1993. Brown, Ronald. Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1995. Chen, Shing-Ling. "Electronic Narcissism: College Students' Experiences of Walkman Listening." Annual meeting of the International Communication Association. Washington, D.C. 1993. Du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 1997. Frith, Simon. Sound Effects. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Fromartz, Steven. "Starts-ups Sell Garage Bands, Bowie on Web." Reuters newswire, 4 Dec. 1996. Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place. London: Routledge, 1992. Hayward, Philip. "Enterprise on the New Frontier." Convergence 1.2 (Winter 1995): 29-44. Hosokawa, Shuhei. "The Walkman Effect." Popular Music 4 (1984). Jensen, Joli. The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialisation and Country Music. Nashville, Vanderbilt UP, 1998. Jones, Steve. Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. ---. "Popular Music Studies and Critical Legal Studies" Stanford Humanities Review 3.2 (Fall 1993): 77-90. ---. "A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity and the Aural." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10.3 (Sep. 1993), 238-52. ---. "Sound, Space & Digitisation." Media Information Australia 67 (Feb. 1993): 83-91. Marrsh, Brian. "Musicians Adopt Technology to Market Their Skills." Wall Street Journal 14 Oct. 1994: C2. Massenburg, George. "Recording the Future." EQ (Apr. 1997): 79-80. Paul, Frank. "R&B: Soul Music Fans Make Cyberspace Their Meeting Place." Reuters newswire, 11 July 1996. Redhead, Steve, and John Street. "Have I the Right? Legitimacy, Authenticity and Community in Folk's Politics." Popular Music 8.2 (1989). Shepherd, John. "Art, Culture and Interdisciplinarity." Davidson Dunston Research Lecture. Carleton University, Canada. 3 May 1992. ---. "Value and Power in Music." The Sound of Music: Meaning and Power in Culture. Eds. John Shepherd and Peter Wicke. Cambridge: Polity, 1993. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space. New York: Ungar, 1982. Young, Charles. "Aussie Artists Use Internet and Bootleg CDs to Protect Rights." Pro Sound News July 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Steve Jones. "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php>. Chicago style: Steve Jones, "Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: 'Remixing' Authenticity in Popular Music Studies," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Steve Jones. (1999) Seeing Sound, Hearing Image: "Remixing" Authenticity in Popular Music Studies. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/remix.php> ([your date of access]).

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Bachelors
Arts and Sciences
Psychology

This thesis interprets student culture as a vehicle to understanding college drinking. It presents the findings of an ethnographic study of college drinking culture as experienced by college women. Particular emphasis is placed on age and gender variations within the student culture which significantly impact drinking beliefs and behavior. The subject of this study is the meanings of drinking in student culture. The findings suggest that university alcohol policy should speak to and from student culture, rather than to and from university administrative values. Based on the meanings of drinking in student culture, suggestions are made toward formulating a more effective university alcohol policy.
Department of Anthropology

This study sought to explore the lived experiences of five female, first-generation, low-income students who attend a metropolitan commuter university, and investigate how a structured undergraduate research experience exerts influence on the women's academic and social involvement. A qualitative case study with a narrative and grounded theory analysis was selected as the most appropriate approach for exploring this topic and addressing the guiding research questions. Interview and journal data were collected and analyzed to identify significant themes. The importance of finding an academic home, the significance of interacting with faculty and peers, and the validation of a metropolitan commuter university education through a scholar development process emerged as significant findings. Implications and recommendations on programmatic and institutional levels are included, as well as suggestions for future research.

Thesis (MPhil (Sociology and Social Anthropology))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006.
Worldwide various studies have been undertaken to investigate the influence of discrimination due to sexual preference and the impact thereof on the homo- and bisexual student during his/her student years. As opposed to this, few studies have been done at tertiary institutions in South Africa. This study investigates homosexuality as a sub culture by illustrating the experiences and perceptions of a selected group of homo- and bisexual students with regards to social interaction within a heterosexual student environment.

This ethnographic study describes the patterns of decorating in the study rooms of university sorority women. The primary method of data were collection was by means of interviews with sorority members. Observations and photographs of the study rooms of these members supplemented the interviews and provided validation for categorization purposes. A large body of research exists related to the effects and implications of sorority membership. Because much of this research is quantitative, it does not allow for the descriptive type data collected in the context of the culture which may be utilized in a qualitative study. The purpose of the present study was to document the decorating patterns of the informants and to identify cultural values and expressions of individual identity in the decoration of their living spaces. This study contributes to existing research on college student decorating patterns by relating the items used for decorations to cultural and individual values. In addition, it provides a detailed description of how the space in the study rooms is utilized. The data are also evaluated based on demographic information gathered. The results of this study indicated that the members of Alpha Beta sorority expressed certain cultural values by using similar items to decorate their rooms and by exhibiting common ways of using their living space. One of the values expressed by the members in their decorating was that of comfort, both physical and mental. Comfort was demonstrated in conditions such as the degree of tidiness of the room, the color scheme, the photos on display or the level of self expression available to the individual. Examples of identity expression were also evident in these study rooms. Items indicating personal accomplishments, items from personal collections and objects used for hobbies were found in many rooms. Conclusions drawn from this study were first, that the desire to decorate was nearly universal among the members of Alpha Beta sorority. Second, the desire for self expression seemed to be a significant motivation for decorating, although there was evidence of some peer pressure as well. Third, decorating generally, and decorating using a theme, appeared to be a behavior members embraced more readily over time. Interactions over time allowed for the cultural values related to decorating the study room to be acquired. This process is facilitated by the significance of the social network within the sorority culture. This study contributes to an understanding of how cultural and personal values are expressed in the study rooms of sorority women, and by extension, the values that could be expected in other interior environments.
Graduation date: 1999

While there exists substantial research on struggling and developmental readers, few research-practitioners have sought to examine the histories and circumstances that result in strong readers. This study drew upon the reading autobiographies of doctoral students in an English Education program at an Ivy League institution, in order to discover what can be learned from first-hand narrative accounts of their reading lives about the early literacy experiences, reading practices, family, community, school and cultural influences of a group of “strong” adult readers. Also examined for comparative and contrasting data are the reading lives of remedial and honors first-year college composition students at a 2-year community college. An understanding of how the environments, people, institutions, circumstances, and texts encountered in the literacy lives of the three different groups studied here can assist literacy educators in bridging theory with practice for the teaching of reading in early grades and for the teaching of college-level reading in first-year college writing classes. A central term and concept to help explain the trajectory of the reading lives of the populations studied here was Deborah Brandt’s (1998) theory of “sponsors of literacy.” Brandt’s terminology and the notion of sponsorship along with a sociocultural theoretical framework are used to interpret the reading autobiographies in this study. Methods employed were based on Connelly and Clandinin’s narrative inquiry approach, a methodology steeped in the richness of the storied lives of the participants. The three patterns that emerged in the strong readers’ memories were: (a) being read to in the home prior to school age; (b) dichotomous attitudes toward in-school and out-of-school reading, especially around the middle school years; and (c) evidence of firm productive habits of mind toward complex reading that extends into the higher education years. The early literacy sponsorship and productive habits of mind were less evidenced in the remedial population. The findings of certain common characteristics and practices in the backgrounds of strong readers, many of which were not present at the same level in the remedial readers, can help literacy educators and caregivers re-examine their role as literacy sponsors and offer approaches for how we might sponsor literacy differently to create strong readers at any stage of their education.

This study set out to investigate how students construct their identities. Throughout their socialisation into academia, students are confronted with the paradox of learning as they negotiate the opposing discourses of enslavement and mastery that construct higher education. Utilising a critical discursive psychology approach this research aimed to examine the implications this paradox holds for the development of students’ identities. In-depth interviews with five master’s degree students allowed for an examination of the linguistic resources available for students to draw on in constructing their accounts of student-hood. Analysis of the interpretive repertoires and ideological dilemmas in the text revealed the uptake of contradictory subject positions in participants’ navigation of academic discourse. In order to address the inconsistencies associated with these conflicting ways of being a student, participants ‘worked’ a face in their interactions with academic discourse. Their face-work served to address the paradox by integrating the contradictory positions evident in their accounts. It is in the agency displayed in the integration of these disparate positions that the emancipating student is revealed.
Psychology
M.A. (Research Consultation)

This chapter outlines the theoretical frameworks that scholars have used when seeking to explain, predict, and understand youth political participation as well as the methodologies commonly utilized. The most common theoretical approach in studying youth engagement has been generational and, within this framework, scholars have utilized the social capital, historical, sociological, psychological, and rational choice theoretical perspectives. The methodological approach to studying youth engagement also has been fairly uniform with most relying on survey research (predominantly of college students) and with most scholars focused upon the political actions of individuals rather than issues prompting action or the institutional context in which actions take place. This critical analysis of the literature leads to the conclusion that key aspects of participation aren’t being considered and that the study of youth engagement would benefit from broadening our approach as well as looking at the phenomenon from young adults’ point of view.