Suchergebnisse

Deviation from normative practices is common in established categories, stimulating category gatekeepers to reevaluate their approaches to defining and enforcing category boundaries and meanings. While scholars agree that categories are mutable and dynamic, we lack a theoretical framework explaining the mechanisms through which practice deviation stimulates category change. Using structural topic modeling and inductive hand-coding of a large text corpus, I analyse critical reviews of jazz records between 1968 and 1975 to show the discursive mechanisms through which gatekeepers codify change in cultural categories. As jazz musicians experimented with new practices associated with a style now known as jazz fusion, critics discursively reordered their criteria for assessing membership, quality, and value in jazz music, expanding the jazz category into new realms yet retaining its semantic coherence. This paper contributes to research on category dynamics including change and subcategorization, and extends knowledge of category maintenance and gatekeeping in cultural fields.

The United States has been at war in Afghanistan for nearly twenty years, with arguably no discernible end in sight. Yet there has been no public accounting of the costs of the on-going conflict, either for Afghanistan or America. While the war's destruction is readily visible throughout much of the Afghan countryside, it is no less profoundly damaging to the social and political fabric of the United States. As the costs for this conflict come due, the U.S. will be faced with a bill it may be ill-equipped to pay – not only financially, but socially and politically as well. Indeed, Afghanistan may be the war that ultimately destroys American democracy as we know it. (Crit Asian Stud / GIGA)