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15 Nov 2022 • Journal Article • New Media & Society
Use this sound: Networked ventriloquism on Yiddish TikTok
AbstractThis article explores body–voice entanglements in TikTok through the prism of ventriloquism. It suggests that TikTok is an app of network ventriloquism, that is, an audiovisual technology–based web of dissociations and reconfigurations of users’ bodies and voices. Yiddish serves as a case study for how TikTok’s features build an infrastructure for language, heritage
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1 Aug 2022 • Journal Article • Public Understanding of Science
“We think this way as a society!”: Community-level science literacy among ultra-Orthodox Jews
AbstractDespite growing interest in community-level science literacy, most studies focus on communities of interest who come together through particular science, environmental or health-related goals. We examine a pre-existing community—ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel—with a particular history and politics vis-à-vis science, technology, and medicine. First, we show how Haredi
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29 Jul 2022 • Journal Article • Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Israel
Religion in Contemporary Israel: Haredi Varieties
AbstractUntil recently, Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Israel were mainly examined through the lens of the “isolated enclave model.” Yet the Haredi sector has undergone radical changes in a wide array of social and cultural spheres. Many of the traits that exemplified Israeli yeshiva fundamentalism at its inception, such as uncompromising dedication to Torah study, the exclusion
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Mar 2022 • Journal Article • photographies
Between emptiness and superfluity: funeral photography and necropolitics in late-apartheid South Africa
AbstractDocumentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a
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29 Dec 2021 • Journal Article • Interventions
Hydrocolonial Johannesburg
AbstractJohannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped
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1 Dec 2021 • Journal Article • American Anthropologist
A Rabbi of One's Own? Navigating Religious Authority and Ethical Freedom in Everyday Judaism
AbstractThis article examines the varying ways religious devotees utilize, negotiate, embrace, and reject religious authorities in their everyday lives. Ethnographically exploring the ways that Orthodox Jews share reproductive decisions with rabbinic authorities, I demonstrate how some sanctify rabbinic rulings, while others dismiss them, or continue to “shop around” until they
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5 Nov 2021 • Journal Article • Convergence
Thumbs up and down: The cultural technique of thumb-typing
AbstractThis paper explores thumb-typing as a cultural technique stemming from the mutual development of typing interfaces and practices. Focusing on the work of the typing fingers, it examines how the assignment of thumbs to be the primary writing digits is an innovation that correlates—and in some respects causes—textual and social changes that are central to digital culture
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10 Sep 2021 • Journal Article • Religions
“It’s Not Doctrine, This Is Just How It Is Happening!”: Religious Creativity in the Time of COVID-19
AbstractDrawing on thirty in-depth interviews with faith leaders in the UK (including Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Sikhism), we examine the diverse ways religious groups reorient religious life during COVID-19. Analysing the shift to virtual and home-based worship, we show the creative ways religious communities altered their customs, rituals, and practices to
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Sep 2021 • Journal Article • The Cultural Cold War and the Global South
Choreographing Ideology: On the Ballet Adaptation of Peter Abrahams' The Path of Thunder in the Soviet Union
AbstractSouth African writer Peter Abrahams’s literary mediation of the Harlem Renaissance is often seen as foundational for black literary production in apartheid South Africa. Abrahams’s exilic trajectories have also been widely noted. Despite scholarly interest in Abrahams’s transnational involvement with pan-Africanism and communism however, existing research has not
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25 Jul 2021 • Journal Article • Internet Histories
Aleph-bet, dits-and-dahs, zeros and ones: representing Hebrew in character code
AbstractOne of the basic features facilitating communication on the Internet in a variety of languages is Unicode code-layout. It standardizes the representation of most of the world’s writing systems on digital media, thus enabling the process and transmission of information through such technologies. Unicode is a contemporary character code, and this paper traces its evolvement
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