Aneta Podkalicka

Towards a general theory of thrift

Thrift used to mean necessary scrimping and saving in order to get by. But more recently, with growing prosperity coupled with a heightened sense of global social and environmental fragility, the meaning of thrift has shifted in advanced economies connecting with various practices geared towards reconfigured modes of consumption and lifestyles – ethical, conscientious or collaborative. Many scholars and commentators have noted this shift and at least as many explanations have been proposed. This provides us with an opportunity to develop a more general theory of thrift by proposing that all thrift behaviours and practices can be understood over three basic dimensions that we identify as: (1) ‘causes of thrift’; (2) ‘meaning of thrift’; and (3) ‘thrift capital/capabilities’. We show how existing but disparate definitions and empirical studies of thrift can be organized with respect to this framework and how this enables us to elucidate the nature of the shift that is currently occurring.

Young listening: an ethnography of YouthWorx Media's radio project

Listening as the act of aural consumption has commonly been the moment in cultural practice around which analysis has cohered. This has certainly been the case with the cultural objects of popular music and radio broadcasting. Where young people have been brought into the frame of such analyses, the impact of listening on the formation of the self has been highly pronounced – leading at times to public panic around particular musical genres and their associated socio-cultural practices, for instance around hip-hop, heavy metal and emo music. This paper investigates the combination of radio broadcasting and young people from the perspective of cultural production as a redemptive process. The taxonomy of a reflexive ‘listening to oneself ’; collaborative ‘listening to others’; and the empowering and responsibilizing process of ‘being listened to’ grounded in an ethnography of radio production is employed to explore the social processes of ‘learning to listen’ undertaken by the YouthWorx Media program that engages disadvantaged young people in media creation, while setting a scene for the projects evaluation.

‘Twin transformations’: The Salvation Army’s charity shops and the recreating of material and social value:

This article uses an empirically grounded historical case study of The Salvation Army’s charity shops in Melbourne, Australia to review recent debates around the position and function of ‘cultural intermediaries’ beyond its traditional meaning and application to aesthetic sectors within cultural industries. Drawing on archival research, cultural observation and interviews with staff members, the article focuses on the stores’ specific cultural identity engendered by the organization’s history of remaking the value of discarded objects, alongside its development of individual human agency and context-based community links. Secondhand ‘Salvos Stores’ form a network of hybrid commercial and social enterprises that serves as a basis for developing a wider conceptualization of the notion ‘cultural intermediary’. Following Cronin, Howells and McFall, we argue for an understanding which emphasizes their embedded, contextually reliant qualities, informed by the discourses, practices and networks of sociality.

Factory, dialogue, or network? Competing translation practices in BBC transcultural journalism

Drawing on interdisciplinary theories of translation and empirical research into the BBC World Service, I propose a set of three conceptual metaphors to model media-based translation work. ‘Factory’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘network’ can each serve as a metaphor for the processes of interlingual and transcultural journalism by international broadcasters. Rather than periodizing these historically, I propose that all three metaphors, from the Fordist centralized factory via the user-friendly dialogue rhetoric to the seemingly power-free digital network, can best be seen as concurrent and competing journalistic processes in daily dynamic interaction, whether they concern centralized practices or user-generated contents.

An Agent-Based Model of Residential Energy Efficiency Adoption

This paper reports on an Agent-Based Model. The purpose of developing this model is to describe ‘the uptake of low carbon and energy efficient technologies and practices by households and under different interventions’. There is a particular focus on modelling non-financial incentives as well as the influence of social networks as well as the decision making by multiple types of agents in interaction, i.e. recommending agents and sales agents, not just households. The decision making model for householder agents is inspired by the Consumat approach, as well as some of those recently applied to electric vehicles. A feature that differentiates this model is that it also represents information agents that provide recommendations and sales agents that proactively sell energy efficient products. By applying the model to a number of scenarios with policies aimed at increasing the adoption of solar hot water systems, a range of questions are explored, including whether it is more effective to incentivise sales agents to promote solar hot water systems, or whether it is more effective to provide a subsidy directly to households; or in fact whether it is better to work with plumbers so that they can promote these systems. The resultant model should be viewed as a conceptual structure with a theoretical and empirical grounding, but which requires further data collection for rigorous analysis of policy options.

The skilled social voice: an experiment in creative economy and communication rights

Recent approaches to human rights and communication have emphasized the move beyond traditional politics of recognition and self-representation towards the ‘right to be understood’. But how might we better understand the scope and content of such a right and its practical application? This article suggests that the right to be understood has a useful application in interventions aimed at promoting social inclusion and economic participation, and is therefore an important concept beyond its immediate domain of communication policy reform. As an example, the study focuses on YouthWorx, a collaborative youth media project that combines the creative, distributive and social service capabilities of Melbourne youth community broadcaster Student Youth Network, the Salvation Army and the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation. Drawing on ethnographic research at the YouthWorx site, this article explores the content and practical possibilities of the notional ‘right to be understood’, in the context of a targeted community initiative for ‘youth at risk’.

Media Sport: Practice, Culture and Innovation

This article introduces the special issue on Media Sport: Practice, Culture and Innovation, and outlines the overall objectives and focus of the eight collected essays. The tripartite of ‘practice, culture and innovation’ encapsulates emerging themes in the study of media sport that connect with core (inter-)disciplinary concerns in and around communications and media studies: (1) media practice and what people do in relation to media; (2) the role of television, digital platforms, social networking, mobile media, apps and wearable media devices in the constitution of media cultures; and; (3) how both these issues relate to broadly articulated conceptions and processes of innovation. These articles add to a rich tradition of media sport research that stretches back four decades, as well as two previous special issues of Media International Australia published on sports media (in 1995 and 2011). They also continue the important process of renewing this tradition by the inclusion of new and established researchers based in Australia, New Zealand, Belgium and Spain, and analytical perspectives that draw selectively upon media studies, television studies, cultural studies, media anthropology, social psychology and economics.

Practices of media sport: Everyday experience and audience innovation

Media sport has a long history as a significant site of media innovation, and existing work in media and cultural studies has explored how media sport, technological innovation and regulatory frameworks interact. However, this work often focuses on how major actors such as broadcasting organisations, sporting bodies and telecommunications companies mediate sport. As a complementary strategy to this ‘top-down’ analysis, we approach media sport through the lens of practice, which allows us to understand everyday forms of engagement with, and consumption of, media sport in a clearer fashion. The article analyses existing policy discourses and social commentaries centred on the targeted ‘high-quality’ or ‘high-tech technological’ innovation, and argues that users of sports media are also motivated by series of cultural rewards and varied tradeoffs that do not map neatly onto industrial categories of quality or media consumption trends.

Deploying diverse approaches to an integrated study of thrift

With the recent Global Financial Crisis and enduring concerns around social and environmental sustainability, older ideas of thrift have gained new traction in public discussions, ushering in a new and diverse body of literature. This paper surveys existing writing on thrift across popular and academic domains, discussing ways in which these diverse perspectives can be systematized according to key approaches. Our argument is that, to date, narratives of thrift have followed two main divergent tendencies: one views thrift from the top-down, focusing on models, patterns and ideological trajectories of thriftiness; the other studies it from the bottom-up, privileging context-based, fine-grained analysis of specific, differentiated experiences and manifestations of thriftiness. While both strands offer valuable contributions, we propose an approach that involves actively integrating the macro and micro strands as well as work focusing on different aspects, or spheres, of thrift practice. We suggest that thrift-related conversations in the domain of popular knowledge production and practice, including online, are included in studies of thrift.

Skiing Transnational: Cultures, Practices, and Ideas on the Move

Skiing has been practised in various forms and shapes for a long time, undergoing “many improvements and almost metamorphoses”. But it was in the post–World War II era, the fledgling sport developed into a multibillion-dollar industry. New models of purpose-built ski resorts attracted increasing numbers of visitors to mountainous regions all across the world, helping to transform skiing from a means of transport and later an elitist recreational pursuit into a common leisure practice, which became a “keystone of middle-class identity”. In this introductory chapter, Aneta Podkalicka and Philipp Strobl provide a brief overview about the entangled, transnational histories of skiing. They outline the chances and challenges of theorising skiing as a transnational phenomenon that has been translated into different contexts while spreading through the world. This chapter also discusses cultural perspectives and approaches that help explicate how ideas and knowledge spread and how they interacted with others to produce what has been described as the “cosmopolitan culture of Alpine skiing”.