Tourism and toponymy: Commodifying and Consuming Place Names

Academic geographers have a long history of studying both tourism and place names, but have rarely made linkages between the two. Within critical toponymic studies there is increasing debate about the commodification of place names, but to date the role of tourism in this process has been almost completely overlooked. In some circumstances, toponyms can become tourist sights based on their extraordinary properties, their broader associations within popular culture, or their role as metanyms for some other aspect of a place. Place names may be sights in their own right or ‘markers’ of a sight and, in some cases, the marker may be more significant than the sight to which it refers. The appropriation of place names through tourism also includes the production and consumption of a broad range of souvenirs based on reproductions or replicas of the material signage that denote place names. Place names as attractions are also associated with a range of performances by tourists, and in some cases visiting a place name can be a significant expression of fandom. In some circumstances, place names can be embraced and promoted by tourism marketing strategies and are, in turn, drawn into broader circuits of the production and consumption of tourist space

Comedian Hosts and the Demotic Turn

Podcasting is a showcase for what cultural studies scholar Graeme Turner coined “the demotic turn” or the increasing visibility of the ordinary person in the today’s media landscape. Collins argues that the emergence of a particular breed of podcasts – comedian-hosted interviews with celebrities – function in an “off-label” manner as a form of self-help or vicarious therapy. The emergence and rapid growth of this genre can attributed to three main factors: a confessional culture, the triumph of experience over expertise, and the democratization allowed by the form’s technology. She explores the link between emotional intimacy and comedy, and analyzes podcasts like Marc Maron’s WTF that are, in expression, a rejection of the pedestal version of stardom

Crime, media and the will-to-representation: Reconsidering relationships in the new media age

This paper considers the ways in which the rise of new media might challenge commonplace criminological assumptions about the crime–media interface. Established debates around crime and media have long been based upon a fairly clear demarcation between production and consumption, between object and audience – the media generates and transmits representations of crime, and audiences engage with them. However, one of the most noticeable changes occurring in the wake of the development of new media is the proliferation of self-organised production by ‘ordinary people’ – everything ranging from self-authored web pages and ‘blogs’, to self-produced video created using hand-held camcorders, camera-phones and ‘webcams’. Today we see the spectacle of people them, send them and upload them to the Internet. This kind of ‘will to representation’ may be seen in itself as a new kind of causal inducement to law- and rule-breaking behaviour. It may be that, in the new media age, the terms of criminological questioning need to be sometimes reversed: instead of asking whether ‘media’ instigates crime or fear of crime, we must ask how the very possibility of bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour.performing acts of crime and deviance in order to recordmediating oneself to an audience through self-representation might be bound up with the genesis of criminal behaviour

The new Victorians? Celebrity charity and the demise of the welfare state

This article asks whether the expansion of celebrity involvement in charitable and humanitarian issues in Northern Europe and the US might be a comparable historical phenomenon with the philanthropic endeavours of prominent nineteenth-century persons. The article notes that the conspicuous nature of star philanthropy in both Victorian times and the present is fairly dramatic in comparison with that of the mid twentieth century, when the welfare state and the New Deal were at their peak: a welfare-oriented era which, to some, now increasingly looks like a ‘historical blip’. It asks whether the rise of contemporary celebrity involvement in charity can therefore be explained in terms of the contemporary political conjuncture, inasmuch as celebrities could be understood as individuals with large amounts of private capital seeking to intervene in – and gain forms of power through – involvement in humanitarian and charitable causes that might have formerly been the job of the state. Can celebrity involvement in charity be explained in these terms? Does the marriage of celebrity and charity today take a neoliberal form, one that parallels the liberal form of nineteenth-century interventions, bequests and donations? What might the key differences between forms of spectacular ‘philanthrocapitalism’ in these eras (particularly the contemporary insistence on the confessional and intimate modes of address) reveal about its workings, its internal traditions and about the specificity of our own age? This article draws on contemporary media discourse, debate in the voluntary sector, historical scholarship and Foucault’s distinctions between liberalism and neoliberalism to argue that whereas ‘celanthropy’ in the Victorian period eventually came to contribute to the welfare state, today it is more involved in privatising and dismantling it

The celebritization of society and culture: understanding the structural dynamics of celebrity culture

In recent debates about the ever-growing prominence of celebrity in society and culture, a number of scholars have started to use the often intermingled terms ‘celebrification’ and ‘celebritization’. This article contributes to these debates first by distinguishing and clearly defining both terms, and especially by presenting a multidimensional conceptual model of celebritization to remedy the current one-sided approaches that obscure its theoretical and empirical complexity. Here ‘celebrification’ captures the transformation of ordinary people and public figures into celebrities, whereas ‘celebritization’ is conceptualized as a meta-process that grasps the changing nature, as well as the societal and cultural embedding of celebrity, which can be observed through its democratization, diversification and migration. It is argued that these manifestations of celebritization are driven by three separate but interacting moulding forces: mediatization, personalization and commodification