Is European popular music actually ‘popular music’? Of course it is, especially if we consider that the United Kingdom is part of Europe. But perhaps the question should be formulated as follows: ‘Is continental European popular music... more
Is European popular music actually ‘popular music’? Of course it is, especially if we consider that the United Kingdom is part of Europe. But perhaps the question should be formulated as follows: ‘Is continental European popular music actually “popular music”?’ Yes, if we consider that the first conference on popular music research was held in Amsterdam and offered a number of papers on non-Anglophone popular music, that IASPM was established in Sweden, that its second conference (titled What is Popular Music?) was held in Italy, that many popular music scholars are based in continental European countries, and many of them study their local genres and scenes. However, those genres and scenes are not called, in local languages, ‘popular music’, and only a semi-informal international convention made continental
European scholars adopt the English term for their object of study. On the other hand, there are also many signs that Anglophone scholars, when they use the expression ‘popular music’, tend to refer to Anglo-American popular music, and incline to call other popular musics ‘world music’. Of course, the issue is not just about linguistic usage: in the article examples both from the media and the academia are commented, and their ideological implications are discussed.
The Religious Determinant for Civilization and Global Policies: A Reading of Al-Faruqi's Perspective on International Relations
This paper presents the perspective of Ismail al-Faruqi on the role of religion in current international politics, and lays out the features of a normative theory in international relations based on his view of the concepts of Tawhid and meta-religion as presented in a number of his books, particularly "Tawhid: Implications for Thought and Life" and "Islam and the Problem of Israel." Al-Faruqi elucidates how Islam offers solutions to global problems associated with the foundations of the current international system, which is based on the ethno-Euro-centricity, a system that contradicts the needs of the global society, which in turn is characterized by openness, freedom, and coexistence.
"International conflict coverage as intercultural communication Intercultural communication occurs when large and important cultural differences create dissimilar interpretations" (Lustig/ Koester 2010: 52) If this problem focussing... more
"International conflict coverage as intercultural communication
Intercultural communication occurs when large and important cultural differences create dissimilar interpretations" (Lustig/ Koester 2010: 52)
If this problem focussing definition of intercultural communication seems familiar to the reader, it could be reasoned by the occurrence in the last weeks’ media coverage according to the Maidan protests in Ukraine reaching its peak in the beginning of March with diplomatic threats and bilateral accusations. Hilary Clinton is, perhaps not without a reason, comparing Putin’s strategy of ‘just securing Russians in Ukraine’
with Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia (Robes Meeks 2014 and SZ 2014h), Putin and Yanukovych claim the protesters as fascists putschists (SZ 2014k), German leftists scent a counterrevolution of bourgeois and fascist forces (Arbeitermacht 2014, indymedia 2014, MLPD 2014, SZ 2014b) and German mainstream media celebrate the folk’s victory. These differences in interpretation occurred mostly in the end of January when the before 2 months lasting mainly peaceful protests converted into riots and radical fascist fighters appeared more frequently in media pictures. Here, a weakness of modern protest and conflict communication became aware.
Transnational communication and delivery systems now facilitate the internationalization and even globalization of some protests […] and today’s complex media ecology […] offer unprecedented opportunities for the wider dissemination of political protest and dissent – from the local to the global
(Cottle 2008: 855) While, according to Simon Cottle, news coverage has been getting more direct and international and, therefore, foreign protest movements and revolts are omnipresent in today’s media, intercultural differences are often ignored. Hence we may misjudge these movements mistakenly since we have fundamentally different senses for categories like
in- and out-group or power distance or analyse all happenings in relation to us and our value system driven by an enormous
eurocentrism ignoring cultural asymmetry and identities. For analysing these problematic reinterpretations of international protest, I use a biased quantitative analysis of German print media online coverage assessing the frame of news transported via linguistic elements and support this with a qualitative analysis of a few chosen exemplifying articles by quoting some parts of them. I will mostly use articles of "Süddeutsche Zeitung" since this is one of the highest quality newspapers in Germany, not too left or too right for providing an exemplifying picture and was endeavoured of being objective. Both analyses, qualitative and quantitative, are embedded into the following chapters which each pick one of the mentioned intercultural communication categories as core.
