Journal of Creative Communications

The article examines the discourses and representations of suffering in public culture. Situated within cultural emotion studies, it assumes that suffering is tied to ‘spectacles’ of bodily injury and vulnerability. It first analyzes images and the rhetorics of suffering, pain and trauma. There is now a near-persistent visual culture of extreme and distant deprivation—voluntary, in extreme sports, or involuntary like war or starvation victims—beamed into our living rooms. Discourses of suffering deploy, I propose, a trauma-aesthetic that consists of individualization–personalization and the making of a ‘barbaric space’. Visual cultures of bodily trauma constitute now a spectacle of sentiment, the article argues. Finally, I propose the emergence of a moral imagination, a sense of affective communities and a new geopolitics of the world through the discovery of the shared precarity of lives. Scar cultures, the article concludes, has a role to play in global politics because they initiate ethical, affective responses. It is through a commodification of suffering and its ethical consumption that the space is cleared for a new politics of recognition—and this politics is based on the emotional intelligence of the global community

The huge popularity of the Harry Potter novels has surprised many. The series initially won considerable critical acclaim. Over time, the adulation is somewhat tempered, and reviewers have turned to more critical examination of class, racism, gender and similar elements in the series. In this article, we reevaluate the relations between Wizards and Muggles, and show that this relation can be interpreted in terms of the dependency literature prevalent in development studies to explain the relation between developed and developing countries. This article will focus on three principles of dependency relations that are present in the novels of Rowling: (a) flow of agricultural goods from the periphery to the centre; (b) flow of skilled labour from the periphery to the centre; and (c) prevalence of a ‘we–they’ relation between the centre and the periphery. It is argued that the economy and society of the Wizards sustains itself based on a neo-colonial mode of exploitation, operating through these channels.

This article investigates the relationship between organizational communication and job satisfaction. Data were collected from 380 employees at junior, middle and top level management from various telecom and banking sectors. Results reveal that there is a significant correlation between organizational communication and job satisfaction. It was observed that trust and communication satisfaction predicted significantly pay, promotion, supervision and fringe benefits. Job satisfaction differed significantly across hierarchy. However, organizational communication did not differ across hierarchy. Thus, it can be implicated that there are some aspects of communication like trust and communication satisfaction that can be given more priority in order to get high levels of job satisfaction in Indian organizations.

Mass media messages often prompt dialogue among listeners or viewers. Such dialogue may reinforce social stability or lead to pro-social change. If the dialogue prompted by a mass media programme is central to understanding media effects, what forms does this dialogue take, and how does it influence people to change their thinking and actions? These questions formed the basis of the present investigation, which examined an entertainment-education (E-E) programme in India, developed with the intention of promoting pro-social change (e.g., gender equality, family planning, etc.). We discovered that internal dialogue (parasocial interaction) between listeners and media characters lead to conversations about the educational content of the media programme that fuelled support for social stability and for pro-social change. Second, interpersonal dialogue within families, and dialogue at the group level among community members, facilitated discussion of sensitive or taboo subjects in ways that were supportive of social stability as well as social change in family and community dynamics. Finally, listeners and viewers of E-E programmes confronted powerful forces of resistance as they attempted to change community power dynamics. Despite these difficulties, our findings suggest that synergistic possibilities for social action emerge when E-E broadcasts disseminate pro-social models of behaviour that spark various forms of dialogue among audience members.