Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019

This article recounts the creation of an art project that began with the artist’s research in Venice in 2014 and resulted in a 2017 exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Venice’s Jewish Ghetto. The museum’s staff invited her to create new works for their spaces that would interpret Venetian Jewish history in a more contemporary and universal manner. Using cast glass of worn shoes and silk fabric, she created artworks that were then housed in two separate galleries of a former synagogue that poetically resonated with the themes of migration and memory.

Godzilla: Il re dei mostri (Cozzi, 1977), the Italian creative artefact that adapted Honda Ishirô’s original 1954 Gojira, is one of dozens of variations in the Godzilla oeuvre that circulate in European popular culture and globally to inform, intentionally or otherwise, discourse on nuclear safety, peace and the responsible uses of science. Teaching Godzilla and other texts of Atomic Bomb Literature often invokes controversy about both historical and contemporary issues and therefore requires a pedagogic approach that can manage civil discourse while fostering mindset growth and empathetic understanding. Literary studies provide a unique set of tools to battle the recalcitrant!

This article is the product of an ‘unorthodox’ interdisciplinary collaboration between a philosopher and a musician. The starting point is the nature of jazz performance. Jazz is a quintessential American form of artistic expression. What are some of the challenges and opportunities confronting an American musician performing in Europe, a continent with a rich – and, on the surface, rather different musical tradition? This rapidly brings us to more general questions about the contextualization of music. What affects musical performance? Does it change depending on the venue? Do audiences vary across different cultures? This leads us to the relation between music and our contemporary society. Recent technological developments have clearly affected not just the production, but also the fruition of music. Some changes are surely welcome. But does progress come at a cost? What do we gain by using new technology and what do we lose? The final exchanges of our conversation invite us to question the future of music, the performing arts and the humanities in general. The fundamental underlying issue becomes: what can we, as educators, do to promote the creativity, originality and innovativeness of the bright young minds that will shape the future?

This article arises from an interest in understanding the various ways that schools of jazz in Europe have engaged in various partnership relationships. Of particular interest are arrangements between public and private educational institutions, private educational institutions and for-profit venues, and non-degree-granting and degree-granting institutions. The following schools were selected for study: Jazz and Modern Music Department, Universidade Lusíada, Lisbon, Portugal; Escola Superior De Musica De Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal; MusicTime Music School, Milan, Italy; Siena Jazz National Jazz Academy, Siena, Italy; and Kunst Uni Graz Jazz Department, Graz, Austria. This article will present the case studies of the Italian schools and comparisons of those schools to other European schools of the study.

Italy is at the forefront of the immigration and refugee crises that have characterized the European social landscape over the past ten years. In particular, attitudes towards migrants have become increasingly negative and political parties have used harsh rhetoric against migrants to appeal to anti-migrant sentiments in the population. Recently, acts of anti-immigrant violence have been at the centre of the public debate, placing media coverage of migration issues front and centre in the campaign for the legislative election of 2018. This article examines some of the themes that emerge from Italian media coverage on issues related to migration. In addition, this article proposes a framework to analyse the relationship between mass media, success of populist parties and the rise of anti-migrant attitudes.

This article explores theories of relationality and relational ethics of food and culture. Specifically, this essay focuses on the concept of relationality as how we conceive of ourselves as relational beings within food networks, how we relate to others through food and how we relate across different levels of food movements. The ethics of relationality as a theory is traced through a reading of the history of the Slow Food Movement and some of its core commitments from conviviality to fair food.