Tweet Justice: The Canadian Court’s Use of Social Media

ABSTRACT

Like other political institutions in Canada, the judiciary has entered the digital age. Indeed, Canadian courts have been using Twitter for almost a decade. Despite this, there has been very little systematic examination of how Canadian courts use Twitter and the nature of the content they produce. While digital technologies create new challenges for all political actors, this is especially so for the courts, which exist in a very “traditional and conservative environment”. In this research note, we develop a framework for analyzing court-produced content on social media. This framework draws from concepts from digital politics and legal studies. We then apply this framework by conducting a content analysis of tweets from active court Twitter feeds in Canada.     

Manufactured tradition? – the Victoria Cross

SUMMARY

The Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy, is commonly believed to be cast from the bronze of Russian cannon captured at Sebastopol during the Crimean War. There is no corroboration for this belief beyond an entry in The Times in 1857. Historical sources suggest that neither the Queen nor her Prime Minister would have favoured an association of the medal with Sebastopol. From 1914, however, it is likely that many Victoria Crosses were indeed sourced from captured ordnance, but probably using Chinese guns. Some may even have been cast from entirely unprovenanced metal. Recent examination of VCs and putative sources of their metal by X-ray fluorescence suggest multiple sources of material, presenting medals variously of bronze, brass and copper.     

Street music,governance, and cultural policy in San Cristóbal de Las Casas

ABSTRACT

This article takes an ethnographic perspective to explore the changing ways in which the municipal government of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, a city in southern Mexico whose economy is highly dependent on tourism, has regulated street musicians over the last five years. It focuses on permits given to street musicians which served to exert spatial and temporal control over street performance, while giving musicians no substantial rights in practice. Engaging the so-called ‘anarchist turn’ in anthropology, it shows that this policy instrument effectively sidelined non-monetary forms of exchange between musicians and their various publics, and privileged the commercial interests of restaurants and bars. Further, in practice, it pushed some street musicians onto the margins of the city’s economic life, where their performances were often more, rather than less, disruptive. Nonetheless, this situation altered significantly in the wake of social unrest in Summer 2016, which caused a precipitous drop in tourism to the city. The municipal government’s response to the ensuing economic crisis signified a belated recognition of the economic value of street musicianship.