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  • The Vatican's adaptation to new media: an exploration of the strategies, benefits and impacts on the local church

    Dossett, Wendy; Tee, Caroline; Oladosu, Olaitan Gaspar (University of Chester, 2024-10)
    This thesis investigates how the Catholic Church has adapted to the emergence of new media, its strategies, benefits, and impacts on the local church. Religious institutions such as the Catholic Church have entered the world of new media in an effort to achieve their aims and objectives, emphasizing the power of new media as ‘new spaces for evangelization’. This situation requires a reorganization that takes into account the historic development of the Holy See’s structures of communication, unified integration, and management. As a result, the Dictionary of Communications was created to respond to the current demands of communication by factors of convergence and interactivity. To assess how the new Dicastery of Communications has fared in the face of recent changes, the study traces the historical evolution of the Church’s attitude towards the media, from one of outright hostility in the early decades of the twentieth century to a much more open and progressive stance today. Generally, the study aims to explore how the Vatican has adapted to new media and the strategies, benefits, and impacts on the local church. Specifically, the study identifies how the Vatican uses new media strategies to engage existing audiences and to market to potential adherents; to explore how the new Dicastery for Communications is taking full advantage of the benefits and opportunities presented by the new media and engagement paradigms; to examine the barriers to and dangers of the Vatican's adoption of new media strategies to engage existing audiences and to market to potential adherents; and lastly, to consider how new media strategies from the center cascade and impact local churches. The study employed the use of qualitative research methods, with the elite interview used as the medium of data collection in the research. Interviews conducted with nine elites, including three each of the members of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications, local Church officials in the developing world, particularly the Archdiocese of Ibadan, and independent experts with knowledge about the Vatican's media, serve as major data employed to discover how successful Pope Francis and the Catholic Church as a whole have been in this endeavor of strategic communications and synodality. The initial stage of the data analysis procedure involved transcribing the interviews, prioritizing the objectives of precision and ethical reporting in documenting the participants' remarks. The transcribed data were further analyzed using thematic data analysis techniques. The study finds that the new media strategies adopted by the Vatican have succeeded in terms of enabling a more coherent internal communications structure but have largely failed to attract new converts to Catholicism. Overall, the findings suggest the church is still finding its way in the new media sphere. Conceptually, the church is on the right track. Its challenge now lies in implementing the practical steps necessary if the digital sphere is truly to become a modern space for evangelisation.
  • Missional Capital: Volunteering and Faith Communication

    Llewellyn, Dawn; Annison, Louise (University of Chester, 2024-05)
    In this thesis, I identify missional capital, which is a form of social capital comprising theological capital, bridging capital, and linking capital, collectively underpinned by bonding capital to explain how volunteering provides lay Christians with confidence they can participate with God in mission. Based on qualitative interviews and participant observation, I find that the experience of volunteering can give lay Christians assurance about sharing their faith commitments in their workplaces and communities, despite their general anxiety about sharing their beliefs with non-Christian peers. My participants believe that stories of their volunteering experiences are welcomed by their friends and colleagues and tell these in order to initiate discussions about their Christian beliefs. My research arises from my professional practice as volunteer and leader at a Christian witness and service project I pseudonymously name “The Chapel”. The Church of England recognises the importance of witness and service projects, such as The Chapel, to help address its crisis of declining attendance (Church of England Research and Statistics, 2020; The Church of England, 2022, Oct 22). However, since existing volunteer studies typically focus on recruitment and retention (Wilson, 2012), there has been little research into how Christian witness and service projects might also help the Church of England to equip lay Christians to communicate their beliefs beyond their faith community. My research shows how practices of prayer, listening and storytelling employed by The Chapel leverage the liminality and communitas inherent in volunteer witness and service projects to facilitate theological play. This play strengthens volunteers’ conviction that they can identify and participate in God’s existing activity in visitors’ lives. The attitudes and practices arising from this integrate belief and action creating missional capital. The church is usually conceived as either gathered in worship or scattered in witness and service to the world (Van Gelder & Zscheile, 2011). This study illustrates the service-learning potential of witness and service projects, such as The Chapel, which combine elements of corporate worship with individual witness. I suggest similar practices could be tested in other Christian witness and service projects to teach other lay Christian volunteers to communicate their faith more effectively.
  • Language and pop culture: Setting the agenda

    Werner, Valentin; Hiramoto, Mie; Flanagan, Paul; University of Bamberg; National University of Singapore; University of Chester (John Benjamins Publishing, 2025-01-30)
  • Book Review: Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans Under Hitler

    Grady, Tim; University of Chester (Oxford University Press, 2021-06-24)
    Book review of Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans Under Hitler
  • Book Review: Daniel Shin, Theology and the Public: Reflections on Hans W. Frei on Hermeneutics, Christology, and Theological Method

    Fulford, Ben; University of Chester (Oxford University Press, 2025)
    Review of Daniel Shin's study of the theme of publicness in Hans Frei's theology.
  • “I come as his right hand”: Imagining pirate disability, prosthesis, and interdependence in Black Sails

    Tankard, Alexandra; Pelling, Madeleine; Jones, Emrys; University of Chester (Bloomsbury, 2026)
    Ostensibly a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island, Starz TV series Black Sails (2014-17) imagines a fleeting moment of possibility for anti-slavery and queer revolution in the Golden Age of Piracy. In the final episode, this possibility is extinguished by Long John Silver betraying the pirate and Maroon alliance, and Atlantic history veers back to its grim course of imperial conquest. Srividhya Swaminathan argues that Black Sails offers a “pastiche of a period in history that still inflects contemporary understanding of empire”. Black Sails’ pastiche reimagines pirates as a unique historical community in terms that also speak critically to contemporary neoliberal discourses of disability, which designate irreparably disabled people as a parasitic, dependent class distinct from the supposed norm of productive, independent adults. In the same year Black Sails appeared, David T. Mitchell explained that “devalued populations” are consigned to “zones of expendability”, marked out “for death (letting die) on behalf of sustaining other, more valued populations in lives of surfeit comfort”. By contrast, Black Sails’ creative engagement with histories of Golden-Age piracy suggests a radically different model: a crew that shares labour and profit as a composite body of cooperative “hands”, refusing to separate maimed from whole, transforms the meaning of dependency and disability itself.
  • Interwar Women: The Psychogeographic Nature of Detection in Golden Age Detective Fiction

    West, Sally; Martin, Sarah L. (University of Chester, 2024-04-27)
    This thesis theorises female detection psychogeographically. Through an examination into the very mechanics of spatiality, the overall argument unearths an inherently psychogeographic nature of detection within specific figures of female detectives within Golden Age Detective Fiction. A psychogeographic perspective unearths the influential nature of space, and its impact on the construction of gendered and social identity. Moreover, specifically female detectives as psychogeographers voice the shifting social and cultural position of women during the period. Engaging with the cultural, social and political influences of the time, the thesis analyses the spatially imbued nature of space, and the ways in which it effects the spatial, temporal and cultural performance of femininity throughout the period of 1918 to 1954. Examining individual decades, the thesis analyses the transformations of imposed femininity, and the ways in which hegemonic gendered behaviour embedded in physical space, influence and impose the formation and enactment of identity. Within these reformed notions of the feminine, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers’s female detectives directly exploit and manipulate the process of spatial influence. This process of feminine manipulation of imposed identity is encapsulated through the process of subversive detection methods embedded in psychogeographic means of expression. Overall, the literature voices a shift in female psychogeography as well as voicing the transformation in a woman’s place in society and culture during the first half of the twentieth century through the metaphor of detection.
  • Deconstructing the dominant pregnancy script: A feminist analysis of pregnancy and parenting in contemporary British and American fiction, film, and on social media

    Rees, Emma; Cornforth, Kate (University of Chester, 2024-08)
    In the global North, there is a dominant pregnancy script (DPS) where the expectation is that the pregnant body, and people’s parenting styles, should fit a universal category. What this means is that Black, transgender, non-conforming pregnancies (for example, surrogate pregnancy), and other marginalised bodies are missing from narratives in fiction, film and on social media platforms. To challenge this, my thesis conceptualises a new, feminist pregnancy script (FPS) that advocates for pregnant people, mothers, or parents, to, as motherhood scholar Andrea O’Reilly puts it, have agency, autonomy, authenticity and authority in their choices. Crucially, the FPS is inclusive and supportive of pregnancy, mothering, or parenting that does not adhere to the ‘rules’ of the DPS. The paradoxical and demanding expectations of the DPS mean that many representations of pregnancy and parenting experiences in fiction, film and on social media are not equal, diverse, or inclusive, and neither empower pregnant people and parents, nor encourage choice. The DPS and its multivalent cultural manifestations revere the ‘good’ mother – someone who is white, heterosexual, married and in a nuclear family; this same ‘good mother’ is altruistic, patient, loving, selfless, devoted and cheerful. However, representations of pregnancy and parenting also have the potential to resist and challenge such embedded, dominant norms. It is through digital texts in particular that audiences can interpret, interact with and revoke heteropatriarchal inscriptions of ‘correct’ pregnancy and parenting experiences. By uncovering and subsequently deconstructing the DPS through textual analysis, my thesis proposes a feminist reimagining. The FPS challenges social systems where pregnancy and parenting must be done in a ‘correct’ way to be accepted, and it underlines how attitudes in the global North reflect structures where neoliberalism and global capitalism benefit only a privileged few. It is time for change.
  • Introduction (Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene)

    Hay, Jonathan; University of Chester (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024-12-26)
    Introductory chapter to Science fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene
  • Binti (Nnedi Okorafor, 2015) - Africanfuturism and the Meduse

    Hay, Jonathan; Gomel, Elana; Bacon, Simon; University of Chester (Peter Lang, 2024-10-31)
    In the uncharted territory of space, humans ourselves become alien. This understanding is central to Nnedi Okorafor’s Nebula and Hugo award-winning novella Binti (2015) and its sequels Home (2017) and The Night Masquerade (2018). Through the interactions between humans and the trilogy’s “alien” Meduse, Okorafor’s text makes unfamiliar and radically expands the familiar territory of race. Typically, aliens in science fiction are rigidly defined as either enemies or friends of humanity. Yet, the Meduse transcend this simplistic dualism, and therefore comprise a central component of Binti’s Africanfuturist meditation on race.
  • Mental Health and Well-Being in Prisons and Places of Detention

    Ndindeng, Atina N.; University of Chester (Emerald, 2024-10-29)
    This study aims to address the critical mental health challenges faced by individuals in prisons and places of detention. By introducing and validating a novel conceptual framework that integrates social determinants of health with the stress process model, this study aims to provide actionable insights for improving mental health care in correctional settings. The research seeks to inform policymakers, prison administrators and mental health professionals about effective interventions and systemic reforms that can reduce recidivism, enhance rehabilitation and promote a more humane and just criminal justice system.
  • ‘Meeting God in an ordinary place’. What can we learn from Coffee Shop Sunday about meeting God using the internet to encourage and develop fellowship?

    Werrett, Simon; University of Chester (Taylor & Francis, 2024-10-13)
    All are welcome at the ‘common table’ to enjoy the ‘table talk’. How does Coffee Shop Sunday (CSS) (Coventry and Nuneaton Methodist Circuit Project) reflect that alongside pointing people to Jesus? CSS began a worship service in a Coventry Costa Coffee Shop in December 2019, this was severely disrupted with covid-19 restrictions and their concept of ‘meeting God in an ordinary place’ moved online. The internet through Facebook and Zoom became the ordinary place they met God. Since March 2020, the online work has grown from initially meeting four days a week to daily activities with participants from five continents. Two of the principles of CSS are encouragement and fellowship. The paper will explore (1) How the internet became the ‘ordinary’ place to meet God for people from different denominations and cultures. (2) How fellowship is experienced, using Russell’s ‘round table ecclesiology’ model where those present participate in a way which reflects their own journey of ‘faith and struggle’. (3) How does CSS point other people to Jesus through its activities. Barth emphasises that churches or a Christian’s activities should not focus on themselves but ‘point to Jesus’. By reviewing CSS activities, I will demonstrate that they point others to Jesus.
  • Introduction: Charlotte Brontë and Material Culture

    Wynne, Deborah; University of Chester (Taylor & Francis, 2024-09-23)
  • Brontë Studies special issue: Charlotte Brontë and Material Culture

    Various; Wynne, Deborah (Taylor & Francis, 2024-09-25)
    This is a Special Issue devoted to the Brontës and material culture.
  • The World at the End of the Garden: A Novella-in-Flash [Kindle Edition]

    Walker, Gillian; Chantler, Ashley; Blair, Peter (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2024-04-24)
    An English textile artist accompanies her husband to live in Tucson, Arizona for a year. Her world shrinks to a gated community of strangers and the view of the arroyo at the bottom of the garden. Escaping from a regime of fertility treatments and miscarriages, she learns to tolerate the heat and the snakes. With the help of Samuel, a mysterious boy who lives across the arroyo, she explores the landscape, learns its history and falls in love with Tucson’s flowers and seasonal rains. As the year passes, she pioneers a new direction for her art and, finally, accepts that she will never be a mother. The World at the End of the Garden is a novella-in-flash about the discovery of self, the meaning of home, and the place of humans on the planet.
  • Nothing to Worry About: Flash Fictions [Kindle Edition]

    Gebbie, Vanessa; Chantler, Ashley; Blair, Peter (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2024-04-24)
    Welcome to the strange, fertile world of Vanessa Gebbie’s imagination in this collection of irreal flash fictions, in which little makes sense and yet everything does. A sea lion learns to fly. A man wakes to find his head is triangular. Babies talk. Sextants grow inside a man’s chest. Bella’s iron tablets work rather too well. And Daphne grows bonsai in a plethora of odd places. After all, the world keeps turning, and people occasionally do strange things but then, that’s life, and life is nothing to worry about ... Or is it?
  • Lined Up Like Scars: Flash Fictions [Kindle Edition]

    Tuite, Meg; Chantler, Ashley; Blair, Peter (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2024-04-23)
    Sassy and incisive, tender yet scalpel-sharp, the ten short tales in Lined Up Like Scars cut to the quick of modern life, dissecting the dysfunctional dynamics of an American family with a tragic secret at its heart. Meg Tuite traces girlhood, young womanhood, and the jealous loyalties of sisterhood through a series of magpie moments that are often darkly funny featuring inedible meatloaf, sloughed skin, mysterious boy-bodies, insurgent underwear, speed-dating with attitude, the street-stomping antics of a wannabe band, and an unnerving collector of American Girl dolls. But the comic coping strategies of children (licking walls, ingesting gym socks, humping stuffed animals) have chronic counterparts in those of adults (alcoholism, prescription drugs). And in the final story, an ageing father reveals a truth that his daughters will forever conceal behind Facebook facades.
  • Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 12.1 (April 2024)

    Various; Chantler, Ashley; Blair, Peter (International Flash Fiction Association, 2024-04-15)
    Founded 2008, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is a biannual literary periodical publishing flash fictions of up to 360 words.

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