Amanda Ciafone | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (original) (raw)
Amanda Ciafone is a cultural historian of capitalism, especially interested in culture industries and the role of the media in constructing meaning around economic and social relations. Her research and teaching is at the nexus of various fields including cultural history and cultural studies of the United States in the world, especially Latin America; political economy; culture and media industries; history of technology and science; and social movements. She is currently completing her first book about The Coca-Cola Company and the politics, cultural representations, and social movements around the multinational corporation.
Ciafone is also at work on a new book project on the relationship between technology and old age, as part of the new, growing field of the humanistic study of aging.
BA, Brown University; PhD, Yale University
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Papers by Amanda Ciafone
Routledge eBooks, Oct 4, 2022
Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a nar... more Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a narrative form interconnecting disparate or seemingly unrelated characters, plotlines, and geographies. These films demonstrate networks on three levels: a network narrative form, themes of networked social relations, and networked industrial production. While they emphasize realism in their aesthetics, these films rely on risk and randomness to map a fantastic network of interrelations, resulting in the magical meeting of multiple and divergent characters and storylines, spectacularizing the reality of social relations, and giving a negative valence to human connection. Over the last 20 years, the network narrative has become a prominent means of representing and containing social relations under neoliberalism.
Radical History Review
This essay introduces readers to key themes in critical gerontology and age studies and asserts t... more This essay introduces readers to key themes in critical gerontology and age studies and asserts their centrality to contemporary history and politics. Age scholars and critical gerontologists push back against perspectives that individualize and medicalize old age as a natural or universal stage in a singular life course explained solely by biology, psychology, or personal choices. Instead, they challenge us to see contemporary life stages and even chronological age itself as historically and culturally specific structures. The contributions in this issue demonstrate the power of this approach, exploring histories of later life in the context of slave societies, retirement, social movements, and gendered embodiment. Together, contributors model a radical history of old age that centers power, historical struggle, and linked lives.
Feminist Media Studies , 2019
Historia y Sociedad, 2018
International Journal of Communication , 2014
Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a nar... more Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a narrative form interconnecting disparate or seemingly unrelated characters, plotlines, and geographies. These films demonstrate networks on three levels: a network narrative form, themes of networked social relations, and networked industrial production. While they emphasize realism in their aesthetics, these films rely on risk and randomness to map a fantastic network of interrelations, resulting in the magical meeting of multiple and divergent characters and storylines, spectacularizing the reality of social relations, and giving a negative valence to human connection. Over the last 20 years, the network narrative has become a prominent means of representing and containing social relations under neoliberalism.
As The Coca-Cola Company debuted its commercial featuring a multilingual rendition of “America th... more As The Coca-Cola Company debuted its commercial featuring a multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful” during the Super Bowl a spate of racist and homophobic tweets grew on Twitter with the hashtag #SpeakAmerican, some even calling for a boycott of the company’s products. Radio and television coverage amplified attention to the commercial and the social media backlash. This commercial has performed a branded representation of the diversity of American identities on a national stage.
With the sudden, almost ubiquitous reentry of The Coca-Cola Company to India during economic libe... more With the sudden, almost ubiquitous reentry of The Coca-Cola Company to India during economic liberalization, the branded commodity became a sign of both aspirational global consumer-citizenship for India’s urban middle class and of corporate enclosure for those dispossessed of material and symbolic resources to fuel this consumption. Village communities around several of Coca-Cola’s rural plants, including in Mehdiganj, Uttar Pradesh, organized against the company’s operations, which they accused of exploiting and polluting common groundwater in the production of bottled drinks as an increasing expanse of the country fell into a crisis of water scarcity. This “environmentalism of the poor” has articulated a powerful critique of corporate globalization and privatization, illuminating the exploitation of the resources of the rural poor for the consumption of those on the other side of an increasingly widening economic divide.
Routledge eBooks, Oct 4, 2022
Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a nar... more Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a narrative form interconnecting disparate or seemingly unrelated characters, plotlines, and geographies. These films demonstrate networks on three levels: a network narrative form, themes of networked social relations, and networked industrial production. While they emphasize realism in their aesthetics, these films rely on risk and randomness to map a fantastic network of interrelations, resulting in the magical meeting of multiple and divergent characters and storylines, spectacularizing the reality of social relations, and giving a negative valence to human connection. Over the last 20 years, the network narrative has become a prominent means of representing and containing social relations under neoliberalism.
Radical History Review
This essay introduces readers to key themes in critical gerontology and age studies and asserts t... more This essay introduces readers to key themes in critical gerontology and age studies and asserts their centrality to contemporary history and politics. Age scholars and critical gerontologists push back against perspectives that individualize and medicalize old age as a natural or universal stage in a singular life course explained solely by biology, psychology, or personal choices. Instead, they challenge us to see contemporary life stages and even chronological age itself as historically and culturally specific structures. The contributions in this issue demonstrate the power of this approach, exploring histories of later life in the context of slave societies, retirement, social movements, and gendered embodiment. Together, contributors model a radical history of old age that centers power, historical struggle, and linked lives.
Feminist Media Studies , 2019
Historia y Sociedad, 2018
International Journal of Communication , 2014
Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a nar... more Transnational network narrative films attempt a cognitive mapping of global systems through a narrative form interconnecting disparate or seemingly unrelated characters, plotlines, and geographies. These films demonstrate networks on three levels: a network narrative form, themes of networked social relations, and networked industrial production. While they emphasize realism in their aesthetics, these films rely on risk and randomness to map a fantastic network of interrelations, resulting in the magical meeting of multiple and divergent characters and storylines, spectacularizing the reality of social relations, and giving a negative valence to human connection. Over the last 20 years, the network narrative has become a prominent means of representing and containing social relations under neoliberalism.
As The Coca-Cola Company debuted its commercial featuring a multilingual rendition of “America th... more As The Coca-Cola Company debuted its commercial featuring a multilingual rendition of “America the Beautiful” during the Super Bowl a spate of racist and homophobic tweets grew on Twitter with the hashtag #SpeakAmerican, some even calling for a boycott of the company’s products. Radio and television coverage amplified attention to the commercial and the social media backlash. This commercial has performed a branded representation of the diversity of American identities on a national stage.
With the sudden, almost ubiquitous reentry of The Coca-Cola Company to India during economic libe... more With the sudden, almost ubiquitous reentry of The Coca-Cola Company to India during economic liberalization, the branded commodity became a sign of both aspirational global consumer-citizenship for India’s urban middle class and of corporate enclosure for those dispossessed of material and symbolic resources to fuel this consumption. Village communities around several of Coca-Cola’s rural plants, including in Mehdiganj, Uttar Pradesh, organized against the company’s operations, which they accused of exploiting and polluting common groundwater in the production of bottled drinks as an increasing expanse of the country fell into a crisis of water scarcity. This “environmentalism of the poor” has articulated a powerful critique of corporate globalization and privatization, illuminating the exploitation of the resources of the rural poor for the consumption of those on the other side of an increasingly widening economic divide.
Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world’s most influential and widely known corporati... more Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world’s most influential and widely known corporations, The Coca-Cola Company. Over the past 130 years, the corporation has sought to make its products, brands, and business central to daily life in over 200 countries. Amanda Ciafone uses this example of global capitalism to reveal the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations—liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal—of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Coca-Cola's success has not gone uncontested. People throughout the world have redeployed the corporation, its commodities, and brand images to challenge the injustices of daily life under capitalism. As Ciafone shows, assertions of national economic interests, critiques of cultural homogenization, fights for workers’ rights, movements for environmental justice, and debates over public health have obliged the corporation to justify itself in terms of the common good, demonstrating capitalism’s imperative to either assimilate critiques or reveal its limits.