Unity in Diversity
The public television endeavor in South Africa to translate a multicultural ideology into programming addresses the plurality of citizen-viewers in the country through the stipulation of language and local content quotas, among other corporate objectives. But the way women negotiate television's attempts to reproduce a shared sense of national identity and the manner in which they view television as a means to participate in the national public sphere have not yet been assessed. This chapter intervenes by investigating the heterogeneous manner in which audiences utilize global and local programming in their identification as national subjects. First, white women offer an antagonistic response by distancing themselves from nation-building rhetoric and by expressing preferences for programming from other national contexts. Second, older black women collaborate by identifying with programming on television that they believe addresses issues of the nation directly. And, finally, a mixed racial and ethnic group of women demonstrate more ambivalent or critical responses to programming designed to bring people together around national concerns. The paradoxical responses of women to national programming suggest the exclusive qualities of the lived experience of multiculturalism versus the imagined success of the televised national project. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
South Africa; 
television; 
reception; 
cultural proximity; 
multiple proximities; 
gender; 
race; 
class; 
multiculturalism; 
audience studies; 
globalization
Multiple Proximities between Television Genres and Audiences
How can a Mexican telenovela be more attractive to viewers in Brazil than a nationally produced telenovela? This seems to be the question posed by the increasing transnational flow of cultural products. Most of the data indicate that viewers prefer locally produced programs. Nevertheless, some of the transnational success of Latin American telenovelas abroad seems to question this truism. This article argues that audience preferences are formed within the overall trend toward cultural proximity within both national and cultural-linguistic boundaries. However, within this logic of cultural proximity, other forces also apply. It is important to understand cultural proximity working not only at the national and supranational levels but also at the subnational and regional spheres. With this in mind, the authors first examine the attraction or proximity of genres, from the virtually global attraction of melodrama, as a macro genre, to subgenres within the telenovela. Second, they discuss the sense of shared historical experience of specific groups within nations and how this particular form of proximity might operate at the reception level.
Solidarity. Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics. Summary
1. References to solidarity are currently on the increase in public discourse. In the UK and beyond, during economic crises and in a political climate where many feel that mutual assistance has lost currency, calls for a new and forceful emphasis on the meaning of solidarity are increasingly heard. Such appeals to solidarity are inevitably linked to ideas about how societies function, and about how and where the boundary between individual, familial, communal and societal spheres of responsibilities should be drawn.