Culture Unbound

Introduction to Special Issue: Placemaking Beyond Cities.

2024-01-26T11:21:07+01:00

This special issue of Culture Unbound directs attention beyond cities, to small towns and rural communities, and the practices taking place there. Referring to a previous special issue on ‘Rural Media Spaces’ from 2010, this special issue revisits the notion of ‘the rural’ versus ‘the urban’ through the concept of placemaking and geomedia. In a mediatized society, placemaking practices cannot be understood without simultaneously understanding different media practices and how they affect place. A geomedia perspective on placemaking beyond cities, therefore, brings new perspectives on media representations of small towns and rural communities, related to the materialization of space and how we engage with and perceive the world. Geomedia also includes a focus on layers of digitalization and new media in the relations between place and practice.

The issue brings together researchers from a wide range of subjects, and the articles in this volume address empirical examples from different rural places and small towns in Sweden and internationally. Taken together, a manifold of issues relating to media and placemaking beyond cities are covered, for example, inclusion/exclusion, representation, resistance, community building, belonging, and identification.

Hope, Rigging and Relativisations in the Making of Neoliberal Academia

2023-10-17T16:32:31+02:00

It is hardly news that neoliberal academia, to say the least, might not be the very best place for conducting critical research. Among the scholars with a critical bent, this is such a widely accepted fact that it basically constitutes a truism. However, it is one thing to say that contemporary academia is hostile to critical scholarship, but quite another to understand mechanisms pertaining to such a state of affairs. With the aim of illuminating the performativity of neoliberal academia, the article first examines how neoliberalism engages academic subjectivity, making it apparent that it is our hope of establishing a decent academic career at some point in the future that fosters the excessiveness of neoliberal academia. Second, by focusing on the rigging of academic positions, the article reminds us that the performativity of neoliberal academia is not at all foreign to the foreclosure of competitiveness. Third, while emphasising the importance of questioning the (in)existence of critical thinking in contemporary society, I analyse some viewpoints in academia that relativise the rigging of academic positions and the lack of critical scholarship in neoliberal academia.

L’Ennui Des Syrtes Or The Boredom Of Empires

2024-01-24T09:58:59+01:00

The paper presents the phenomenon of boredom in Julien Gracq’s novel Le Rivage des Syrtes (The opposing shore). The book describes Orsenna, oligarchic city-state loosely based on Venetian republic and empire, which is in a state of phoney war with Farghestan, a mysterious country across the closed sea of Syrtes. The story, narrated by Aldo, young aristocrat assigned for civic duty on the outskirts of empire, depicts the collective mood of anxious anticipation and boredom of the citizens of Orsenna “waiting for barbarians.” The paper analyses Gracq’s novel as a literary illustration of the theories of civilization demise, primarily that of Oswald Spengler, and of the decadence state of society led by bored and languorous elite. In the article, I hypothesize that the demise of empires can be partially attribute to them being boring for their civic agents and subjects alike. The sense of meaninglessness and the feeling of interminable ennui seem to contribute to the attitude of carelessness in both these groups resulting in lack of loyalty and low morale. I suggest that Orsenna’s citizens suffer from societal existential boredom and that similar affliction might have been observed in late British Empire.

Ukrainian priests as creators of church carols in the 17th – 19th centuries.

2024-01-10T14:45:30+01:00

The study highlights the development of the genre of church carols in the work of Ukrainian priests as a component of the spiritual song culture of the 17th – 19th centuries with a possible specification of their authors. A review of the scientific works of Ukrainian and foreign scientists was carried out, in which the question of the existence of church carols at various stages of their development was investigated. The works of Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Wozniak, Hans Rohte, Larysa Hnatiuk, Lidia Korniy, Larysa Kostiukovets, Yuriy Medvedyk and others were analysed.

In the process of research, it was found out that the first sources where the use of church carols was noticed were: school drama, live and puppet verteps (nativity scenes). The authors of the first Christmas dramas that have survived to this day were Pamvo Berynda, Dmytro Tuptalo (Rostovskyi), Yepifanii Dovgalevskyi and a number of authors unknown to modern science. They were probably the authors of church carols used in dramas. The result of the creation of church carols was the first printed collection of Ukrainian spiritual songs “Bogoglasnyk”, published in Pochaiv in 1773, later a more complete edition, an anthology collection of Ukrainian spiritual songs “Bogoglasnyk”, was made, and published in Pochaiv in 1790-1791. There were published 24 Ukrainian and 5 Polish carols in it among 240 spiritual songs. The probable names of the authors of several Ukrainian carols are mentioned.

The research indicates that the process of creating church carols intensified in the 19th century. Their authors were Greek-Catholic priests Viktor Matiuk, Maksym Kopko, Ostap Nyzhankivskyi, Yosyp Kyshakevych and others. In addition to pastoral activities, they were also engaged in composing, were the authors of Holy Liturgies, spiritual songs, including church carols. The most famous carols were “Na Nebi Yasna Zirka Zasiala” (“A Bright Star Shone in the Sky”) by Viktor Matiuk, “Vselennaya Veselysia” (“Rejoice the Universe”), “Na Rozhdestvo Khrysta” (“On the Birth of Christ”), “Vistku Holosyt’ Svitu Zirnytsia” (“A Starling Announces the News to the World”) by Maksym Kopko, “U Vyfleyemi Nyni Novyna” (“News in Bethlehem Today”) by O. Nyzhankivskyi, “Nad Vyfleyemom Zablysla Zoria” (“A Star Twinkled Over Bethlehem”, “Slava Vo Vyshnykh Bogu” (“The Highest Glory to God”), “Spy, Isuse, Spy” (“Sleep, Jesus, Sleep”) by Yosyp Kyshakevych.

The periodization of the development of the genre of church carols in the works of Ukrainian priests of the 17th-19th centuries was carried out. The first period is called the “manuscript” one (the end of the 16th century – 1773), and is associated with the first recording of Christmas songs without specifying the names of the songs and their authors. The second period is the “edition period” (1773 – the beginning of the 19th century) is associated with the appearance of the first collection of Ukrainian spiritual songs, published in Pochaiv in 1773, the beginning of the tradition of printing collections of spiritual songs, including carols, with the specified titles and partly the names of the authors. The third period, which is called the “author’s” (the middle of the 19th – the end of the 19th century) was initiated and developed by composers and priests such as Ivan Bilykovskyi, Viktor Matiuk, Maksym Kopko, Ostap Nyzhankivskyi, Yosyp Kyshakevych. During this period, a church carol undergoes stylistic changes. It loses the features of church hymnography (solemn, extended character, literary strophic structure, solemn melody, refined and solemn performance style). Instead, it acquires the features of folk song creativity, both in strophic and melodic structures.

Culture-led Regeneration in Historical and Cultural Areas

2024-01-03T12:46:53+01:00

Despite embracing various historical and cultural values, historical areas of Iran are experiencing massive changes in their functional, social and physical profiles, often without apt recognition of the role of culture in urban regeneration. This paper aims to examine the role of culture-led regeneration in enhancing the quality of a cultural and historical district in Mashhad, Iran and determine appropriate spatial strategies. Based on a critical literature review, this paper presents a conceptual framework for culture-led regeneration, which considers different approaches to culture-led regeneration and their associated spatial strategies: competitive-led, community-led and creativity-led. The framework's applicability in our case study is then assessed through multiple methods, including field observation, reviewing secondary documents and a three-round Delphi survey of experts' opinions. Our findings reveal the applicability of the three approaches to culture-led regeneration in the selected area considering context-specific adaptation. The results also highlight that community-led and then creativity-led strategies are perceived as more essential than competitive-led ones. The paper also offers practical implications for designing the historical district based on the prioritised approaches and strategies.

Re-placing Race in the Public Space

2023-12-18T11:41:05+01:00

In this article I engage with the un- and re-making of monuments in the context of the globalization and mediatization of Black Lives Matter and anti-racist activism. I analyze in particular two examples that display transcultural negotiations of antiracism against the background of different colonial histories:

The induction of Josephine Baker to the French Pantheon in November 2021, which opens the space of a key monument of French heritage to a black woman for the first time.
The defacing of the statue of the Italian journalist and prominent intellectual Indro Montanelli in Milan in June 2020.

The analysis emphasizes, on the one hand, the fluidity characterizing the transnational circulation of language, media and spatial practices. On the other, it points to multiple asymmetries deriving from the globalization and the transculturalization of communication. In order to take both aspects into account, I use a border perspective, and expand the category of ‘monument’ to include processes of un- and re-making heritages. In particular, I de-border the concept of language and crisscross the borders between discursive spaces and material spaces of representation.

The article contributes to diversify postcolonial theory by showing that labels such as ‘European’ (post)coloniality or ‘global’ anti-racism are far too reductive with respect to the diversity of colonial histories and postcolonial realities. Accordingly, it pleads for putting transculturality at the core of decolonial struggles within and outside academia.

How Does Meaning Affect the Perceived Value of Art? The Case of Chinese Calligraphy

2023-09-01T16:21:06+02:00

How does meaning making affect the perceived value of art? In this paper, we focus on a unique form of art, Chinese calligraphy, to explore the effects of literal meaning on the perceived value of art combining both words and aesthetic quality. Based on a 2*4 between-subjects factorial experiment (n = 451), we find evidence that the provision of transcriptions for Chinese calligraphy artworks can have certain impact on the works’ perceived value. Specifically, our findings suggest that transcriptions enhance the appreciation of the value of the literal content and the perceived beauty of certain artwork. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the effect of meaning on the perceived value of Chinese calligraphy artworks, information supply on aesthetic experiences, and the value of Chinese calligraphy as intangible cultural heritage. Recommendations for stakeholders including auction houses are provided.

Migrant Life Stories as Digital Heritage

2022-08-04T09:19:03+02:00

Following the ambitions of international and national policy makers to digitalize the cultural heritage sector, a growing research field that deals with digitalization and cultural heritage has emerged. However, it has been argued that too much focus has been placed on technology and information policy issues and that research on how to achieve administrative effectiveness and preservation has taken precedence over studies of different actors’ engagement, participation and access to cultural heritage. Previous studies have also tended to problematize the “hows” rather than the “whys” of processes associated with digital heritage and digitalization. In addition, research has shown that collections documenting minorities and marginalized groups have been excluded from national strategies concerning the digitalization of cultural heritage. Therefore, the aim of this article is to investigate why and under what conditions digital heritage about and with migrants has been initiated, created and curated. We study the motives and the roles of different stakeholders in the digitization and patrimonialization processes of one collection containing life stories from migrants. Furthermore, in the article we understand stakeholders not only as decision makers, owners or managers, but also as any person or organization that feels affected by whatever happens to the object or piece defined as heritage. Consequently, a central element in the methodology of this research was the interviews conducted with crucial actors in relation to their engagements with the studied collection. During the interviews, we paid specific attention to the different motives of the involved stakeholders and why it was important to them that the collection was created and digitized.

Introduction

2022-08-04T09:19:06+02:00

Digital technology rapidly permeated all aspects of human existence in the majority of the world during the early twenty-first century, concurrently reshaping social understanding of the present and interpretations of the past. Indeed, the process has reconditioned age-old social communication and expression practices, while opening up inventive spaces for information organisation, data preservation, as well as for the creation and distribution of knowledge, beliefs and cultural values. The commercialisation of the Internet in the 1990s, coupled with the simultaneous emergence of the World Wide Web, have played a particularly significant role in the development and popularisation of public digital cultures (Gere 2008: 207-224). However, relying as such on digital technology for their exposure, sustainability and expansion, digital cultures were not as conspicuous back then as they turned out to be, especially in the 2010s when social media platforms, augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI) and smart communication devices rose to prominence and became integrated across the otherwise discontinuous geographies dominated by technologically-advanced nations. Since then, it has hardly been possible not to be conscious of how digital cultures have re-energised well-established cultural memories and legacies, on the one hand, and perpetuated innovative cultural dispositions, on the other. In doing so, digital technology, and perhaps digital cultures more specifically, have adapted a set of recognised traditional identities to the social pressures and political demands of life in the twenty-first century. At the same time, they have given expression to otherwise marginalised, non-conformist, and even contentious identities.

“The Usual Antisocial Protocol”

2023-10-03T10:38:08+02:00

This article considers experience narratives of “dålig stämning” (bad atmosphere and unease) in Swedish workplaces. The aim of this article is to show how office-employees in Sweden experience, negotiate and understand bad atmosphere and unease in their working life. By analysing personal experience narratives, collected through a qualitative questionnaire, through the lens of narrative positioning (Hynninen 2017; Pöysä 2009; Bamberg 2003; Harré & van Lagenhove 1999). The article shed light on how an uneasy atmosphere is defined and experienced in a Swedish office workplace environment. By analysing narratives collected in the qualitative questionnaire through close reading (Pöysä 2010) concentrating on positions, or who the narrator positions him/herself to be, I conclude that the narrators narrate an experience of lack, and that office unease can be viewed as the attunement phase of a conflict taking place or a call to action to resolve the lack.

Gauging the Google gaze

2022-12-02T14:43:47+01:00

This study explores the visual representation of Great Yarmouth, a British coastal town caught between the urban and the rural, as seen through the quasi-monopolistic image search engine Google Images. The research examines levels of pluralistic or biased place representations to consider how rankings employed by Google Images algorithms represent Great Yarmouth’s identity. The study adopts a visual culture perspective that recognises the role of images in place making and combines digital methods with an image type analysis to investigate how online representations reflect and create the town’s identities. The data shows that Google Images’ preference for representing Yarmouth as a sunny seaside town indicates that the search engine prioritises marketable assets above its connections with its hinterland, its diversity of people, and the cultural activities it has to offer. This, the authors state, is a place far away from Tuan’s (1979) idea of a place that is given meaning and identity from the perspective of people. Instead, Google Images’ representations of Great Yarmouth are an example of a created form of place making as commodification. The article concludes that the inscribed bias and unbalanced search priority criteria employed by the search engine impact upon the diversity of the semi-peripheral town.

There’s a Hinterland in Me

2023-01-30T16:36:26+01:00

Northern Norrland has a long history of domestic colonialism and internal migration. However, in the latter half of the twentieth century the region has seen a decline in population, job opportunities and welfare services. This study analyses how contemporary popular music from the region represents it and reflects feelings and thoughts on life there, and how identity, moods and sentiments are constructed and attached to place to uncover the rhetoric of place-making in popular music. The analysis shows a complex relationship between the local area and the surrounding country, featuring themes of ambivalence, resistance, dualistic nostalgia and transience responding to contemporary realities of the region. The lyrical themes and rhetorical actions performed in twenty-first century popular music evinces clear connections to literary depictions of the region throughout the last hundred years, indicating a reinterpretation of cultural memory in light of present conditions. These lyrics perform a rhetoric of re-membering which serves to reinforce the bond of people to place through music.

#Nowhereland

2022-11-08T14:56:55+01:00

Rural places and small towns are highly valued by lifestyle migrants who wish to live close to nature (Verdich 2010) and have a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Ängsbacka is a course center and a community for alternative lifestyles, located on the outskirts of a small town in mid-Sweden. The center emphasizes community and belonging, while also being a place characterized by cosmopolitan taste patterns and constant mobility, which can be described as a cocoon community (following Korpela and Dervin 2013).

The members of the cocoon community use social media platforms such as Instagram to make place for themselves, to communicate belonging. Through images, hashtags and captions, they make connections between various places, people, activities and emotions that together contribute to the user’s spatial self (Schwartz and Halegoua 2015) and to the place making efforts of the community. Those using the hashtag ängsbacka often do so to communicate a deep connection between the place and themselves. At the same time, while the local place and nature is at the center of their activities, it is simultaneously a mere backdrop for their projects of personal development.

Using Ängsbacka as a case, the article adds to research about digital place making beyond cities, by examining how the local place is given meaning within a community defined by privileged mobility. To analyze the intermingling of the local and the global in the context of sustainability, I combine theories of place making with Carfagna et al’s (2014) concept of ecological habitus. I argue that discourses on sustainability and harmony with nature can create a connection and sense of belonging that combines the (hyper)local with global (alternative) lifestyles.

Reimagining the Rural Hinterland: an investigation of participatory digital placemaking in rural communities

2023-01-11T15:50:32+01:00

Rural locations often form a hinterland – geographically and culturally - for large conurbations that dominate a particular region. They are interconnected, sometimes interdependent, but also separated by the social and spatial perceptions of a place. For urban dwellers the hinterland is a place to ‘escape to the country’; for rural dwellers the town is the place of ‘bright lights’. The norms of either location often sit juxtaposed. This sense of place may be constructed from traditional, stereotypical ways of seeing and understanding communities. Digital technology has provided a platform to challenge these norms and provide new ways of representing the physical and cultural landscape of urban and rural spaces. In this conceptual paper we explore digital placemaking in the hinterland of the North-East of Scotland. In this region, the city (Aberdeen) dominates, but it is the rural hinterland that charms. Through an examination of co-created content of rural spaces in this region we consider the role of participatory digital placemaking. Drawing on an extensive body of previous research that has explored community heritage in the North-East of Scotland, we use case studies to consider the ways in which images, iconography and language shape and inform perceptions of the rural space in the digital environment. We argue that this bottom-up approach to placemaking in rural areas can help to shape the way that places are seen, understood, and valued by communities, visitors and wider online audiences. To conclude, this paper reflects on how rural participatory digital placemaking counteracts the urban norm and connects communities across town and country through a reimagined digital hinterland.

“County residents take the fight”

2023-05-05T09:45:32+02:00

Celebrations of local volunteering as a way to cope with cutbacks are frequent. Not least are such celebrations apparent within the media, where descriptions of local initiatives are sometimes seen as the solutions to downward spiralling trends in Swedish rural areas. The paper explores the media production of meaning around rural resilience as they covered initiatives where rural populations mobilised to ‘save’ threatened local service for their supposed public interest. Using the concepts of ‘patchy resilience’ and ‘cruel optimism’, the paper points at how the representations attach rural areas and identities to a stereotypical rural imagery while also representing a resilience ideal that risks glorifying neoliberal responsibilisation.

Living with an iconic aid

2022-12-08T13:24:15+01:00

There are plenty of objects that are conspicuous in the way they signal to the surroundings that the user has some kind of physical impairment. Most obvious are perhaps wheelchairs, motorized wheelchairs, hearing aids and crutches. These objects can be described as aids in the sense that the purpose is either to mitigate the effects of reduced physical abilities or to compensate for the loss of a sensory faculty. The focus of this article concerns an object that both increases mobility and replaces such a faltering capacity. It might even be the most iconic of all aids: the mobility cane, also known as the white cane, long cane or white stick. Based on the work at a Swedish Low Vision and Resource Centre, this article discusses the use of the white cane among people with severe and progressive visual impairment. The fact is that this aid, which for an outsider would easily seem to be a rather natural choice, can arouse completely different feelings in somebody who has a severe visual impairment. It is a well-known circumstance amongst low visions teachers and therapists that persons with acquired or progressive sight impairment are often not quite happy about using the aid. Therefore, the aim of the article is to utilize notions of everyday experiences to gain further insights into why the white cane for many of its potential users are associated with strong feelings of both personal ambiguity and social stress. In order to highlight these emotional, and still cultural and political, tensions, the discussion is grounded in critical disability studies and informed by ableism, stigma, and passing as theoretical concepts.

Moving on, Looking Back: Letters from Australia

2022-02-08T10:23:44+01:00

N/A

Live-action role-playing and the affordances of social media

2022-06-08T08:33:12+02:00

Live-action role-playing (larp) is characterized by participants’ physical and mental immersion in a storyworld, played out in a specific location during a fixed period of time. Most of the immersion is realized during the live event itself, where a collective story is acted out in physical space in real time. However, contemporary larping also usually entails significant interaction and communication between players, and between players and organisers, before and after the event itself, through digital media. In this article, we explore the social media afterlife of one of the most significant Nordic larp events in recent years, Fortune and Felicity (2017). Using an affordance framework, we discuss what happens to the “liveness” of the larp when it is extended into social media. Through the affordances of persistence, visibility, editability and associability, we analyse material from the Facebook group connected to Fortune and Felicity, used by players and organisers to prepare for the larp and, afterwards, to continue the gameplay and to de-brief. In social media, the continuum of time and space, which is characteristic of the larp event itself, is changed into asynchronous and physically separate player action. Thus, the affordances of social media, we argue, enable player interaction and collaborative storytelling in ways that change the narrative, interactive and immersive dynamics of the larp.

Introduction

2021-12-27T16:27:07+01:00

This special issue brings together research from various disciplines to not only assess the current state of human rights, aid and development projects, and legitimate governing orders – often framed as factors of human security – but also to critically examine the increasing reliance on measures of compliance and progress in these areas, reflecting the current “world of indicators,” as Richard Rottenburg and Sally Engle Merry put it (2015). While the tools and models currently being utilized are indeed quite powerful, the call for different, more effective kinds of knowledge and evaluative instruments in the face of (allegedly increasing) uncertainty, nevertheless, continues to grow at the same time. Yet neither the various political or humanitarian crises, nor the urgent calls to take action are by any means new. Far from representing an unusual state of affairs, uncertainty is both fundamental to the human condition and the world we inhabit. John Dewey (1938) described the very contingency of social life as the starting point for human reflection, for the generation of meaning and social constructions of evaluation.

Assisted Dying as Intimate Care

2023-02-24T15:36:16+01:00

How does asking loved ones to help you die, to help you commit suicide, bend the limits of our relationships and perhaps of care itself? This paper traces the aesthetic and affective considerations of those deciding to die resist against depersonalizing experiences of medical care. Focusing on ethnographic interviews with members of the British right-to die group My Death My Decision, I explore how individuals recruit loved ones and doctors to actively participate in their death through “assistance”. This paper will specifically focus on what this assistance looks, or perhaps more accurately, feels like. It will question if the desire for an assisted death in which bodies, actions, and decisions touch and are touched by one another is a demand which exceeds the boundaries of “care”. My Death My Decision is campaigning to legalize assisted suicide based on a belief that the individual knows when it’s their time to die, regardless of a terminal diagnosis. One member, Pat, has decided that when the time comes, she will travel from London to a euthanasia center in Switzerland where, surrounded by loved ones, she can receive a “kind death” from doctors that care. Unlike colloquial uses of care, here, Pat references a relationship which is not defined by medical interventions to elongate life. This paper argues that presence and touch – both physical and emotional – can produce communal practices and ethics of care which challenge traditional expectations of biomedicine.

‘The patriarchy can’t dance with us’

2022-02-28T14:51:51+01:00

The music festival Statement was initiated as a response to sexual violence towards women at other festivals, and during the work of creating a safe festival, separatism became the feminist strategy. In this paper we analyse media reporting from Statement, with a focus on the desire for safety. Using psychoanalytical discourse theory, we analyse different media materials, focusing on emotive language and fantasmatic narratives. We argue that in the media representations, a desire for safety is linked to enjoyment, opportunities to be oneself, predictability and lack of conflict. Safety is also strongly represented as linked to a focus on security and the absent man is continuously present in the media articulations. While the media representations tend to reconstruct a heterosexual Woman with a universal experience, the focus on the patriarchy, a common ‘we’ and the emotive language might nevertheless spur political mobilisation.

“What is the Real Sweden?”

2022-11-09T10:45:36+01:00

While the interest and search for identity through genealogy or family history is not new, the increased mediatization, access, and range of vehicles through which one can engage and learn are. What are the effects of this mediatization of identity and genealogy? How do individuals understand and interact with these mediatized representations? Since the expanded availability and marketing of genetic/DNA testing in the 1990s, and media programmes that trace the “roots” of famous people such as “Who do you think you are?” interest in genealogy has exponentially grown. In relation, ancestry tourism has grown in popularity before the Covid-19 pandemic and is projected by many researchers, culture, and government organisations post-pandemic to be instrumental in rebuilding tourism for many affected places and countries. The Swedish reality television programme, “Allt för Sverige” acts as a bridge between the mediatization of genealogy and this ancestry tourism interest. American contestants are introduced to a frame of Swedish identity as produced through the institutional structures of a television show, reflecting larger historical and socio-cultural assumptions, ideologies, and knowledge. This identity encoded by the programme of “Allt för Sverige” is engaged with/decoded and reacted to by the contestant. Utilising the concept of frame and framing, from Goffman and media studies, the presentation of Swedish Identity in “Allt för Sverige’s” is explored in the narratives from semi-structured interviews with 16 previous contestants. This data is analysed through Hall’s theoretical encoding/decoding model. This study contributes with new knowledge to the ongoing research examining the interest and mediatization of genealogy by focusing on the effect on participants in front of the camera instead of the targeted audience.

Transforming Personal Death into Public Martyrdom

2022-08-05T10:26:17+02:00

Abstract

This article examines ways to analyze and understand the social and cultural transformation that occurred after the 2011 uprising in downtown Cairo. We argue for a cultural sociological perspective using a renewed version of the concept “the sacred” for analysis. Visual material – graffiti and murals on the walls of Cairo – is discussed in relation to the process of transforming the death of an individual into collective martyrdom. The role of social media, public rituals, and celebrations in the events in Tahrir Square is also discussed. This article shows how the process of sacralization follows a recurring pattern in which individual deaths transmigrate into new collective, ritualized memories through the use of aesthetics in social media and on murals. Using different types of field-based and online material, this article argues for a cultural sociological perspective whereby individual death also can be understood on a more general level as a constituent part of the existing and contested societal order. The emphasis on a processual view of social and cultural transformation is equally important. This view includes a dialectical perspective, which together with an awareness of spatiality, materiality, new media, and embodiment, is essential for an understanding of what happened in downtown Cairo after the uprising in 2011.

Between Words and Silence

2022-08-04T09:19:10+02:00

This article tackles the risks of digitization of sensitive collections and the ethical limits of open access. Research into experience of conflicts and violence requires the submerging into a world of local taboos and practices that usually remain within the sphere of cultural intimacy. Similarly, the digitization of sensitive collections can grant an un-curated uncontrolled access to realms which should be handled with ethical awareness and sensitivity. We focus on two case-studies referring to the Podhale, a region in the Tatra Mountains inhabited by local people called Górale. The first one is the archive of Nazi anthropological photography and documentation recently rediscovered at the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). Its digitization in 2007 marked the start of a research project on WWII anthropology in Podhale, evoking at the same time an ardent and emotional debate among both scholars and the Górale community. The most serious issues referred to the impact of the digitized photographs on the present-day collective memory of the Górale. In fact, till the archive’s discovery and digitization, the episode of Nazi racial research was literally cast out from local history and memory. In this article we will ask how to deal with such materials and conduct research among people, for whom such documentation invokes unwanted and traumatic experiences. The second case-study focuses on contemporary memory conflicts related to the anti-communist guerrilla group “B?yskawica” (Lightning) operating in the aftermath of WWII on the Polish-Slovak border in the Tatra Mountains region. Accused by communist authorities of war-crimes, these partisans were officially rehabilitated only in the aftermath of the Polish Revolution of 1989. Memories about “B?yskawica” are still very vivid in this region evoking conflicting feelings from undisputed glorification to total condemnation. This article will inquire into the ambiguous digital discourses in the social media around such conflicting memories build on digitized resources from the archives of the former secret police (now deposited at the Institute of National Remembrance; INR - Institut Pami?ci Narodowej, IPN ). Both case-studies deal with a similar period, region, type of sources (archives produced in the past by the regime’s institutions of power). Both refer to the memory of experiences of violence, difficult choices, local conflicts, oppressive regimes and practices. We argue that the transition of such sensitive data into the digital realm raises the danger of manipulation by various interest groups, arbitrary defragmentation and reconfiguration. It can enliven and even reinforce old conflicts, generate new ones and even undermine the fragile social and cultural balance within a community.

‘Nordic Nineties’: Norwegian and Swedish self-understanding in the face of globalization

2021-08-10T17:15:00+02:00

‘Nordic Nineties’: Norwegian and Swedish self-understanding in the face of globalization

(Re-)Assembling Cultural Studies

2022-08-04T09:19:31+02:00

This paper proceeds from the assumption that the Anthropocene is characterized by a profound impurity and ‘messiness’. It argues that in order to be able to better tackle the immense complexity of the contemporary world, Cultural Studies needs to be more fully posthumanized, that is, brought into an encounter with the various theoretical formations associated with the nonhuman turn (actor-network theory, new materialism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, etc.). Specifically, it proposes the concept of the ‘assemblage’ as an alternative onto-epistemic commitment for Cultural Studies and a very productive hinge for such an encounter. Primarily drawing on the work of the philosopher Manuel DeLanda, the article distils the most important features of this concept and then goes on to explore how it calls for a rethinking and revision of some of the central assumptions and categories of Cultural Studies once it is ‘translated’ into the discursive horizon of the discipline. In particular, the essay, availing itself of a wide range of theoretical resources, investigates how the three key concepts of culture, power, and identity undergo a reconceptualization, one that more strongly opens them up to the nonhuman.

The Challenge of the Heritage of Protest Movements

2022-08-04T09:19:12+02:00

This article analyses the challenge of collecting the heritage of present-day global protest movements, which are shaped and influenced by digital practices. In focus of the analysis are the mass-street demonstrations which took place in cities all over Poland in 2020 and 2021 to denounce the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal imposing a near-total ban on abortion (the “women’s rebellion”). Considered as the largest social protests since the fall of communism in 1989, they have engendered several spontaneous documenting and collecting initiatives. The aims and outcomes of such projects, launched by Polish museums, NGOs, artistic collectives, etc. will be juxtaposed in this article with similar ventures aimed at collecting and archiving the global social movements of the twenty first century and examined as the first Polish examples of Rapid Response Collecting (RRC). This article, by analysing the recent RRC projects of the 2020/21 protests against the abortion ban in Poland, aims to inscribe them in the current discussions on the preservation of digital heritage. While pointing out definitional issues with digital heritage, my analysis also demonstrates the need to integrate and interrelate digital heritage within the wider framework of cultural heritage, its preservation and institutionalisation.

Multimedia Historical Parks and the Heritage-based “Regime of Truth” in Russia

2022-08-04T09:19:15+02:00

This article focuses on the 2013–2016 exhibitions in Moscow Manege which were later transformed into a network of entertainment centres (“historical parks”) Russia––my (hi)story. The exhibitions are built on multimedia technologies and include no authentic artefacts/museum objects. There is a growing network of such centres all over Russia, all organized in a similar manner, appealing to the visitor’s emotions and creating a relation of affect through the unravelling of a nationalistic historical narrative.

Claimed to present “the objective picture of the Russian history” the exhibitions are following the recent developments in Russian cultural policies and history curricula. By analysing narratives presented at the “historical park” exhibitions, in policy documents and in media, this article follows the changes in public attitude towards history, which heritage is perceived as ‘difficult’ and ‘contested’ and how the digital representations influence these perceptions.

Based on this analysis I argue that the reduction of the museum mechanism to only digital and multimedia form can bring along very serious issues in different political contexts. Russian historical parks enterprise, which combines the methods of fostering patriotism by the means of historical narrative templates both from the 19th and the 20th centuries, enhanced with the 21st-century technology in a form of “multimedia museums,” is only one of such examples.

The musical legacy of the 1918 Finnish Civil War on YouTube

2022-08-04T09:19:18+02:00

Conflicts such as wars, rebellions and revolutions often give rise to songs that pass on from one generation to another. This applies also to the bloody 1918 Finnish Civil War, which led to the death of nearly 37 000 people (about 1% of the population), of whom the majority 27 000 belonged to the defeated, the Reds, and affected Finnish society on every level and in long-lasting ways, some of which can still be acknowledged today. For decades after the war official and public commemoration of the war dead applied only to the winners, the Whites, whereas the Reds were forced to mourn and honour their dead in the private sphere. On both sides, songs were first a popular way of keeping up spirits and then after the war to commemorate the war. These songs were sung at funerals, parades as well as to mock the enemy. Today some of these songs as well as new ones on the topic are still popular and circulate in various versions on YouTube and other social media sites. These music videos are often remixes of original footage and photos used together with images from other sources. The most popular videos have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. In this article, we explore the digital heritage of the 1918 Finnish Civil War by giving first an overview of the musical legacy of the war and then analyse how and why this musical legacy continues to flourish on YouTube.

Transformative Heritage

2022-08-04T09:19:23+02:00

In this paper, we analyze some of the platforms and technologies that influence the manner in which we interact and experience historical sites and heritage. Acknowledging that history is a constructed narration of the past, this paper demonstrates how contemporary technologies have agency in reconstructing histories in the present via digital platforms. By comparing online platforms for digital heritage production like Google Heritage with Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) platforms, we demonstrate how digital heritage may undergo a process recontextualization or decontextualization from its originating settings.

We also show that digital heritage’s reconstruction of history is done through the act of remediation: by turning actual remnants of the past into digital models or by replacing such remnants with virtual representation that are globally accessible, something new is created and alternative stories can be told. Within that, we consider some of the ethical issues that are raised by the migration of historical narratives into digital platforms, as we point towards a growing tendency in which history and its production can be subjected to major data companies.

Transforming Photographs into a Digital Catalogue

2022-08-04T09:19:21+02:00

In this article I focus on three aspects of the digitisation of photographic collections which I have had the opportunity to deal with professionally in two museums, in the UK and Poland. In 2014, the Imperial War Museum in London (IMW) implemented an online project of the portal/monument, Lives of the First World War, commemorating all citizens of the British Commonwealth who took part in the First World War (WWI), both in uniform and in civil services. Users registered on the portal could attach documents, photographs, reports to each commemorated soldier-keyword, thus expanding the database. One of the key elements of the project was a collection of portrait photographs bearing the title Bond of Sacrifice. These comprised over 16,000 photographs of soldiers of the British Commonwealth, handed over to the Museum by their families in the years 1917–1919. After nearly a hundred years, the Museum decided to comprehensively develop, digitize, and make the collection available in the form of an online catalogue. In the meantime, the Museum digitised a huge collection of WWI photographs, the so-called Q Series (ca. 115,000), the most important part of which was British official photography. By 2016, the entire collection was scanned and made available in an external catalogue of the Museum on the basis of a non-commercial license. Since then, the photographs have taken on a life of their own: they are used in academic works, press articles, TV productions, and in social medias. The second project includes numerous photographs of the Polish Armed Forces. This phenomenon is dealt with in the second part of this paper, which discusses the online photographic collection of the Silesian Museum in Katowice. The third and final part of this article is devoted to the impact of digitization and on-line accessibility on the making of temporary exhibitions. This is explained using the example of the author’s last exhibition at the museum about women in industry; based entirely on digital reproductions of photographs from the collections of many museums from Europe and the U.S., amongst others the US National Archives and the IWM. This is due to the fact that the author selected the entire material with the use of online catalogues of these very institutions.

Anti-caste Memes as Cultural Archives of Resistance

2022-08-04T09:19:25+02:00

In this article, we make a case for looking at memes as potential digital cultural

heritage artefacts to counter hegemonic narratives around the caste system

in India. We reflect on this potentiality of memes by evaluating how three

anti-caste Facebook meme pages responded to protests against the Indian

Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens (CAA-NRC)

from December 2019 to March 2020. These pages simultaneously archived and

critiqued key moments of the protests as well as the anti-caste movement through

memes, playing a significant role in amplifying the voices of the Bahujans, the

marginalised caste groups in India. Focusing on the protest memes created by these

pages, we look at the contexts in which the protest memes could be considered

carriers, preservers, and transmitters of cultural knowledge. We argue that memes

could be understood as cultural heritage,not only as objects but as processes and

practices that constitute the building of cultural narratives. We illustrate how the

protest memes hold and demonstrate potential to become digital cultural heritage

as they simultaneously provided a much-needed alternative account of the way

the resistance played out on the streets as opposed to how mainstream media

portrayed them and archived and highlighted key moments of the protests and

the anti-caste movement.

A sanctuary built on conflict

2022-08-04T09:19:28+02:00

This article investigates conflicts in retrospective Facebook groups, i.e., groups created with a particular interest and focus on the past, to analyse how members of these groups understand the past and how they negotiate, resist and challenge each other’s notions of the past. The data comes from a netnographic fieldwork within six such retrospective groups. Theoretical inspiration is drawn from Actor-Network-Theory (Harrison 2013, Latour 2005). The analysis thusly focuses on human (the members of the groups) as well as non-human actors (the operative logic of Facebook) and study how these produce associations between the past and the present. An overall result of the study is that the retrospective Facebook groups are not characterised by conflict. Instead, they are produced as places of sanctuary, where associations with the past becomes a basis for a nostalgic feel-good culture. However, the analysis also shows that the sanctuaries build on the production of a discontinuity and a conflict between the past and the present. Using Boym’s concept of ruinophilia, as well as Bauman’s concept of retrotopia, the article discusses how the conflicted discontinuity between the past and the present produces an us-and-them relationship where group members can come together in a nostalgic as well as a critical care for the world as it (in their perspectives) was supposed to be. The analysis also illustrates how members’ use of sources and references becomes a mere stylistic performance of authority, as the operative logic of Facebook not only enables but also constrains group interactions, reducing the members’ possibilities of having profound interactions and negotiations based on their memories and notions of the past. The article hereby contributes to the emerging research on digital memories in general, and memory work on Facebook in particular.

Zooming In

2021-09-20T17:19:13+02:00

At the heart of this article is the presence of Indigenous children in photographs of explorative travels taken by Dutch Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Netherlands New Guinea (present-day West Papua, Indonesia) in the early twentieth century. Departing from the hypothesis that the children may have been guiding the missionaries, this research studies if and how young West Papuans acted as ‘local intermediaries’ in the early years of colonial settlement. ‘Zooming in’ on engagements between missionaries and children in both visual and textual sources, two paradoxical aspects of Indigenous children in missionary archives are grappled with: their centrality as objects of civilising practices on the one hand, and their marginalisation as historical subjects in colonial textual practices on the other. The visual and textual are brought in conversation: the active presence of children as individual historical actors participating in processes of colonisation in the photographs helps to see children and their actions in ‘still’ discourse, to contextualise captured instances in time and space. This shows how and when missionaries depended on the knowledge, skills, and networks of local children to introduce them to their new working ground. This article thus adds to the existing body of literature on colonial intermediaries, in which young people constitute an overlooked group, and to complement understandings of non-elite colonial childhoods of Indigenous children outside of familial or institutional contexts.

Seeing Images

2021-06-10T08:42:51+02:00

In the cultural heritage digital archive, descriptive metadata makes images (re)searchable. Text-based searches seek terms that match metadata terms or terms referring to aspects of images that have previously been considered essential to select and describe in metadata terms. Such considerations are bound up with historically changing institutional agendas, ideas about user preferences, and implementation of metadata standards. This study approaches image accessibility from a different perspective. It aims to investigate how the infrastructure of the digital archive, comprising metadata and interface, intervenes with, circumscribes as well as enables, the images’ visibility and knowledge-producing capacity. The starting points are: first, that images in digital archives, exemplified by the online image collections in Alvin and DigitaltMuseum, are mediated, mediating, and “mixed” media objects that simultaneously represent the past and the present; second, that the digital archive in a media history of images functions as both a tool and an object of research. Using the platforms as tools of research, this study is based on test searches that aim to find viable search strategies for mixed media objects. The chosen search terms represent media-historically significant and common traits such as images that are combined with text and images that represent and/or mediate other images. The study discloses that the platforms give both false negatives and false positives. They do not support searches that focus media terms and relations between media elements. These problems are further related both to heterogenous metadata practices and to the simultaneously restricted and broad image concept behind them. As objects of research, both platforms are considered in relation to a future construction of a media history of images, where the digital archive is a particular node. The study demonstrates how the “hypermedial” environment associated with new media is prefigured by media interrelations in analog images – or images that are accessible as mediated through the archive’s interface and as policed by the archive’s metadata structure.

Child Studies Multiple

2021-05-25T18:06:05+02:00

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

Does Spotify Create Attachment?

2022-08-04T09:18:57+02:00

This paper seeks to measure the extent to which algorithmically generated playlists, conceptualised herein as cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu 1984), create ‘attachment’ between consumers of music and producers of music. This was undertaken following debates in the professional music press problematising the ability of streaming platforms to create relationships between artists and listeners and, in a wider discussion, to generate sustainable income for musicians (Chartmetric 2018, Mulligan 2019 in Griffiths 2019, Music Ally 2019). We develop the idea from cultural and economic scholars that intermediation results in ‘attachment’ on behalf of consumers (Callon et.al 2002, Smith Maguire & Matthews 2012) by formulating a definition of the term informed by insights from consumer psychology and applying this framework to a 115-question survey completed by listeners to Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ Playlist for a one-week period. The findings suggest that the playlist was able to generate close to no attachment for those considered poorly-involved new music consumers, and only minor to mid-levels of attachment for those participants considered heavily-involved new music consumers. We therefore propose that algorithmically curated playlists can influence low-cost audience attachment behaviours while their overall impact on the economic success of artists may be limited. This paper contributes towards academic debates concerning the role and impact of cultural intermediaries and lends early empirical support to discussions within the professional music industries and wider public policy (GOV 2020) concerning the uncertain ability of playlists to influence the artist-fan relationship. In addition, by developing a methodologically precise definition of ‘attachment’, it is hoped that the framework provided by this modest study can act as a guide for other researchers to explore the concept of intermediation and attachment with larger sample sizes on alternative playlist types and on other digital platforms.

Swedishness on Stage

2021-08-14T17:10:17+02:00

Globalization, stagflation and economic uncertainty challenged the Swedish welfare model during the 1980s, driving renegotiations of state-market relations domestically as well as re-conceptualizations of Sweden’s place in the world internationally. This article addresses how a key media event – the 1638–1988 New Sweden 350^th Anniversary of the New Sweden Colony in North America (New Sweden-88) – reflects these shifts. Drawing upon materials from the National Committee for New Sweden ’88 and various public-private Swedish-American foundations and initiatives as well as Swedish and US media reception, the paper argues that these renegotiations of Swedish self-identity in the late 1980s contributed in certain ways to prepare the intellectual ground for far-ranging reforms of the Swedish welfare model which followed during the globalized 1990s.

'New Gustavians'

2021-08-16T17:10:41+02:00

The early 1990s saw Sweden severely hit by financial crisis, electoral upheaval and a swift reorientation within political elites resulting in an application to join the European Union (EU). Focusing on the Swedish blockbuster exhibition project Le Soleil et l’Etoile du Nord (The Sun and the North Star) in Paris during spring 1994, this paper argues that the early 1990s represent a key transition period for the renegotiation of the relationship between business, politics and culture in Swedish foreign promotion and cultural diplomacy. In a wide-ranging campaign launched in France ahead of the EU membership, political communication, cultural heritage narratives, and export promotion were brought together in an ambitious national identity political project that showcased a new, liberal-conservative and inherently European Sweden.

1994 – a temporal and scalar exploration of a Norwegian climax

2021-08-10T17:15:03+02:00

This article explores ‘1994’ as a cultural-historical ‘moment’ in order to tease out the layered manifestation of ‘Norway’ in a globalizing world. With offset in the oral testimonies, news coverage, reports, analysis and memories of people experiencing and contextualizing the two events of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics and the Norwegian referendum on membership in the EU, the article pursues their meaning along several temporalities and on multiple spatial scales. The argument is that ‘1994’ marked a symbolic climax and watershed moment for Norwegian (cultural) patriotism and the dispersion of what ‘Norway’ meant in a national, Nordic, European and global context. But the climax’s meaning were fragmented across time and space, and the monolithic moment has increasingly come to be filled with silences, anxieties and frustrations. Indeed, the Norwegian climax of 1994 dissolved in commercialism, mediatized fragmentation, Europeanization and globalization. The recognition that neither the ‘uniqueness’ of the ‘best Olympic Winter Games ever’ nor the ideational and historical significance of the Norwegian ‘no’ was received as intended by the sender, makes their temporal manifestations in the national context all the more significant: The simultaneous resurrection and burying of these twin events of the 1994-climax can thus be understood as a significant catalyst of Norway’s cultural and political myopia through a period of hasty, tumultuous and increasingly troublesome globalization.

Pipe Dreams of the Nouveaux Riches

2021-08-13T17:10:11+02:00

World expos are occasions for the type of rhetorical display known as "epideictic," and as such, they provide glimpses into how a nation wants to be seen at a particular point in time. In this article, I probe into Norway’s pavilion at the 1992 expo in Seville, Spain, for answers to what Norway wanted to be in the early 1990s. I will argue that Norway’s pavilion, a “deconstructed structure” that centered on a somewhat ambiguous pipe, signals a country in the process of reinventing itself under the aegis of petroleum. More specifically, I suggest that Norway’s ’92 pavilion can be read as an early instantiation of rhetorical techniques that would later become key to Norway’s claim to being both a leading petroleum producer and an environmental frontrunner. The pavilion itself pulled off this balancing act in much the same way that politicians and others would later learn to handle it – by techniques of rhetorical association and dissociation (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969 [1958]). Having chosen “the cycle of water” as the overarching theme for the exhibition, the makers of the pavilion (the largest sponsor of which was the state oil company, Statoil) managed to make petroleum safe by renaming it “offshore” and by associating it, also in many other ways, with water. The pavilion’s deconstructive architecture can thus be understood as an early validation of the rhetorical practice of “putting together” and “taking apart” to make new things that serve the nation’s interests – in this case a “cycle of water” in which petroleum was a natural part. Although I posit only similarity, and not causality, the rhetorical techniques of Norway’s ’92 pavilion were in this way strikingly similar to what later became a stock argument, e.g. that Norway offers “the world’s cleanest petroleum” (see Ihlen 2007).

Stories of Siblinghood

2021-08-14T17:10:06+02:00

This article analyzes newspaper representations of Nordic neighboring countries at the 1994 winter Olympics. Held in Lillehammer, Norway, the games constituted an enormous sporting success for the Norwegians, while neighboring Finland and Sweden fared much worse, which led national media in all three countries to contemplate on the discrepancy. Focusing on the tension between national and macro-regional Nordic identities, this article argues that media neighbor-images did in fact not compromise the seemingly collision-bound norms of “national rivalry” and “Nordist friendship”. Instead, the two norms informed and enforced each other through the key concept of humor, which created a safe media space for an Olympic dramaturgy of “siblinghood” to play out in. The analysis complements previous research on Nordic identity through highlighting the importance of emotion, popular cultural narratives, and intra-national neighbor relations for the construction of Nordicness.

Future Fears

2021-06-30T11:40:06+02:00

This paper is based on ethnographic work in organization that form part of what we term the Future Industry - such as think tanks, consultancies and governmental bodies - involved in the charting, description and analysis of geopolitical future scenarios. That is to say, an industry explicitly aiming for organizing the future. This type of activity has for centuries generally been left to politics, executed foremost by governments and political parties. In later decades, however, the future industry has taken up on political parties in formulating and advocating options and suggestions for the future. In the paper we analyse the Future Industry, which we see as serving, feeding into, the emotional streams of contemporary politics and economics. We wish to describe the emotion work the industry undertakes in order to get the attention of its significant others. In the interest of selling beliefs of the future, we suggest that it draws on reason, in the format of science, making its customers sense the pros and cons of the particular future it puts forth. In so doing, it at times may attempt in shaping the future, but what it foremost does, is selling ideas of the future as a commodity. The paper argues that the mapping of global futures to a large extent involves the making of a ‘geopolitics of emotion’. In anticipatory activities, involving the voicing of ‘global problems’ and the presentation of ‘desirable futures’, the cultivation, articulation and management of fear, anxiety, and hope, as well as a reliance on rationality, reason, and evidence, are central components.

An Oil Company as a Force for Good? How Statoil put Norway’s Identity as a‘ Champion of Ideals’ to the Test

2021-08-17T17:10:47+02:00

This article explores how Norway’s quest for moral authority to be recognized as a “champion of ideals” came under strain in the 1990s when the Norwegian state’s oil company (Statoil) expanded its operations in- and outside Norwegian borders. While we know a lot about Scandinavia’s international activism after the end of the Cold War, we know less about Scandinavian business’ responses to this policy. Neither do we know much about business’ potential impact on this policy. The aim of this article is therefore to begin address this issue by examining Statoil’s response to some of Norway’s moral and ethical aspirations in the post-Cold War global arena. Particular attention is paid to the tension between Norway’s ambition to be an early mover for sustainable development and a human rights advocate, and Statoil’s approach to environmental problems and human rights violations. As such, the article explores the role of state-owned enterprises in profit-making and global expansion during a formative decade when economy became an increasingly important determinant of Norwegian foreign relations, and ethical and moral objectives with roots in earlier decades were revitalized through an unprecedented number of international initiatives.

Sweden, South Africa and the business of partnership in the 1990s

2021-08-13T17:09:51+02:00

This article examines the background and ambitions of the large-scale Swedish-South Africa Partnership Week that was rolled out across South Africa in November 1999. The Swedish delegation was spearheaded by Prime Minister Göran Persson and consisted of 800 Swedes; high-level ministers, diplomats, civil society representatives and business leaders. The analysis places particular emphasis on the involvement of Swedish multinationals and the central role played by the public relations agency Rikta Kommunikation. Its focus lies on the broader pedagogical function that the Week was intended to have, primarily from a Swedish point of view. I argue that the stated aim to forge an economic partnership between Sweden and South Africa as the logical extension of decades of historical political solidarity was a means of ensuring that citizens learned to understand the pressures and demands of the new era of globalisation. The foreseeable end of Swedish aid to South Africa was to be the dawn of self-sustaining economic relations; “business interests” – for so long derided by the anti-apartheid activists – were henceforth to lead the way. In light of this, I conclude by arguing that the official launch and marketing of a bilateral partnership in 1999 can be seen as part of a government-funded effort to adapt Swedish internationalism to a new era.

Men Can/Can Men Change?

2021-02-02T16:40:51+01:00

Surviving “Car-diac Arrest”

2021-07-17T11:10:14+02:00

The car dominates the imaginary of urban modernity. Such modernity links the car to living the good life, especially for the growing middle class. However, an environmentalist in my research laments that the unprecedented increase in car volume causes the “car-diac arrest” in our cities. A regime of congestion ensues as too many cars clog our cities’ major arteries. Such situation is a daily experience in Metro Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Although only a tiny minority of the Philippine population owns a car, the lives of millions of Filipinos are impacted by the collective loss of mobility. Through interviews with transport reform advocates and participant observation around Metro Manila, I found that the car has become the ultimate private solution to the public problem of the undesirability of cities. The car creates a one-dimensional world in urban mobility, characterised by its intolerance to other modes of transport. Furthermore, as more cars are added to Manila’s roads, state infrastructure projects and policies highly favour car-centric mobility. This is why walking becomes almost impossible, air pollution worsens, and road traffic crashes take many lives each year. But transport reform advocates are taking action for Metro Manila to survive its “car-diac arrest.” Through pushing for policy reforms, road-sharing initiatives, and partnerships with supportive allies in the government and other sectors of society (called “champions”), they enable the flourishing of alternatives. While they do not see themselves as “anti-car”, they campaign for mobility to prioritise moving people and not just cars. Their ongoing initiatives push for the realisation of “dignified commuting” through a safe, efficient and reliable public transport system and for active transport (i.e. walking and cycling) to thrive. Through the co-existence of these diverse modes of transport, they reimagine roads as spaces where many worlds can fit.

The Careers of New Chinese Professional Women

2021-08-15T04:20:45+02:00

This paper considers a specific cohort of new Chinese professional women born under the one-child policy in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It explores their perceptions and experiences of career in Australia through qualitative data collected from twenty-one professionals. This paper seeks to unpack the complexities of their career planning, pathways, and change, including their use of the WeChat platform to mediate their careers. I argue that new Chinese professional women's experience of career is ambivalent. They aspired to achieve some degree of 'freedom' through choosing to further their career in Australia; simultaneously, they attempted to build homeland connections and fulfil familial obligations as Dushengnv. As a result of constant negotiation, their career pathways were full of 'nonlinear' changes. WeChat works specifically as one important platform that structures the ambivalence experienced – it allows them to establish connections with family in China and the local ethnic community, but it may also limit their ability to develop networks in the Australian workplace; it offers opportunities for entrepreneurship, yet it complicates their social positions. The paper contributes to broader knowledge of new Chineseprofessional women's careers.

Hearts in Australia, Souls in Nepal

2021-07-03T00:08:04+02:00

This article focuses on the intergenerational nature of migrants’ aspirations and the emotions that attach to them. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2014) notion of “affective economies” that emphasises that emotions circulate and accumulate affective value, I show how aspirations attached to migration or the “mobile aspirations” (Robertson, Cheng, & Yeoh 2018) are affectively experienced by their family. While studies have explored aspirations for permanent residency (PR) in the West, as well as the pathways to PR, less is documented of how parents experience their children’s migration aspirations, including for PR abroad. This article addresses this particular gap. Taking the case of Nepali education migrants in Australia and their transnational families, I explore the parents’ emotions when their children aspire for PR overseas. I argue that migration aspirations create a different kind of intergenerational affective economy between parents and children. This article is based on a multi-sited ethnography among Nepali education migrants in Sydney, Australia and their families in Nepal.

Decolonising the Museum?

2021-06-14T11:31:45+02:00

As institutions that arose during the European age of imperial expansion to glorify and display the achievements of empire, museums have historically been deeply implicated in the colonial enterprise. However if we understand coloniality not as a residue of the age of imperialism, but rather an ongoing structural feature of global dynamics, the challenge faced by museums in decolonising their practice must be viewed as ongoing. This is the case not just in former centres of empire, but in settler-colonial nations such as Australia, where “the colonisers did not go home” (Moreton-Robinson 2015: 10). As a white, Western institution, a number of arguably intrinsic features of the museum represent a significant challenge to decolonisation, including the traditional museum practices and values evinced by the universal museum. Using a number of case studies, this paper considers the extent to which mainstream museums in Australia, Britain and Europe have been able to change their practices to become more consultative and inclusive of Black and Indigenous peoples. Not only this, it discusses approaches that extend beyond a politics of inclusion to ask whether museums have been prepared to hand over representational power, by giving control of exhibitions to Black and Indigenous communities. Given the challenges posed by traditional museum values and practices, such as the strong preference of the universal museum to maintain intact collections, this paper asks whether community museums and cultural centres located within Indigenous communities may represent viable alternative models. The role of the Uluru Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre in Australia’s Northern Territory is considered in this light, including whether Traditional Custodians are able to exert control over visitor interpretation offered by this jointly managed centre to ensure that contentious aspects of Australian history are included within the interpretation.

A Man in Crisis or Crisis of Men? Masculinity and Societal Challenge in the 1970s in Sweden

2021-02-04T16:34:18+01:00

‘Individual crisis’, as a psychological term, was introduced in a Swedish context in the late 1960s. In this article, ‘individual crisis’ is analysed as a concept in order to understand how masculinity and emotion came to matter in Sweden in the 1970s—not least to bring about gender equality in Swedish welfare society. With ‘individual crisis’ as the empirical starting point for pinpointing the way men were to create a new identity and how new psychological knowledge circulated in society, it is possible to analyse which masculinity ideals and norms existed at the time. The focus of this article is on self-help and debate books that drove the discussion in the 1970s.

Foodwork as the New Fathering?

2021-02-05T16:34:45+01:00

The aim of this paper is to explore the parallels of fathering and foodwork among men in Sweden. The research question is: can foodwork be seen as “the new fathering”? The paper outlines the narrative of fathers in Sweden and gender progressiveness, and discusses gendered foodwork in Sweden up until the mid-1990s. Subsequently, statistical evidence from Statistics Sweden’s three time-use studies is presented, complemented with evidence from quantitative studies about the gendered division of housework. Here, the data demonstrates change over time in men’s and women’s total housework, foodwork and childcare. Men are doing more and women less, although the absolute changes are greater among women who still do more. Such evidence is further discussed in relation to socio-demographics, household composition and paid work, pointing to the relevance of factors such as gender-egalitarian attitudes and having children. The quantitative section is then followed by an argumentation about cultural shifts in relation to qualitative studies on men’s domestic foodwork. In the discussion it is concluded that foodwork can indeed be seen as “the new fathering”. Not as a substitution for fathering or as something exclusive for fathers, but as an addition to the repertoire of cultural understandings and social expectations of a “modern” man in Sweden. However, the most substantial change is likely to be cultural—on the level of ideals—while statistics on behaviour mostly support slow and minor changes, with the overall social relation of men and women demonstrating significant stability.

Ashamed of One’s Sexism, Mourning One’s Friends

2021-02-09T12:47:27+01:00

One of the most important questions for feminist research on men and masculinity concerns how men can change and become more affected by feminism and less engaged in sexism. Here, men who identify as feminist, pro-feminist or anti-sexist have been considered to be of particular interest. This article contributes to the emerging research on men’s engagement with feminism by analysing contemporary writing about gender relations, inequality and masculinity, more specifically books about men published in Sweden, 2004-2015. Focusing on lived-experience descriptions, the analysis shows how a range of emotions are central to the processes where men encounter and are becoming affected by feminism. The emotions identified include happy ones such as relief, but a more prominent place is given to negative emotions such as alienation, shame, frustration, as well as loss and mourning. Drawing on Ahmed’s model of emotions as bound up with encounters with others, the article highlights how men’s engagement with feminism is embedded within interpersonal relations with others, particularly women partners, men friends, and children.

Walk the Talk

2021-02-04T16:33:57+01:00

This article explores two Swedish TV shows centred on close, emotional friendships between men, Våra vänners liv (2010) [Our friends’ lives] and Boys (2015), as examples of postfeminism with a Swedish twist, inspired by Swedish ideologies of gender equality. Explicitly referring to feminism and gender equality, both shows explore what can be considered progressive masculine positions, drawing on ideas about sincerity, authenticity, emotionality and insight in men as central but not easily attained. I discuss portrayals of men as well as their friendships and explore the meanings of race, class and sexuality in the shows.
Unlike many US and UK postfeminist representations of bumbling, ironically sexist anti-heroic men, efforts at reaching sincerity and authenticity characterize the protagonists of the shows. Similar to other postfeminist cultural representations, both shows portray political problems as individual ones or, alternatively, as issues that already have been dealt with. For instance, Boys portrays a posthomophobic and postracial Sweden where racism and homophobia are of the past, and both shows portray personal development in individual men aimed at becoming progressive as solutions to problems regarding gender justice.
Both shows explore masculine positions that are available and unavailable, comprehensible and incomprehensible in contemporary Sweden, said to be one of the most gender-equal countries of the world. New masculine positions and intimacies between men, incorporating and referring to feminist or gender equality discourses, may be imagined and made available in shows like Våra vänners liv and Boys. However, such references and their consequences must be critically scrutinized.

Young Feminist Men Finding their Way

2021-02-02T16:40:48+01:00

Men and feminism is a contentious topic. In theoretical discussions as well as in previous studies, men and feminism have been described as an oxymoron, that being a man and a feminist is a border land position and that it entails experiences of so-called gender vertigo or gender limbo. Still, there are men who identify themselves as feminists and engage in feminist settings, parties and organizations. In this article, I aim to explore how masculinity is constructed and shaped within feminism. The article is based on qualitative interviews with nine young feminist men in Sweden. Using Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology and the concepts of disorientation and reorientation, I analyse how the interviewees experience themselves as men and feminists and how they navigate within their feminist settings. The analysis illustrates that in contrast to previous research, the interviewees articulate an assuredness in their position as men and feminists. However, being a man and a feminist is still a somewhat disorienting position that promotes reflexive journeys through which the interviewees seek to elaborate a sensitive, perceptive and “softer” masculinity. Feminism can be seen as a way of doing masculinity, and the ways in which the interviewees (re)orient themselves in their feminist settings can be understood as processes of masculinity construction. These reorientations position the interviewees in the background of their feminist settings, where they carry out what I call political housekeeping and men-feminism. From this position, they also adopt a perspective of a theoretical as well as temporal distance and articulate themselves as actors in the history of feminism. Thus, the article highlights that feminist men can seek out a masculinity that is positioned in the background yet still experience themselves as subjects in the feminist struggle.

Some Die Young

2021-02-03T16:33:57+01:00

This is an ethnographic and an autoethnographic study based on qualitative interviews as well as memories and experiences of the author. It focuses on two men that were childhood friends of the author and who both died prematurely. Marcus died in November 2013 while he was under psychiatric care due to auditory hallucinations and anxiety. Noel died little over a year later, in January 2015, from an overdose of heroin. The aim of the article is to analyse the narratives of women and is concerned with understanding the loss of a son, a brother, or a former boyfriend or friend due to substance abuse or mental health problems. The empirical cases analysed in this text are women’s understandings of the deaths of Marcus and Noel – two young men who were close to them in different ways. Their narratives about the men, their memories, and their rationalisations for what happened to them are analysed. The analysis shows that when the women talk about, and try to explain, the male lives that led up to the death, a limited number of narratives are available. Narratives about absent and/or abusive fathers, narratives about mothers who fail in providing the expected care, and narratives about shortcomings in psychiatric services and community support are dominant in the analysed material. In relation to these available narratives, the story follows the making of a protest masculinity in which elements such as rock star dreams, violence, drug use, and talk of legalising drugs have a place. Together they form an overarching narrative about protest masculinity; i.e. ways to act in reaction to a perceived alienation or subordination by acting out in ways associated with masculinity.

Hesitation before the impact

2022-08-04T09:19:01+02:00

This study has had a twofold ambition; to probe into the life in the museums, and to try out some concepts in a cultural policy research setting. The article does this by analysing encounters between art and visiting audiences with the use of “acontextual” analytic concepts; event instead of experience, affect rather than emotion and a broad understanding of the concept atmosphere. Furthermore, the empirical material for the analysis consists primarily of parts and elements that often are discarded or excluded in examinations. The preliminary conclusions invite to further probing into the interface between visitors and art, between the imagined world of culture and actual concrete events in spaces and settings we tend think of as cultural.

Critical Future Studies and Age

2021-02-15T12:58:28+01:00

This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring management and control. This paper has two parts: the first considers the importance of the future to contemporary ageist stereotypes. The second seeks potential counter representations in speculative fiction. We argue that an age-aware CFS can allow us not only to imagine newfutures but also to reflect critically on the shape and consequences of contemporary modes of relations of power.

A vehicle for positive acculturation

2022-08-04T09:19:34+02:00

Cultural diversity in Hong Kong has increased dramatically following a series of reforms in population and immigration policies after the unification of Hong Kong in 1997. Since then, cultural clashes between Hong Kong locals and mainland Chinese people have become one of the major social issues in Hong Kong. While intercultural clashes between people from different countries have been widely researched, those between people from different regions of the same country are rarely studied. Homogenizing and overlooking intergroup cultural clashes contribute to misunderstandings toward different cultures and resolving these clashes through social policies and services. Cultural research indicates that stereotyped beliefs are transmitted intergenerationally. Policy responses seek to nurture a harmonized society where perceived differences are respected and understood, rather than merely acknowledged. This study adopts narrative inquiry to examine the dynamics of acculturation, social identity, and intergroup contact among local and migrant parents and to explore avenues for promoting positive acculturation amid diversity. We observed four parents from mainland China and three local Hong Kong parents with children aged 4–13 who attended two discussion sessions about parenting. The findings revealed that promoting positive acculturation via parenting education is effective in promoting psychological adaptation at the individual level and reducing intergroup stereotypes at a cultural level. Training parenting educators in facilitating positive acculturation policies and programs for both sides are discussed.

Transforming "Swedish Dads"

2024-10-08T13:19:18+02:00

In a globalized context, modern nation states use nation branding techniques to promote their position in the global social order. This article takes a cultural approach to a specific nation branding project, viewing it as a means through which the Swedish nation is ‘imagined’ in relation to idealized representations of Swedish fathers.

From 2016 to 2019, the Swedish state (via the Swedish Institute) circulated a photo exhibition entitled Swedish Dads to over 40 countries. Swedish Dads was originally an artistic project by a Swedish photographer but was adapted for international circulation by the Swedish Institute. This article aims to examine what the Swedish Institute communicated through their version of Swedish Dads, studied against the backdrop of the original project. Specifically, the article explores what this adapted version communicates about Swedish fathers, but also about the Swedish state and Sweden more broadly.

A multimodal discourse analysis was used to analyze the photographs and texts from both versions of Swedish Dads, as well as two key informant interviews. Empirical findings suggest that the adapted version of Swedish Dads was transformed by removing visual and textual allusions to the chaos, complications, and difficulties of family life. Instead, this version positioned Sweden as diverse, inclusive, and integrated country where the average – rather than the exceptional – Swedish father takes extended periods of parental leave.

The article concludes that these transformations resulted in a (re)imagining of Swedish fathers to include more cultural diversity. However, the adapted version was still relatively homogenous in terms of social class, with mostly middle-class fathers being included. In this way, the adapted version of Swedish Dads potentially reinforces the hegemony of middle-class parenting norms and middle-class notions of gender equality by positioning them as a universal ‘gold standard’ to which all (fathers and nations) should aspire.

Culture Unbound Vol. 12 Editorial

2020-11-10T12:26:33+01:00

No abstract available.

This Must Surely be the Way to Happiness!: Divergent “bite-size wisdoms” about Happiness in inspirational internet memes

2021-02-02T16:40:47+01:00

The present study explores the contents and functions of inspirational memes addressing happiness in two cultural contexts, Finnish and Italian. Inspirational memes are understood as a mode of present-day folk wisdom conveying advice that can be easily memorized, shared and applied in everyday life. The material consists of 709 memes collected from Instagram and Facebook in 2019 (N=353 in Finnish; N=356 in Italian). The theoretical background of the study draws from social representation theory. The analysis shows that the contents and functions of inspirational memes addressing happiness are similar in the Finnish and Italian contexts. Five common themes were identified: “the self”, “the others”, “the life goal”, “the here & now”, and “the pointless search”. Furthermore, the social representation of happiness within the material is organized around a fundamental dichotomy: on the one hand, happiness can be built, and detailed advice is dispensed on how this can be achieved; on the other hand, building happiness is represented as an unattainable goal, and supporting this view is the idea that happiness is found in the moment. The dichotomy implies a social representation that emphasizes internal factors of the individual and plays down the role of external circumstances in achieving happiness.

The Mystification of Digital Technology in Norwegian Policies on Archives, Libraries and Museums: Digitalization as Policy Imperative

2020-11-10T12:26:35+01:00

In this article, we investigate how digitalization has attained the role of policy imperative in the culture sector, and how the imperative is influencing contemporary policy discourses on archives, libraries and museums (ALM-organizations) in Norway. We have analyzed policy documents issued by state authorities within the Norwegian ALM-sector since the time around the turn of the century, and demonstrate through the analysis that one must take three types of cultural processes into consideration in order to understand how digitalization has attained the status as policy imperative. Each of the cultural processes amounts to a form of mystification. Firstly, one must understand that digitalization’s ascendancy into a policy imperative is in part a process of imitation, of other countries and societal sectors. Secondly, one must take into account the conceptual framing of the policy discourse, in particular in relation to the epochalist vision that structure the discourse. Thirdly, one must take into account the process of fetishism which is at work in this policy discourse. Combined, these processes lead to digitalization being perceived as a force which is external to social relations, dictating action on the part of actors working within the sector. As such, digitalization comes effectively to serve as an overarching policy imperative in the culture sector.

Living Precarious Lives? Time and Temporality in Visual Arts Careers

2020-11-10T12:26:35+01:00

Although precarity has always been a characteristic feature of artistic labour, many critics now claim it is becoming more widespread and engrained. However, while the idea of precarity offers a good descriptor of the conditions of artistic labour, it also has its limits. Firstly, it tends to gloss over social differences in the distribution of precariousness. And secondly, precarity tends to imply a universal condition of ‘temporal poverty’ where all social experience appears dominated by the frenetic demands of a speeded-up, unstable and fragmented social world. In this article, we show how these two omissions are interlinked and prevent a more nuanced understanding of time in artistic labour. Drawing from findings from empirical research with working visual artists in the Midlands of the UK, we propose three schematic ways of thinking about the organisation of time and temporality in routine artistic practice. We name these three temporal contexts ‘the artistic career’; ‘the time of making art’ and ‘the temporality of the work’. By researching how artists might be differently positioned in relation to time, we suggest, we not only obtain a more precise understanding of how professional artists’ lives are organised, managed and lived, but also a more distinct understanding of precarity itself.

Useful Creativity: Vernacular Reviewing on the Video-Sharing Platform Vimeo

2020-11-10T12:26:35+01:00

This article intends to cast light on the phenomenon of non-institutionalised or vernacular reviewing by studying the review videos published on the video-sharing platform Vimeo. The data were automatically retrieved by searching for videos provided with the hashtag #review. The majority of these review videos (N = 1,273) were related to the technical equipment of filming and produced by filmmakers and enthusiastic amateurs interested in camera equipment and digital filming quality. The analysis describes the forms of reviewing in these videos and attempts to place them in the conceptual framework of reviewing, which, as is suggested in the article, reaches beyond the professional reviews commissioned by legacy media. Central questions are the delivery of an opinion or judgement, the imagined audience and the establishment of authority. Vimeo reviewers are characterised as both “professional vernacular” and “amateur vernacular” reviewers, reflecting a two-direction approach to reviewing, the one from cultural production (produsage) and the other from cultural consumption (presumption). The findings call for more conceptual elaboration of vernacularity in cultural critique.

Black Hole Suns: Binarism and Gravity in Cultural Fields

2020-11-10T16:14:29+01:00

Sociologicial analyses of artistic practice have long drawn on theoretical traditions grounded in binaries and dualisms. Such analytical strategies, exemplified here by field theoretical approaches, center art objects and their movements in and across markets, where binaristic visions of art worlds do offer significant leverage. But when the analyst moves away from markets for art objects and looks to artistic practices the binaristic lens provides, at best, a blurred image with meaningful blind spots. This article suggests an alternative vision of artistic practice —one based on gravity rather than polarity—that captures the ways individuals and their actions make sense in a specific universe of meaning without forcing them into fundamentally competitive and economistic relationships. It leverages findings enabled by a unique sampling strategy in a four year study of visual artists in the United States to illuminate some limitations of binary theoretical frameworks, and outlines a generative alternative to dualism that promotes new analytical and theoretical directions for sociological analyses of artists and artistic practice. This alternative model provides new leverage on four persistent issues in analyses of artistic work: cultural change in occupational fields; actors’ attempts to manage overlapping but incommensurate forms of recognition, reputation, attention, and success; the persistent hegemony of markets for objects in both vernacular and sociological understandings of artistic practice; and questions of visibility and legitimacy central to understanding boundary formation and boundary work in creative fields. The gravitational metaphor promotes a distict set of strategies for the study of artistic work as well as other nontraditional occupations.

Response: Let This Be an Example: Three Remarks on a Thematic Cluster about Climate Change Exemplarity

2020-10-07T15:23:41+02:00

This thematic section of Culture Unbound brings together five articles which in very different ways invite us to reflect on the importance of examples in the discourse on climate change. At first glance, such an invitation might be surprising, if not puzzling. Anthropogenic climate change is something radically unprecedented, so it would seem counter-intuitive to approach it through the discussion of prior examples. Furthermore, the analytical vocabulary which is already mobilized in the title of the section (exemplarity) and the introduction (exemplification) may seem alien to most readers. Do these terms actually serve as precise conceptual tools in the analysis? Indeed, is there really something like an operative theory of examples? To my mind, the five articles gathered here are very successful in dispelling such an initial reticence. Each piece is rich and thought-provoking on its own terms. Moreover, taken together, these articles help us appreciate the extent to which the use of examples is an unexpected and promising index for mapping how climate change discourse navigates between effect and affect, between illustration and ideal, between facts and values, between science and politics. In so doing, this thematic section also provides tools for better grasping the power of examples as such, which should be of methodological interest for other fields of study.

In what follows, I will briefly comment on three aspects that I not only found particularly intriguing, but which are illuminated differently according to the shifting perspectives of the case studies in the articles. First, the surprising emphasis on the archive in certain articles; second, the position of exemplarity and exemplification between theory and practice; and third, the meaning of the deep desire for potent examples of climate change in the wider society, which will, in closing, bring me back to the title of my response.

Introduction: Narrating the City and Spaces of Contestation

2020-10-07T15:24:41+02:00

While nation states have a disputed status in a globalised world, cities are often regarded as sovereign and global actors. Along with de-nationalising processes of increased privatisation, supranational governing and networks of transnational corporations, city administrations have developed new capabilities of orientation and governing in a global context (Sassen 2006). Inequality, poverty and segregation are some of the pressing issues that city administrations are grappling with – issues of local challenge with global relevance and repercussions, and vice versa. We wonder, if city administrations also address cultural issues that traditionally were of national concern, as fostering and narrating a sense of identity and belonging? If so, we think this shift needs to be further inquired, as we know that narrating and uses of history are not innocent practices. Rather, these are activities which consciously and unconsciously can push developments and futures in specific directions (Sandercock 2003). Further, narrating and history-writing have a spatial dimension and a performative force which may manifest in the physical environment, making changes, or sustaining status quo (De Certeau 1988, Hayden 1997 and Massey 2005). A critical engagement in the making and use of history in urban space is needed to disclose power relations and constructions of categories, such as gender identities (Scott 2011), and to problematize bias perspectives on cultural heritage and an “authorised heritage discourse” (Smith 2006). Processes of narrating the city in urban development and regeneration are often processes where not only urban history, but also urban futures, are negotiated in a very concrete and physical sense.

Culture Unbound Vol. 11 Editorial

2020-10-07T16:01:17+02:00

No abstract available.

Introduction: Critical Explorations of Media Modernity in India

2020-10-07T15:27:14+02:00

No abstract available.

Revising Postsocialism

2021-04-16T13:48:16+02:00

This article reflects on the current explanatory value of concepts such as postsocialism and Eastern Europe by exploring how they are represented in contemporary art projects in Estonia. Through an overview of recent exhibitions in which I collaborated with local artists and curators, the research considers generational differences in relation to cultural discourses of the postsocialist experience. Methodologically, artists and curators were not simply my informants in the field, but makers of analytical knowledge themselves in their practice. Exhibitions were also approached as contact zones, whereby new cultural forms are simultaneously reflected and constructed. Critically, this inquiry gathers new ways of representing and conceptualising cultural changes in Estonia and novel perspectives of interpreting the relations to the Soviet past. The focus is put on art practice because of its capacity of bringing together global and local frames of reference simultaneously. The research also draws attention to the inbetweenness of the first post-Soviet generation (those born near the time of the breakup of the USSR); they are revising established cultural forms as well as historical representations through mixing practices, and therefore updating traditional ideas of identity and attachment to places.

The Unbound Brain - A Thematic Introduction

2020-10-07T15:28:19+02:00

No abstract available.

Culture Unbound Vol. 10 Editorial

2020-10-07T16:05:11+02:00

No abstract available.

Queer times and Chemical Weapons, Suspended in the Gotland Deep

2020-11-10T16:14:39+01:00

The video is also available at https://vimeo.com/220422987.

On Being Here

2020-11-10T16:14:39+01:00

This paper is a response to the social anthropologist’s frustration of not being there. It is, to make further use of your own words, an attempt to deal with my own chronic disciplinary identity crisis. It is a response written in recognition of your situation and in recognition of the symptoms that you so eloquently describe.

On not Being There

2020-11-10T16:14:40+01:00

This paper is an expression of the social anthropologist’s frustration with not being there, and an attempt to deal with my own chronic disciplinary identity crisis and my “it’s complicated” relationship with participant observation.

The Road Map to Brave New World: Cartography and Fordism from Gulf Oil to Google

2020-11-10T16:14:40+01:00

This paper explores the shifting practices in and between cartography and capitalism. It compares two road maps of the same territory created one-hundred years apart; a Gulf Oil map from 1915 and a Google Map from 2015. These representations of space serve as entry points into examining some of the larger transformations that have occurred within capitalism over the century. I am interested in how the classic world order of Fordism has been reconstituted by cybernetic capitalism. I argue that the world order has been intensified and reorganised on a more abstract level, with profound subjective and material consequences.

The Citizen Professional, Mediatization, and the creation of a Public Domain

2020-11-10T16:14:40+01:00

Situated within the transition experienced by our welfare states, citizens have become ever more involved in the re-use of derelict public housing stock throughout Europe. These citizens are tentatively to be called ‘citizen professionals’ in the urban realm, a term that serves as a sensitizing concept to explore the social worlds of their contributions to the public domain. Employing various types of media to communicate their progress and success, these urban actors seek to gain the trust of the neighborhood and governmental institutions to sustain their projects within a broader community. Just as the media influence and structure cultural domains and society as a whole, the social-cultural activities carried out by citizen professionals in the public domain are mediatized not only by the actors themselves, but also by municipal organizations, policy workers, and governmental institutions. Grounding mediatization as a socio-spatial concept within empirical practice, the article examines the practices of citizen professionals and describes how they endeavor to attain public acknowledgment by representing their projects as showcases within a public domain. The article builds on pilot interviews conducted in Rotterdam (NAC, Reading Room West) and Vienna (Paradocks) to expound on the projects as lived spaces between mediatized and physical environments. Positioning citizen professionals within contemporary developments in the urban field, the article then investigates the underlying values of the spatial interventions, as well as how governmental bodies relate to their practices. Seen through the lens of mediatization, the article provides insights into how citizen professionals employ their social imaginaries and mobilize their activities around their agenda regarding the creation of a public domain.

Publishing and Mediatization – A podcast from a Workshop in Norrköping June 2017 [With a written introduction by James Meese]

2020-11-10T16:14:41+01:00

No abstract available

Bellamy's Rage and Beer's Conscience: Towards a Pirate Methodology

2020-11-10T16:14:41+01:00

Over the last decade piracy has emerged as a growing field of research covering a wide range of different phenomena, from fashion counterfeits and media piracy, through to 17th century buccaneers and present-day pirates off the coast of Somalia. In many cases piracy can be a metaphor or an analytical perspective to understand conflicts and social change. This article relates this fascination with piracy as a practice and a metaphor to academia and asks what a pirate methodology of knowledge production could be: how, in other words, researchers and educators can be understood as ‘pirates’ to the corporate university. Drawing on the history of maritime piracy as well as on a discussion on contemporary pirate libraries that disrupt proprietary publishing, the article explores the possibility of a pirate methodology as a way of acting as a researcher and relating to existing norms of knowledge production. The methodology of piratical scholarship involves exploiting the grey zones and loopholes of contemporary academia. It is a tactical intervention that exploits short term opportunities that arise in the machinery of academia to the strategic end of turning a limiting structure into an enabling field of opportunities. We hope that such a concept of pirate methodologies may help us reflect on how sustainable and constructive approaches to knowledge production emerge in the context of a critique of the corporate university.

Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical Executions of Code

2020-11-10T16:14:41+01:00

In this article we explore various constraints and potentials of academic publishing in the digital age. Advancement of digital platforms and their expansive reach amplify the underlying tensions of institutional and scholarly change. A key affordance of these platforms is that of speed: rapidly distributing the outputs of a precaritised profession and responding to pressures to publish as well as the profit motive of publishers. On the one hand, these systems make possible alternative modes of contributory content and peer-production for supporting the commons. On the other, they turn all too readily into privatising devices for contracting labour and profit in the corporate sector and, within the academy, for accentuating subtle power effects. Drawing upon platform studies and integrating insights from political philosophy and property law, our article seeks to problematise neat binaries of possession and dispossession associated with the sector. We examine in particular how co-existing and emergent socio-technical circuits—what we term digital binds—modulate the political economy of academic publishing on a number of scales. These entangled binds constrain but also indicate mechanisms for opening up new possibilities. We introduce three ethical executions of code towards this end: dissuading, detouring, and disrupting. Together, these mechanisms show how mutually beneficial boundaries can be drawn for designing otherwise: by blocking dominant systems and bargaining for fairer practices; exploring sanctioned and unsanctioned systems which offer more diverse publishing pathways; and, disrupting systemic processes and profits towards more inclusive and equitable conditions.

The University as a 'Giant Newsroom': The Uses of Academic Knowledge Revisited

2020-11-10T16:14:42+01:00

Almost a decade ago I published an article (with Dr Kylie Brass) based on Australian Research Council-funded research1 about criticisms in the media and public sphere of ‘ivory tower’ academe, and how, under pressures of ‘relevance’, ‘accountability’, and ‘brand identity’, academic knowledge was being progressively and institutionally encouraged to engage with everyday media discourse. In this and other articles on universities and public communication policies, we explored the ways in which the products of university-based academic labour were being increasingly placed in the service of wider public discourse, with some perils both for that knowledge and those who generate it. In the ensuing years, these pressures have intensified in tandem with the marketization of higher education and the often-remarked hegemony of neoliberal managerialism. The decline of the mainstream press (certainly in paper form) and the rise of user-generated, social and mobile media have produced a more intimate and volatile relationship between universities and the media/public sphere. In addressing the subject of publishing and mediatization, it is timely to re-assess the uses and trajectories of academic knowledge, the technologies that convey it, and the implications for its producers.

Introduction: Mobility, Mediatization and New Methods of Knowledge Production

2020-11-10T16:14:42+01:00

No abstract available.

Studying Ad Targeting with Digital Methods: The Case of Spotify

2020-10-07T15:29:18+02:00

Abstract not available.

Introduction: Theorizing Copies

2020-10-07T15:29:32+02:00

No abstract available.

Culture Unbound Editorial Vol. 9

2021-06-23T17:03:30+02:00

No abstract available.

Reframing Cultural Diplomacy: The Instrumentalization of Culture under the Soft Power Theory

2020-11-10T16:14:48+01:00

Although cultural diplomacy has grown in importance in recent years, there is no consensus on its definition. Cultural diplomacy is commonly framed in terms of soft power: the capacity of persuasion and attraction that allows the state to construct hegemony without using coercive methods. In this article, I offer a critical analysis of this theory’s limitations. To shed light on this situation, I provide an historical analysis of cultural diplomacy. Based on this historical analysis and on an extensive desk research, I examine the dominant methodological and conceptual articulation of soft power in cultural diplomacy literature to clarify how the logical framework of soft power favors a specific and restrained conception of these policies, narrowing its understanding and legitimating its economic and political instrumentalization.

Street Protests and Affects on YouTube Investigating DIY Videos of Violent Street Protests as an Archive of Affect and Event Desire

2020-11-10T16:14:49+01:00

This article argues that YouTube, as a platform for sharing DIY videos, is an useful resource for understanding the role of affective processes before, during and after protest events. As a case study the article investigates the documentation on YouTube of two antagonistic demonstrations in Aarhus, Denmark, on 31 March 2012. We argue that the collected material, consisting of 71 YouTube videos, can be analysed to reveal a wish or will to experience the demonstrations affectively through three forms of DIY video production: 1) a form where the videos affectively charge the demonstrations before their actualisation; 2) a form where the affective potential of witnessing political violence is actively engaged, sought out, and enjoyed by the video producers during the event; and 3) a form where the affective intensity of the demonstrations is confirmed and prolonged after-the-fact, and the excessive nature of future confrontations implicitly ‘pre-charged’. The videos as such are not only approached as ideological mobilization propaganda or as documentation of political events, but also as an archive capable of revealing the presence and dynamics of the affective dimension of street protest events.

Cultural products in flux: an introduction

2020-11-10T16:14:48+01:00

Abstract not available.

Longing for the Past: An Analysis of Discursive Formations in the Greta Thunberg Message

2021-02-02T16:40:51+01:00

This article studies discursive formations of climate change in texts by the contemporary climate activist movement’s most famous character, Greta Thunberg. This study critically analyses the Greta Thunberg message and discusses the kind of worlds her message evokes. In doing so, the author discusses what is being included in and omitted from contemporary public understandings of climate change. Three themes are identified and analysed in the Greta Thunberg message: science as truth; for the sake of the human child; and the apocalyptic futures and the evocation of the past. It is argued that the Greta Thunberg message makes sense because of how it resonates with a worldview related to the promises of modernity. Furthermore, one way of understanding the popularity of Thunberg’s message is that it evokes dreams of a world that once was. It is suggested that the Greta Thunberg message evokes longing for the past, rather than the possibility of existing in an already changing climate.

Cinema and the prefigurative

2022-05-17T19:24:55+02:00

Prefiguration is a term borrowed from political science, describing the experimentation with alternative ways of living, doing and being together in the present as a form of activism. In this article I will argue that cinema can be a powerful tool that can be used to support prefigurative objectives. Arguably, the point of origin of this methodology is Man with a Movie Camera (??????? ? K???????????? 1929) by Dziga Vertov. Structurally this film can be described as 'database driven' and as prescient toward the digital age in which databases and hypertexts are common organising principles affecting daily life experiences. But more importantly, the film presages a different, more harmonious society in a style that simultaneously uses documentary, experimental and poetic elements. The purpose of this enquiry is to establish whether subsequent crowd-sourced and community driven documentaries can be seen as equally successful examples of prefiguration.

Police, clans and cash in Somalia

2021-02-15T13:01:03+01:00

This article explores the ways in which emergent police forces in conflict-affected Southern societies are shaped by cultural practices operating through social phenomena. It uses the record of the prototypical police forces found in the Somali cities of Kismayo and Baidoa, 2014-2017, to explore the ways in which culture, power relations and local realities — in this case, clan-based calculations, Somali and international politics, and physical insecurity — influence police development. It draws on the cities' experience of a donor-funded 'basic policing' programme to identify the motivating forces shaping police evolution in a society familiar with many aspects of conventional policing operations and vocabulary but positioned at the opposite end of the technical and institutional spectrum to those shaping police studies' canonical literature.

Rumours as Anticipatory Knowledge in a Future Petro-State

2021-06-21T10:47:43+02:00

Building on ethnographic research in Uganda, this paper discusses the mundane practice of rumour mongering and gossiping as anticipatory practices. Crude oil discovery in Uganda brought a small oil boom to the region endowed with the natural resource including some infrastructure development and the presence of foreign oil exploration and construction companies. With these companies came (young) men working for them or aspiring to get employed. However, as the development of the oil remained in a phase not-yet-ness, a temporal space opened for rumours about the oil and anyone involved with it to flourish in the oil region. Especially, since information on the (national) development of the oil project was scarce. The rumours used familiar tropes such as gender stereotypes or witchcraft to relate to the presence of foreign or at least non-local casual workers. Ugandans living in the oil region wondered what negative repercussions the boom might have for them and viewed the strangers with suspicion. During my fieldwork, I encountered rumours of wife-snatching, sexual harassment and even human sacrifice. This paper argues that these rumours can be understood as risks narratives or the sharing of anticipatory knowledge. The rumours were not only reflections of the past but were told in anticipation of the dark side of the future.

Images of the Future

2021-04-24T02:26:43+02:00

This article analyzes the conceptions of anticipation and invention in the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Gilbert Simondon. In doing so, I analyze the questions how futures are anticipated and what role technologies play in the anticipation and invention of the future. Technologies are increasingly used to predict, prescribe and control behavior. These technologies are based upon the ontological belief that reality is computable and predictable. With Bergson and Simondon, I aim to show that this ontology does not take the temporal structure and the anticipatory faculty of living beings into account. Anticipation is an essential activity of a living being in its milieu. In order to survive, living beings structure their milieu to make their future actions reliable. Images are central to this process. They are constantly evoked by and with practices. They are transformed and used to anticipate and imagine the future. Yet, these images are affectively charged and can be an expression of what Bergson calls “myth-making function” (fonction fabulatrice). While Bergson describes this function as a positive force, one can ask whether this force turns against itself in face of our contemporary climate crisis, digital technologies and the crisis of open democracies. An alternative is to understand and to construct technical objects as essentially open in analogy to the living being. This implies a conception of the human not as a fixed conception, but as an “open adventure” (Simondon 2016: 121)that constantly re-invents itself in relation with nature and technology.

Mobile Applications to Secure Tenure in Rural Tanzania

2021-02-25T12:59:28+01:00

In light of climate change, projected population growth, increasing conflicts over land and the question of food security, the Tanzanian government takes the respective visions of environmental futures as a cause and justification for particular measures in the here and now. One such modality through which agricultural futures in the Kilombero Valley are currently made present and decided upon is the use of the Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST). Through the use of this application, on the one hand, a more capital-friendly land legislation should be developed. On the other hand, by issuing Certificates of Customary Rights of Occupancy (CCRO), which are supposed to offer a certain security to current land users, expected conflicts are sought to be reduced and prevented. Thus, by examining the use of MAST and the particular ways in which it renders possible futures actionable, we contribute to ongoing research that aims to illustrate how “humans [...] do not own and shape ‘their’ future alone” (Granjou et al. 2017: 8). While such technologies are generally developed and employed to increase certainty, following the implementation and effects of MAST, in particular, we will show how the specific materiality of this mobile application not only allows to secure tenure, but at the same time creates new insecurities that contribute to the complex emergence of environmental futures in this part of rural Tanzania.

Introduction: Exemplifying Climate Change

2020-10-07T15:58:35+02:00

No abstract available.

Performative Memory

2021-04-16T13:43:22+02:00

Though scholars in memory studies often deal with different aspects of cultural memory, it is rare to find any systematic framework to which memory adheres to and which would explain the emergence and maintenance of memories in general. In this article, I use the concepts of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, namely interpellation, subject constitution, repetition, sedimentation, citationality and subversion, to show how she could provide a procedural account of memory formation. To illustrate how this might work, I look at how Turkey has chosen to commemorate the failed coup of July 2016 by interpreting some examples of such memory through Butler’s theories. In doing so, I show that Butler, rather than introducing new concepts to the field, offers a systematic framework that can relate scholars to one another by transposing their concepts onto Butler’s theory.

“I try to tell myself that it’s a machine, but it doesn’t help”

2021-04-26T15:29:56+02:00

The Swedish sci-fi drama TV series Real Humans (original title in Swedish: Äkta människor) can be viewed as a playground for trying out imagined possible future human-robot relationships that can tell us something regarding ideas about possible futures for being human. In the paper, representations of ttranshumansexual relationships are explored, specifically how these representations reproduce and possibly challenge notions of being human. Three articulations of transhumansexual relationships are identified: authenticity, legal subjectivity, and failure of heterosexuality. The negotiations of being human take place in three different discourses – a heteronormative and humanonormative discourse on gender and sexuality, a biological discourse, and a citizenship discourse. Transhumansexuals and hubots in transhumansexual relationships are humanized – anthropomorphized – and made more intelligible as human(-like) beings. However, the quest to make transhumansexual relationships intelligible as something human tends to (hetero- and humano-)normalize the queer potential of transhumansexual relationships

Notes on the Location of Happiness

2021-02-15T13:04:19+01:00

This article explores the world making capabilities of travel writing (Goodman 1978; Youngs 2013). The premise is that literary products are key elements in the configuration of the world itself and that specifically authors of travel accounts mediate the world to their readership at home (Archetti 1994).

By highlighting three different examples of travel writing, the article discusses the persistent notion of the tropical island as an actually existing paradise on earth. More specifically, the discussion focus around the notion that happiness exists in places to which one can travel to.

The examples at hand are two eighteenth century travel logs one French and one English; Louise-Antoine de Bougainville’s from 1772 and William Bligh’s from 1792, while the third and final example is a contemporary Swedish travel piece written by Anders Mathlein and first published in 2001.

Thrift Television: Narratives of Enduring, Saving, and Living Well. A Thematic Introduction

2020-10-10T15:58:56+02:00

Concepts of thrift and dwelling are central to how societies live together. Thrift refers to a complex and morally-loaded set of economic practices that people engage with out of necessity, choice, or both. Whilst home-making or dwelling refers to social integration and self-representation. The ways in which social realms of thrift and dwelling relate to each other are historically and culturally specific, and media representations are an important intersection for reflecting and putting forward specific ‘imaginaries’ of thrift and dwelling. In this special issue, depictions of thrift in popular television are treated inclusively and span makeover reality TV, comedy-drama and documentaries, and target different national and international audiences. Contributions by researchers from the US, France, Germany and Australia examine how ‘appropriate’ ways of dwelling, involving thrift are negotiated in situations marked by material scarcity, precarity and aspirational lifestyles. These include: negotiating the harsh realities of housing in expensive cities such as New York in Insecure or Broad City (Perkins; Kanai & Dobson), make-over through decluttering and controlling debt in Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (Ouellette); Life or Debt; Raus aus den Schulden (Meyer), and are linked to specific historical and social circumstances in different national contexts. Suburban areas of post-war France are represented in 1967-1981 TV documentaries (Overney); gentrified British rural areas in Midsomer Murders (Zahlmann) and post-recessional New York City after the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in Broad City. Drawing on recent thrift scholarship and analyses of televised thrift in this special issue, we demonstrate how thrift and dwelling are articulated largely as a middle-class concern and a disciplining discourse and apparatus. Positive incidents of thrift are also revealed for example, in the comedy form and female voice in French post-war women’s documentaries. In other discussions there is much scepticism over the possibilities for protagonists to self-fashion themselves within the system of television series. This raises the question of whether alternative forms of imagining subjectivities and social relations in neo-liberal economies of dwelling can occur in entertainment television, or whether thrift imagined as what we call ‘televised endurance’ merely serves to reproduce the status quo as an irreversible condition.

Culture-led urban regeneration and local expectations of urban void renewal in eastern Lisbon

2022-08-04T09:19:37+02:00

This article will analyze the ongoing culture-led regeneration processes of abandoned, informal and vacant areas, often considered by residents, local associations, and public officials to be urban voids. Our territorial framework is in Marvila, a semi-peripheral riverside area in Lisbon, strongly affected by informal activities, high levels of youth unemployment, an elderly population, and the existence of urban spaces with non-planned uses, seen as undesirable by the local ecosystem of stakeholders and particularly by residents.

Our analysis will be centered around a social and spatial understanding of Lisbon’s municipal urban policy (funded by the 3.5.6. program of the European Union on Cultural Heritage), which has supported the reoccupation of some these so-called urban voids. We will focus on the use of a Pilot Project methodology, its exploratory and prototype nature, the local bureaucratic planning system, and the soft Planning techniques implemented as new ways of addressing long-term decayed and informal urban spaces.

We will examine the regeneration results of two EU-H2020 funded pilot projects, under the ROCK project, which supports this research. The first pilot project “Loja Com Vida” (“store with life” or “store invites”), supports the municipal objective of creating a new urban centrality in Marvila, encouraging a diversification of its users, operationalizing the reuse of municipal ground floor spaces. The second project, “Jardim para Todos” (‘Garden for all’), corroborates a municipal urban policy on environmental sustainability goals, promoting, with the help of local agents, a learning and sharing process centered around green knowledge and the creation of a future agriculture hub and leisure area.

The acknowledgment of these pilot project results will constitute an interesting case study for other urban areas with similar conditions, incorporating a better understanding of participative urban regeneration processes, outside the traditional and formal planning perspectives and achievements.

No Longer Lost on the Human Highway

2021-02-15T13:05:45+01:00

In recent years, Canadian/US singer, songwriter, and author Neil Young’s production shows increased signs of environmental awareness, manifested in his promotion of biofuels, critique of genetic manipulation, biotechnology, and ecocide, as well as in his warm attitude to non-human animals. These issues are dealt with in detail in his recent memoir Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars (2015), as well as on his recently released albums such as The Monsanto Years (2015) and Earth (2016). While this interest in the natural world could be seen as a simple expression of a 1960s countercultural hippie world view, this essay will propose a different reading of the meaning of animals and the non-human in Young’s Special Deluxe by placing it in the context of human–animal studies and its critique of anthropocentrism. By reading the memoir’s representations of non-human animals in tandem with the emphatic role of the environment on Young’s recent albums, this essay argues that Young’s recent work reveals an increased concern for relationality and non-humans in human life and thus problematizes modernity’s insistence on anthropocentrism and human mastery over nature. Based on the critique of modernity and its anthropocentric hierarchies presented by human–animal studies scholarship (Haraway 2008; Armstrong 2008; Marvin and McHugh 2014), it is suggested that Young’s work foregrounds an explicit concern with the non-human world through its increasing focus on the relationality of the human and the non-human, and their mutual interdependence. The importance of non-human others, especially dogs, to the memoir’s narrator is addressed in detail, and the close transspecies relationship seen as an example of the emotional significance of non-human others in everyday life.

Keywords: Neil Young, Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, environmentalism, human–animal studies, anthropocentricism

Fessenheim—Nuclear Power Plant for Peace

2021-02-09T09:29:59+01:00

This paper explores the construction of a nuclear power facility at Fessenheim, Alsace, and its role in the remaking of French-German post-war relations and the consolidation of the post-war peacebuilding process. The siting and materiality of nuclear energy technology, I argue, was a key component of the top-down peace-building strategy that guided reconciliation processes at the national and regional levels. This study analyses archival documents, newspapers articles, interviews with Alsatian antinuclear activists and amateur films in order to reconstruct how the site for a joint nuclear power plant at Fessenheim was chosen and how it affected cross-border interactions. Although the planning of a French-German nuclear facility at Fessenheim embodied the appeasement that characterised post-war relations at a governmental level between the two nations, its construction had limited impact on the regional reconciliation processes. However, the site of the nuclear plant became central for reconciliation in ways that industry planners did not foresee: opposition to the nuclearization of the Upper Rhine Valley became the driving force for the cross-border reconciliation process. This grassroots mobilisation against the presence of nuclear technology formed the nexus for transcending the legacy of World War II through cooperation toward a common, anti-nuclear future.

Landsacpes of Thrift and Dwelling: Dwelling and Sociality in Midsomer Murders

2020-10-11T15:58:59+02:00

In its long history of airing the popular crime series Midsomer Murders does not only present various murder cases but also a glimpse into the opinions on gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity. These opinions mirror the attitude of the producers as well as the anticipated expectations of the audience. The dicussion of these aspects are inseperately linked to the categories of thrift and dwelling and it seems that the ways of living in Midsomer County are always overwriting the questions of guilt, atonement and punishment. Furthermore the episodes of the series offer strategies to an aesthetic evaluation of sociality in an fictional countryside. Here murders become not only a question of morality and crime but show the depth of human nature as a hidden reality underneath the scenery of rural purity.

Spark Joy? Compulsory Happiness and the Feminist Politics of Decluttering

2021-02-08T15:15:31+01:00

This essay analyzes the Marie Kondo brand as a set of neoliberal techniques for managing cultural anxieties around over-consumption, clutter and the family. Drawing from critical discussions of consumer culture and waste, as well as feminist scholarship on compulsory happiness and women’s labor in the home, it argues that Marie Kondo’s “joyful” approach to “tidying up” presents pared-down, curated consumption as a lifestyle choice that depends on women’s work, even as it promises to mitigate the stresses of daily life and facilitate greater well-being.

Touchstones for Sustainable Development: Indigenous Peoples and the Anthropology of Sustainability in Our Common Future

2020-10-10T15:59:18+02:00

The Anthropocene is regularly invoked as an occasion for the rethinking of the Anthropos, for instance through a reexamination of human origin stories. This article examines one such anthropological origin story; the construction of an exemplary and sustainable humanity based upon notions of “indigenous cultures” in Our Common Future in the context of D. Chakrabarty’s call for a history of the human that merges the biological and cultural archives of humanity. The UN report, Our Common Future, first formulated “sustainable development” as a global policy. Through a close reading of the report, the article demonstrates that a combined ecological and anthropological exemplarity is associated with “indigenous and tribal peoples”, who are also construed as living examples of sustainable living for the global society, and links to humanity’s past. Furthermore, the article aims to show that particular conceptions of “culture” and “ecological” wholes enables a translation between different scales, between local and “bounded” indigenous cultures and earth as the bounded habitat of humanity. The fusion of the concepts of “development” and “sustainability” in Our Common Future lies behind present UN concerns with sustainable development goals in current international policy. Hence, an inquiry into the anthropological and cultural historical assumptions of the report is vital. Questions of natural and cultural time have come to dominate discussions of the Anthropocene. The article also reconnects the global scale with a very literal struggle over space inside the Brazilian nation state, through reading the comment on the report from Ailton Krenak. Applying what we could call a language of survival, Krenak relates the global eco-political scale of OCF with a very concrete struggle over territory inside the political space of the Brazilian nation state.

Women and Money Management: Problematising Working-class Subjectivities in French Television Programmes During and after the Post-war Boom

2020-10-07T15:59:15+02:00

This article looks at French television during and after the post-war period to explore the relationships that programmes systematically established between home-making in social housing, housekeeping money management and women. It sheds light on the gendered dimensions of thrift and dwelling. French 1960’s Television reflected a range of urban transformations characteristic of the period: the development of high-rise estates, social housing, shopping centers. How should people inhabit these new environnements, new structures of dwelling and new services in order to keep up with regular household expenses such as paying rent, utility bills, buying food or covering child rearing costs? Since the 19th century, women had generally managed household budgets as part of the everyday domestic cultures. These heavy financial responsibilities were relayed by televised documentaries prompting questions about the types of in/appropriate activities and attitudes, knowledges and expertises shown on mainstream TV at the time. Television was constantly problematizing working-class subjectivities through women’s voice. On the one hand, television reports showed women always counting the money and thrifting in order to control the household comsumption and to avoid debts. In the documentaries I analyse, the women describe in detail their economic problems and moral economies they are conditioned to operate within. On the other hand, TV programmes were replete with the specialist home economics tips that were meant to spread normative representations of dwelling in order to educate housewives. Women’s activities are tied to the welfare state which is revealed in all its complexity, controlling with one hand the rationalisation of domestic budgets and practices, and, with the other, improving living conditions and protecting individuals against vulnerabilities.

Thrift, Imperfection and Popular Feminist Apartment Plot on Television

2020-10-11T15:59:09+02:00

This paper will explore the ways in which thrift operates as a signifier of a specific type of lprecarity and imperfection in young women’s lives in several popular series associated with the current ‘golden age’ of women’s television production. The twenty-something women of series including Girls, Insecure, Broad City, Fleabag, Can’t Cope Won’t Cope and Search Party, have all been raised in comfortable middle-class homes and are now living independently in major global, expensive cities. The precarity of the ways in which they dwell, at both a practical and figurative level, is a symptom of what has come to be understood as ‘adulting’—where relatively privileged millennials struggle with the rituals and realities of adult life in a starkly neoliberal society. Through a focus on the narrative device of the apartment plot, this paper will examine how the concept of thrift, with its central spectrum of necessity and choice, can illuminate both the everyday practices and the overarching logic of the adulting phenomenon as represented in this wave of television production. By attending to a variety of contemporary series by, for and about women, it will also argue for the ways in which both thrift and adulting can be understood as specifically gendered behaviours.

Making do on not much: High Energy Striving, Femininity and Friendship in Broad City

2020-10-07T15:24:06+02:00

In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis (“GFC”), feminist media scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered calls in Western media culture to remake subjectivity in line with imperatives of thrift required in conditions of austerity. In the shared symbolic environments that “gender the recession” (Negra & Tasker, 2014), media ranging from news, reality television, and film have placed further, intensified demands on women’s domestic, affective, paid and unpaid labour, requiring attitudinal orientations combining future-oriented enthusiasm, positivity, entrepreneurialism, a continued faith in (budget-conscious) consumption and investment in the home and the family. This article considers the US comedy Broad City as an articulation of how young women are critically grappling with such shifts in gendered social relations and labour markets in the cosmopolitan setting of New York City. We suggest, in the depiction of the central female friendship between Abbi Abrams (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer) in Broad City, the show foregrounds the necessity of young women’s “high energy striving” but produces an alternative configuration of the normative relation between femininity and labour. In the show, contra the “retreatism” Negra and Tasker document idealising women’s work in the home as a means of combatting an austere future, the thrifty fun, care, support, and love Abbi and Ilana strive to create together spills across public spaces, spanning the streets of the city, outdoors in parks and on stoops. Abbi and Ilana are continually depicted labouring in some way, though such labour does not generally result in financial or career-based reward, but rather, produces psychic and emotional sustenance for the women’s friendship and a means of affectively investing in each other. Thus, in Broad City’s acknowledgement of the high energy striving required to survive, the show critically questions the relation of such feminine striving to the promise of career, financial success, and the idealised direction of such striving towards the domestic and hetero-patriarchal family. Instead, the show emphasises the material importance of such striving in relation to the bonds of women’s friendship in conditions of material and social hardship, suggesting a different orientation to women’s work and its place in recessional culture.

The Moral Economy of Thrift: The Production of the Indebted Self in the Reality Series Getting out of Debt and Life or Debt

2020-10-12T15:58:32+02:00

In this article, the intersection of the economic and social dimensions of thrift is analysed under the special condition of debt. The debt context serves as a focal glass exposing agents, their social practices and strategies of accumulation capitals with regard to appropriate spending. In order to capture the many layers of thrift, the concept of moral economies is applied. This concept tries to reconcile two seemingly divergent dimensions of human behaviour which can be described as individualistic, calculating and serving a self-interest (economy) on the one hand and community-oriented and benefitting a common good (morality) on the other hand. Starting out with an overview over studies on moral economies in historical and social science since the early 1970s, I will explain the heuristic use of the concept for the case of debts research and apply it to representations of thrift as visualised and popularised in the reality TV shows Raus aus den Schulden (Getting Out of Debt) and Life or Debt. Here, the images of homes are clues for the cultural productions of appropriateness on TV: What are suitable ways of living when in debt? What are adequate scenes of dwelling and narratives of dealing with debts and which normative structures regulate those stories, the perception of the self and potential social exclusion? By examining the TV show as a strong voice in the debt discourse, thrift turns out to be a cornerstone in the internal and external regimes of governing debt in the micropolitics of TV.

Risk Perception through Exemplarity: Hurricanes as Climate Change Examples and Counterexamples in Norwegian News Media

2020-10-13T15:58:30+02:00

This article explores how hurricanes are used in news media to exemplify the consequences of climate change. This is done by a close reading of Norwegian newspaper articles on the hurricanes Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), Harvey and Irma (both 2017). The geographical distance between the disaster areas and the media audience enables an exploration of how these weather events are made meaningful across long distances, as global concerns. The article shows how these hurricanes are textualized and turned into signs in nature that are pointing towards a climate-changed future, and how they work as modelling examples for imagining the possible disastrous state of such a future. It further argues that reasoning with hurricane examples is a certain kind of risk perception involving a temporal and spatial entwining of the future and the present, that represents a notion of cultural catastrophization by calling upon a fear of an uncontrollable disastrous future. The uses of the hurricane example in news media imply an epistemological shift from probability to exemplarity. This shift provides an argumentative space for climate change skeptics to perform counterarguments that juggle between probability and exemplarity. The article explores how this is done, and how statistics and mentioning of other hurricanes are used to argue that hurricanes Sandy, Harvey and Irma were not extraordinary events in terms of intensity, and thus that they cannot possibly be fueled by climate change. The climate change skeptics’ attempts to claim these hurricanes to be local and normal phenomena, independent of human action, may be regarded as attempts to de-catastrophize contemporary society.

History, Exemplarity and Improvements: 18th Century Ideas about Man-Made Climate Change

2020-10-14T15:58:39+02:00

Can grain crops be increased? The issue was heatedly debated in 18th century Denmark-Norway, both for patriotic and economic reasons. The historian Gerhard Schøning (1722–80) answered affirmatively. Chopping down much of the forests that covered Norway would change the climate radically for the better. As a consequence of the warmer weather, the fertility of the soil would improve. Crops would increase, and new and even more delicate types of plants could be introduced. Schøning’s argument was nearly entirely built on examples from Greek and Roman history, cited to demonstrate that since classical times, this kind of changes had already taken place in other parts of Europe.

Climate interested a number of 18th century writers. It was not only a part of geotheory, but also included in theories about the history of society, law and culture as well as in medical thought. Ideas about a human-made climate change similar to Schøning’s can be found in texts by e.g. Hume and Buffon.

The argument relied on a quantity of examples, as well as on the uncontested exemplarity of classical literature itself. Schøning’s examples represent both series and ideals. The cases he cites are numerous (serial) instantiations of the same general mechanism: The effect of human interventions in nature. Yet at the same time they are models to follow, even if it will take some effort. Norway will never be as warm and fertile as southern countries, but Schøning exhorts his compatriots to “take courage and start!” History consisted of examples to learn from and models to follow.

Making Invisible Changes Visible: Animal Examples and the Communication of Biodiversity Loss

2020-10-10T16:00:10+02:00

Communicating biodiversity loss and other environmental threats is never only about relating natural science data. How different environmental discourses are presented, how they intertwine, and what concepts of nature are implied, are important parts of environmental communication. The release of the 2015 Norwegian Red List for Species by the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre was commented on by governmental and non-governmental organizations, and was covered quite extensively in Norwegian national and local papers. In this article, I investigate the use of animals as examples in media texts on the Norwegian Red List, and the different conceptions of biodiversity loss that they activate. The examples studied in the article vary from the listing of species’ names to longer narratives connected with a single species. What they have in common, however, is that the authors use them to make the general issue of the texts more real and understandable to the reader or listener. The conceptions of biodiversity, produced through animal examples in the various media, ranged from happiness and childhood magic, to a climate-changed future, and to recreational hunting. The close reading of the examples shows that both the choice of species and, more specifically, which of the species’ many relationships to portray as part of the exemplary narrative, is crucial to the conceptions of biodiversity loss and of nature that are conveyed to the public. Through their way of both exceeding and reducing the general statement they are meant to illustrate, the examples bring some ideas about biodiversity loss to the foreground, but at the same time obscure others, thus providing insight into how biodiversity loss is constructed and communicated as an environmental problem.

The Past as a Mirror: Deep Time Climate Change Exemplarity in the Anthropocene

2020-10-07T16:00:13+02:00

During the past decades, notions of Earth dynamics and climate change have changed drastically, as anthropogenic CO₂-emissions are linked to measurable Earth system changes. At the same time, Earth scientists have discovered deep time climate changes triggered by large scale and natural release of CO₂. As the understanding of past climatic changes improved, they were used to envision what might happen in the near future. This article explores the use of deep time climate examples by analyzing publications on a 56-million-year-old greenhouse gas-driven rapid global warming event, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). We explore how the PETM is framed and used as an example of “extreme climatic warming” in four cases across different scientific genres. The scientific knowledge about the PETM is considered too uncertain to draw conclusions from, but our analysis shows that, by being presented as an example, the PETM may still contribute to the scientific understanding of ongoing climate change. Although the PETM is regarded as too uncertain to guide present day climate change modeling, it is still considered morally significant, and is allowed to influence public opinion and policy making. We argue that the PETM is used as an example in ways that have formal similarities with the early modern historia magistra vitae topos. The PETM example highlights the ambivalence that characterizes the Anthropocene as a temporal conception. The Anthropocene is “completely different”, but at the same time pointing to the similarity between the present and the deep past, thereby allowing for comparison to past geological events. Thus, the Anthropocene is not so “completely different” after all. Just a little bigger, a lot faster, and a lot scarier to humans.

Constructing the Desirable Reader in Swedish Contemporary Literature Policy

2020-11-10T12:26:33+01:00

This study contributes to a growing number of critical studies of reading that are seeking to understand how reading is constructed socially and politically. It addresses issues concerning why certain types of reading are deemed more appropriate than others in various contexts and historical eras. The aim of the study is to explore constructions of reading, reading promotion, and readers that can be identified in Swedish literature policy 2012-2013 in order to make explicit the implicit assumptions embedded in the politics of reading. This is achieved through a discourse analysis of the Swedish Government Commission report on Literature from 2012 and the subsequent Government Bill from 2013. The analysis focuses on the construction of the ‘problem’ that reading is supposed to solve, the subject-position of the reader, and the knowledge practices that underpin the construction of the ‘problem’. The analysis reveals that the main ‘problem’ is the changing reading habits of the Swedish population and the decline in the reading ability of Swedish children and youth. This is seen as a threat to several important societal values, such as children’s learning and development, democracy, “the culture of reading”, Sweden’s economic competitiveness, and the market for literature. Responsibility for the problem is placed on the school system, parents, and the use of computers and the Internet. The remedy is seen as the promotion of the right kind of literature. Furthermore, the analysis illustrates how the subject position of the appropriate reader is formed around the notion of the harmful non-reader. Similar dividing practices are constructed around youth/adult, pupil/teacher, child/parent, and son/father where the latter is expected to make the former a reader and thereby a desirable subject. The analysis also shows how two contradictory knowledge practices are joined together in the policy texts, where seemingly rational, objective, and empirical research is paired with humanistic Bildung values.

The Voices of Berlin: Busking in a ‘Creative’ City

2020-11-10T12:26:32+01:00

The city of Berlin is often advertised as one of the most prominent creative cities today. In the past two decades, its marketing agencies have constructed a carefully crafted urban image designed to attract the young, mobile and creative workers that move the contemporary economy. To do that, they rely on cultural temporary uses that enable selected urban spaces to have the desired ‘cool’ and authentic ambiance that distinguishes this city from others within the competitive global network. This paper investigates the phenomenon of abundant street performers in the German capital to find out if and how these artists perceive their role and instrumentalisation within these creative policies. The field research carried out through the method of ethnography reveals that their understanding of their art as small resistances in urban space often clashes with their use in broader placemaking schemes that have negative consequences. The article begins with a discussion of creative policies in Berlin from an Urban Planning point of view, highlighting how it encourages the migration of young artists and creative professionals. It then analyses the definitions of busking in the existing literature in the Social Sciences to understand its potential as a builder of sociability. Moreover, it draws on theories that speak of the “looseness” of space and the idea of tactically appropriating a place through art to build an interdisciplinary approach between the different fields. Lastly, it presents the case study, using the performers’ own testimonials to draw conclusions about the temporary uses of urban space within a broader urban context.

Migrant Youths and YouTube Entertainment: Media Participation in Post-Migrant Finland

2020-11-10T12:26:33+01:00

Recent media studies in Europe have stressed the importance of studying socie- ties’ negotiations on migration and the ability of migrants and other ethnic minorities to participate in these processes. Social media platforms have been widely praised for their openness to culturally diverse voices and representations. For minorities who have often been ignored and misrepresented in traditional media, these platforms arguably provide an empowering space where they can self-represent their identities, provide counter-representations to large and diverse audiences, and enhance their careers as media professionals. The video streaming social media platform, YouTube, is at the forefront of media participation. However, YouTube also has been criticized for promoting a highly commercialized culture of self-commodification and entertainment that maintains the status quo instead of enabling progressive social change. This study presents the results of an examination of the YouTube scene in Finland, a country with the lowest percentage of foreign-born inhabitants in Northern and Western Europe, where few YouTubers with migrant backgrounds have become increasingly visible within the last few years. Drawing on interviews with YouTubers, the study presents new insights into ethnic minority participation on YouTube and challenges binary oppositions between commercialism, entertainment and social change.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words. On Photographs, Talking Contexts and Visual Silences

2020-11-10T12:26:33+01:00

This paper’s point of departure is that historic silences are socially constructed and culturally productive, and that photographs in archives participate in the creation of historical silences despite, or maybe thanks to, their convincing depicting qualities. In this essay, photographs from three occasions have been studied in detail in order to elucidate different kinds of visual silences. The occasions are i) a funeral where it is the photographer’s own mother that is being buried, ii) a funeral where the coffin is covered in a draping with a swastika, and iii) a royal funeral. Adopting a self-reflexive outlook, the purpose of this essay is to suggest a few possible ways of addressing silences that can occur when the presumptions of a beholder meet the image content of a photograph from the past. The three examples show that the concept of visual silence can be applied in different ways. In the first example, the technical and artistic shortcomings are interpreted as silencing components, which can convey information. In the second example, the (to a contemporary beholder) provocative silence around the historically charged symbol of a swastika becomes an analytical resource in its own right. The last example illustrates how a lot of information can compose such a dominant narrative, that it silences other stories.

Introduction: Archive and Method(s)

2020-11-10T12:26:33+01:00

No abstract available.

The Contract-labour Photographs of Gunnar Lundh. A Media History Study of a Photo Archive in Motion

2020-11-10T12:26:32+01:00

The focus of this article is the work of photographer Gunnar Lundh, specifically the works collectively known as the statare photographs, images of rural contract labourers (or statare) that form part of a collection donated to the Nordic Museum in 1961. An overview of how these photographs have circulated in the Swedish public sphere indicates that three areas are particularly suitable for a targeted study of their use and reuse: i) social reportage, aimed at the miserable conditions facing these agricultural labourers in the emerging welfare state; ii) a biographical theme, in which the contract-labour photographs are part of a historical layer that repeatedly connects the author and opinion former Ivar Lo-Johansson with the ‘contract-labour photographer’ Lundh; and iii) how the older images remain a relevant element of a contemporary material cultural-heritage creation. In all of these examples, Lundh’s contract-labour photographs function as visual models through which it becomes possible to represent the contract labourers’ historical reality in books, buildings and interiors. However, they also constitute important components in the creation and perpetuation of what this article highlights as a distinctive set of intra-referential memory.

Images of Leisure and Outdoor Activities in the 1930s: A Mixed Archive Sources Methodology

2020-11-10T12:26:33+01:00

In Sweden, leisure time and outdoor activities were important parts of the 1930s welfare society. The aim of this study is to examine the usefulness of some different source categories in the Nordic Museum’s collections and to complement representations of 1930s ideals about health, leisure time and outdoor activities. The article is written within the scope of the Nordic Museum and Stockholm University research project Images and Stories of Everyday Life. With digitising as an overall purpose, the project focuses on two categories of source material in the museum collections—the responses to the museum’s questionnaires and the photograph archive of the Swedish photographer Gunnar Lundh. Methodologically, around 400 questionnaire responses and 2,000 contact sheets have been looked at, with the aim of finding relevant representations of people’s leisure time and outdoor life in the 1930s. A selected number of questionnaires are analysed, and regarding the photographs, four series are analysed and represented by a selected number of photos. Series of photos on Gunnar Lundh’s contact sheets are essential, as they add knowledge beyond the individual photo. The combination of sources used in the article supports that holidays and outdoor life were part of urban people’s lives, while for rural people it was not easily combined with living conditions in agriculture. These results are reflected in the museum’s source material as well as in official government reports, earlier studies and historical sources. Although there is quite a large difference between the source categories, this study shows that the museum material, including evaluation of sources, makes it possible to broaden the image of Swedish people’s outdoor activities in the 1930s. The bricolage research method indicates that combinations of sources enlarge the image of different groups’ relationships to outdoor life.

Framing Childhood: Representations of Children in Gunnar Lundh’s Photo Agency Archive

2020-11-10T12:26:34+01:00

Based on Gunnar Lundh’s photographs from the period 1920-1960, this article aims to discuss how a visualisation of children and childhood in cultural history collections can be addressed. This period is known as the time when the Swedish welfare state and society took shape, a period when the conditions for children in society changed in a number of ways. Lundh’s photographs are therefore viewed as cultural expressions of an era of cultural, societal and political change in which photographs of children came to play a particularly important role. Some of Lundh’s pictures have been reproduced in works about the constructive period of the Swedish welfare state and have thereby had an important role in narrating the story of the welfare society. In this way, Lundh’s photographs of children must be understood in the specific context of visual representations of children and childhood from this time period. In the many pictures of children in Lundh’s collection, the children play, are dressed up in fine clothes and national costumes, visit the library, pick flowers, play along the shore, etc. The children are depicted both active and passive, innocent, childish and pure. In that sense, the photographs follow a genre-specific way to portray children which was typical at the time and still is. In the article, I argue that an understanding and a specific way of seeing and portraying children and childhood became institutionalised during this period. However, in this institutionalisation process of images of childhood, Lundh’s pictures of children seem to reproduce and enhance this “pictorial vocabulary” in many ways that appear natural to childhood.

From Excerpt to Cosplay. Paths of Knowledge in the Nordic Museum Archive

2020-11-10T12:26:34+01:00

The aim of this article is to shed some light on the situation that occurs when scholarly knowledge, once highly valued, is successively undermined, while elements of the same learning live on as attractive resources to other stakeholders. More accurately, the research question relates to the process that starts with many ethnologists who, over time, come to increasingly view formerly important materials as less relevant to their own academic issues. For the sake of the argument, the Nordic Museum’s extensive collection of excerpts concerning folk customs and beliefs is used as an eye-opening case study. During the 1960s and 1970s, folklore researchers and ethnologists retreated from researching those lingering traces of the past—of which the Nordic Museum’s excerpt collection constitutes a powerful material centre—and thus this field was left free for others to claim. By drawing attention to both the productive force of the Nordic Museum’s collection of excerpts, and a number of contemporary and popular representations of ancient folklore, this article actualises a set of questions that deal with the relationship between new and old knowledge; for what becomes of previously sought after academic learning, once treasured in the Nordic Museum Archive, when the vast majority of the discipline heads for new materials, methods and theories?

The Small Details in the Archives and the Meaning of a Non-existent Photography from the Home of a Stationer in Helsingborg

2020-11-10T12:26:34+01:00

This article describes and problematizes the skills that are used when researching analogue archives. The article deals with the process that operates when a researcher finds small details in archival records that makes it possible to generate a story. Whether it is skill or luck that enables one to find the phenomena that create meaning is also discussed. The empirical example is fetched from the “Swedish Town project” that was initiated with the aim to write a new kind of urban history in the 1940s by Swedish art historian Gregor Paulsson. The researcher Börje Hanssen conducted field work in the city of Helsingborg in southern Sweden during the summers in 1942, 1943 and 1944. The “Swedish Town”-project explored urban history through both traditional sources such as archives, but also by interviews with contemporary town inhabitants and photographs. In the article we meet both Hanssen and some of his interviewees, and his working methods, his texts and some photographs are being analyzed. Börje Hanssen later became an influential ethnologist and in this article we encounter him in the beginning of his career. In order to examine the role played by one small detail in a large amount of material, and how such a detail can influence the researcher’s inter- pretations, Roland Barthes concepts of punctum and studium are used in the article, in order to create meaning out of small, everyday and often seemingly insignificant phenomena. Punctum and studium are fruitful analytical tools, not only in analyzing photographs, which was Barthes original use of the concept but also in other contexts, in this case archival records. The article thus discusses when a detail becomes the punctum that changes the researcher’s mindset and enables new knowledge to be produced.

Follow Lundh! Between Text and Context in a Photographer’s Archive

2020-11-10T12:26:33+01:00

No matter how well documented a life is, only shards, bits and pieces remain of what was once a vibrant person, with purpose, memories, feelings, actions and ideas. For any historian, these slivers are what remains and what can be used to access a past. This article presents a case study where the photographs taken by the photographer Gunnar Lundh (1898–1960) are in focus. The archive contains next to no written sources, and the information about the motifs is scarce. This is in fact the fate of many personal archives, especially those containing few written sources. The contact sheets Gunnar Lundh used in his business as a photographer provide some mostly routine and brief information, usually the year and sometimes where the photo is taken, in “Denmark” or “Skåne”. A majority of them are picturing anonymous individuals. The lack of information makes the archive of Lundh, in a sense, silent or mute. The purpose with my research is to investigate what happens to a photograph or a set of photographs when more contexts are added. By adding biographical knowledge it is possible to read the photographs. In this, I am using the art historian Joan M. Schwartz’s ideas about functional context. The process of adding context to an archive is a negotiation of the past that will contribute new dimensions in our collective memory, and also generate new, additional archives. There are options other than silence, and the inevitable reversion and degradation into oblivion for those silent, or mute, personal archives in focus here. A biographical method can however operate in the area between text and context, joining them together and thus letting the material speak.

“…of immediate use to society”. On Folklorists, Archives and the Definition of “Others”

2020-11-10T12:26:34+01:00

This article focuses on archival collections relating to so-called “tattare” and “zigenare” (roughly translated as “tinkers” and “gypsies”) created by Swedish folklore scholars during the twentieth century, and how these scholars influenced politics and interventions regarding these categories. It addresses questions regarding the production of knowledge about these categories and the contexts, structures and actors that have created the basis for these kinds of collections. Special focus has been placed on works by the folklore scholars Carl-Martin Bergstrand and Carl-Herman Tillhagen, and collections at the Institute for Language and Folklore, Department of Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research and the Nordic Museum. By unfolding the networks of Bergstrand and Tillhagen and following the traces of their work to other archives, the article highlights some of the political and monitoring dimensions of archival practices in relation to minority groups in Sweden.

From Oskar Parish, Småland, to Manistique, Michigan: Placing People and Depicting Places

2020-11-10T12:26:34+01:00

Karl Gösta Gilstring’s folklore collection is the largest made by a single Nordic researcher in modern times. The basis for the collection was the network of approximately 700 informants with whom Gilstring corresponded. In this article, the empirical focus is on Gilstring’s correspondence during the 1960s with one of the informants, Carl Nelson, living in Manistique, Michigan. In the collection, Carl Nelson represents Oskar Parish, despite the fact that Nelson only lived there until he was seventeen and, in his stories, seldom referred to the parish. What were the ideological and scientific premises for such a connection between a person and a place? How did Carl Nelson depict the places of Gilstring’s interest? The aim of the article is to explore how Carl Nelson depicted places in his stories, as well as to contextualize the stories with an analysis of the ideological and scientific premises of Karl Gösta Gilstring’s collection. In addition, the article aims to highlight and discuss the working method of such an analysis. The article concludes that the reason why Gilstring changed the spatial references of Nelson’s letters, making it seem as if they spoke of Oskar Parish probably had to do with the way his collection was organized. The ideological and scientific premises for the collection required that the customs and traditions of an individual, in order to be understood as such, needed a geographical place of origin. However, the analysis shows that the stories included in Carl Nelson’s letters do not primarily convey traditions and customs from Oskar Parish. Instead, they depict a mythological landscape recreated by the emigrant Carl Nelson in his American home on the outskirts of Manistique, Michigan.

Manchester’s Post-punk Heritage: Mobilising and Contesting Transcultural Memory in the Context of Urban Regeneration

2020-10-10T16:00:52+02:00

Urban memories are remediated and mobilised by different - and often conflicting - stakeholders, representing the heritage industry, municipal city branding campaigns or anti-gentrification struggles. Post-punk ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) coincided with the culture-led regeneration of former industrial cities in the Northwest of England, relaunching the cities as creative clusters (Cohen 2007, Bottà 2009, Roberts & Cohen 2014, Roberts 2014). Drawing on my case study of the memory cultures evolving around Manchester‘s post-punk era (Brunow 2015), this article shows how narratives and images travel through urban space. Looking at contemporary politics of city branding, it examines the power relations involved in adapting (white homosocial) post-punk memories into the self-fashioning of Manchester as a creative city. Situated at the interface of memory studies and film studies, this article offers an anti-essentialist approach to the notion of ‘transcultural memory’. Examining the power relations involved in the construction of audiovisual memories, this article argues that subcultural or popular memories are not emancipatory per se, but can easily tie into neoliberal politics. Moreover, there has been a tendency to sideline or overlook feminist and queer as well as Black and Asian British contributions to post-punk culture. Only partially have such marginalised narratives been observed so far, for instance in Carol Morley’s documentary The Alcohol Years (2000) or by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The article illustrates how different stakeholders invest in subcultural histories, sustaining or contesting hegemonic power relations within memory culture. While being remediated within various transmedia contexts, Manchester’s postpunk memories have been sanitised, fabricating consensus instead of celebrating difference.

In Good Condition: The Discourse of Patina as seen in Interactions between Experts and Laymen in the Antiques Trade

2020-10-07T15:24:27+02:00

This article examines how notions of patina are conveyed by experts in the antiques trade. How do antiques experts convey perceptions of patina to their clients and audience? How do they explain, persuade, and put forward their standards of condition? Three examples are analysed, a conversation about a sundial from the Swedish Antiques Roadshow, a conversation about a toy car from the British Antiques Roadshow and a vintage watches collecting guide from Christie’s auction house. Different persuasive strategies and styles used by the experts to convey their norms are identified. A change towards higher appreciation of patina can be discerned. Furthermore, the article analyses patina in regard to the relationship between surface and core of an object and in regard to use and usefulness. It is suggested that objects with patina are popular because we as humans feel an affinity with them. If things have a life trajectory, it will also involve ageing, and by surrounding ourselves with old, imperfect things we can come to terms with our own ageing process.

Monetizing Amateurs. Artistic Critique, New Online Record Production and Neoliberal Conjuncture

2020-11-13T12:55:20+01:00

This article examines an emerging academic discourse of new online record production. It represents amateur musicians and producers – with access to new digital production and communication tools – as entrepreneurial, aspiring professionals. The article then connects the discourse with its political, economic, and social context – or the neoliberal conjuncture. From the critical standpoint of conjunctural analysis it takes note of the albeit uneven nature of this neoliberalisation when it comes to certain cultural formations such as the “underground”, “do-it-yourself” and “independent micro-label” music scenes, who are considered to be maintaining “the artistic critique of capitalism”, as outlined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. While the latter suggest that this critique has been, for all intents and purposes, assimilated into capitalism; the case of underground and independent micro-label scenes would seem to repudiate the prevailing neoliberal notions of utilitarian music-making in the new online record production framework. This being said, the article does consider that it might be necessary to revise aspects of the artistic critique rehearsed in music scenes such as the aforementioned for it to remain relevant in the new digital communication environment.

Life, but not as we know it: A.I. and the popular imagination

2020-10-07T15:27:56+02:00

Advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) are prompting a growing chorus of both excitement and anxiety. A.I. is widely perceived as a significant emerging and future-shaping technological field that is developing at an accelerating rate. As such, futuristic imagery involving A.I. is increasingly prevalent in popular media. A central task for critical future studies is to assess both positive and problematic aspects of the futuristic scenarios offered up for public consumption, and to evaluate their role as part of a ‘futural public sphere’ (Goode & Godhe 2017). In this paper, I discuss three distinct but interwoven strands of public discourse that each have a role to play in shaping the popular imagination around possible A.I. futures. I begin with a selective discussion of mainstream science fiction represenations. Secondly, I consider several recent and high-profile popular media events surrounding real-world developments in A.I. Finally, I turn to contemporary futurology and, specifically, the discourse of the ‘singularity’ which posits a near future in which artificial ‘superintelligence’ outstrips human cognitive capacities. In this paper I argue that, while much popular coverage of A.I. is sensationalist and potentially misleading, public engagement with a complex, technical subject such as this depends on the circulation of ’evocative stories’ which can act as entry points into public debate. As such, it is important to understand the evocative power of the stories we frequently tell ourselves in popular discourse about A.I. and its role in our future.

Critical Future Studies - A thematic Introduction

2020-10-07T16:03:55+02:00

Our 2017 essay “Beyond Capitalist Realism – Why We Need Critical Future Studies” (Goode & Godhe 2017), published in this journal, was intended as both a provocation and an invitation to scholars concerned with the ways in which cultural texts not only represent the future, but also actively shape it by opening up or closing down imaginative possibilities. The essays collected in this special section are both responses to our invitation and provocations in their own right. From our point of view, they each take Critical Future Studies forward and collectively augur well for the further development of this field.

This introductory essay contains three sections. First, we briefly situate Critical Future Studies within an intellectual and historical context. In the following section we discuss some relevant scholarship published very recently in cognate fields (specifically Anticipation Studies and Sociology) and which are pertinent to Critical Future Studies as a developing field of study. In the final section, we introduce the articles contained in this this special section: six diverse contributions on topics including green capitalism, artificial intelligence and automation, science fiction, post-scarcity societies and the future of work, and socialist futures.

Remaking the People’s Park: Heritage Renewal Troubled by Past Political Struggles?

2020-10-11T16:00:11+02:00

This article explores how a series of heritage-driven renewal plans in the Swedish city Malmö dealt with a landscape deeply shaped by radical politics: Malmö People’s Park (Folkets Park). Arguing against notions of heritage where the past is essentially considered a malleable resource for present commercial or political concerns, we scrutinise plans for the People’s Park from the 1980s onward to emphasise how even within renewal attempts built on seemingly uncontroversial nostalgic readings of the park’s past, tensions proved impossible to keep at bay. This had profound effects on the studied development process.

Established by the city’s social-democratic labour movement in 1891, the People’s Park is both enmeshed with historical narratives, and full of material artefacts left by a century when the Social Democrats had a decisive presence in the city. As municipal planners and politicians targeted this piece of land, the tensions they had to navigate included not only what present ideas to bring to bear on the making of heritage, but also how to deal with past politics and the park as a material landscape. Our findings point to how the kinds of labour politics that had faded for decades became impossible to dismiss in urban renewal. Both political representations and de-politicising nostalgic representations of Malmö People’s Park’s past provoked (often unexpected) resistance undoing planning visions.

Memory-Making in Kiruna - Representations of Colonial Pioneerism in the Transformation of a Scandinavian Mining Town

2020-10-10T16:01:13+02:00

This article considers colonial rhetoric manifested in representations of early settlement in the mining town of Kiruna in northernmost Sweden. Kiruna was founded more than 100 years ago by the LKAB Company with its centre the prosperous mine on Sami land. Continued iron ore mining has made it necessary to relocate the town centre a few kilometres north-east of its original location to ensure the safety of the people. The ongoing process of the town’s transformation due to industrial expansion has given rise to the creation of a memorial park between the town and the mine, in which two historical photographs have been erected on huge concrete blocks. For the Swedish Sami, the indigenous people, the transformation means further exploitation of their reindeer grazing lands and forced adaption to industrial expansion. The historical photographs in the memorial park fit into narratives of colonial expansion and exploration that represent the town’s colonial past. Both pictures are connected to colonial, racialised and gendered space during the early days of industrial colonialism. The context has been set by discussions about what Kiruna “is”, and how it originated.

My aim is to study the role of collective memory in mediating a colonial past, by exploring the representations that are connected to and evoked by these pictures. In this progressive transformation of the town, what do these photographic memorials represent in relation to space? What are the values made visible in these photographs? I also discuss the ways in which Kiruna’s history becomes manifested in the town’s transformation and the use of history in urban planning. I argue that, in addressing the colonial history of Kiruna, it is timely to reconsider how memories of a town are communicated into the future by references to the past. I also claim that memory, history, and remembrance and forgetting are represented in this process of history-making and that they intersect gender, class and ethnicity.

Black, LGBT and from the Favelas: an Ethnographic Account on Disidentificatory Performances of an Activist Group in Brazil

2020-10-11T16:00:26+02:00

In this article, we address the processes of the production of places, identities, and cultures through analysing performances of activists from Aos Brados, in their political activities throughout Campinas, a 1 million inhabitants city located in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Aos Brados is an activist group formed by Black LGBT people from the favelas whose main activities in the last ten years have been cultural activities. Focusing on the activities made by Aos Brados members in cultural centres and public spaces throughout Campinas, we discuss how, in such presentations, the group disputes meanings associated with the places and cultures that these places claim to represent. We sustain that it can be seen as a process of disidentification in which Aos Brados reshapes meanings associated with places and cultures, producing Black LGBT Culture from the favelas. The discussion results from shared questions in two different research concerning the effects of the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality on the political identity of Black LGBT activists and on the performances of young drag queens. The methodology employed congregated participant-observation and in-depth interviews.

Maintaining Urban Complexities: Seeking Revitalization without Gentrification of an Industrial Riverfront in Gothenburg, Sweden

2020-10-07T16:02:18+02:00

This article presents case study research performed in a small-scale and centrally located industrial site by the riverfront in Gothenburg, Ringön. It has been highlighted in municipal visions to develop according to its very own circumstances, meaning small-scale and zoned for industrial use. Being closely located to the historic core of the city and surrounded by large construction sites, Ringön has received a lot of attention lately in local newspapers, research, university education and social media. The area is repeatedly pictured as redundant, with some rough potential to become something of a hipster mekka. However, this coverage mostly recognises newcomers from the creative industries and art, while neglecting existing repair-shops and small-scale manufacturing industries. To picture an area as redundant and in need of improvements, exemplifies a feature of gentrification, where extant qualities are seldom appreciated, and where outsiders define the needs to revitalize.

The purpose is here to understand and shed light on a diversity of perspectives and interests among Ringön stakeholders, i.e. the insiders, who together affect the development in question. In order to grasp the complexity of the process, I develop a many-faceted narrative in line with Bent Flyvbjerg’s approach to case study research. Meaning-making histories and activities that have come forward in field studies are sorted into eras that are considered lost, still alive, almost lost or recently found. This play of thought is inspired by current discourses on worlds coming to an end, as interpreted by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. In addition, the concept of “urban glue” from Nigel Thrift is introduced to illustrate how Ringön embodies an era that is certainly still alive.

Women on the Path of the Goddess: Sacred Technologies of the Everyday

2020-11-10T12:26:33+01:00

Contemporary spiritualties are often portrayed as a turn to a subjective and individualized form of religion, consisting of individually held truth claims or private peak experiences that are generated sporadically at retreats and workshops. The portrayal is ultimately related to a perception of everyday life in contemporary Euro-America as mundane, rationalized, and secular, but also the exclusion of practices centered on the body, the home and the everyday from what is deemed properly religious. This article explores the sacred technologies of the everyday among women in England who identify as Goddess worshippers. The purpose is to further the understanding of religion and the everyday, as well as the conceptualization of contemporary Goddess-worship as lived religion. Through examining narratives on the intersection between religion and everyday activities, the technologies of imbuing everyday life with a sacred dimension become visible. The sacred technologies imply skills that enable both imagining and relating to the sacred. The women consciously and diligently work to cultivate skills that would allow them to sense and make sense of the sacred, in other words, to foster a sense of withness through the means of a host of practices. I argue that the women actively endeavor to establish an everyday world that is experienced as inherently different from the secular and religious fields in their surroundings; hence it is not from disenchantment or an endeavor with no social consequences. The women’s everyday is indeed infused with different strategies where the body, different practices, and material objects are central in cultivating a specific religious disposition that ultimately will change the way the women engage with and orient themselves in the world.

Good and Bad Squatters? Challenging Hegemonic Narratives and Advancing Anti-Capitalist Views of Squatting in Western European Cities

2020-10-12T15:59:19+02:00

Mainstream mass media and politicians tend to portray squatters as civic evils. Breaking in and trespassing on private property is clumsily equated with the occupation of empty premises. Squatting is often represented as a serious criminal offence even before any legal verdict has been determined. The social diversity of squatters and the circumstances around this practice are usually omitted. Dominant narratives in Western European cities were effective in terms of criminalisation of squatting and the social groups that occupied vacant properties –homeless people in need of a shelter, those who cannot afford to buy or rent convenient venues for performing social activities, activists who squat as a means of protest against real estate speculation, etc. This article reviews the available evidence of those narratives and disentangles the main categories at play. I first examine homogenisation stereotypes of squatters as a whole. Next, I distinguish the divides created by the conventional polarisation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ squatters. It is argued that both dynamics foster the stigma of squatting and facilitate its repression, although these discursive struggles engage squatters as well. As a consequence, I discuss the implications of ‘reversive’ and ‘subversive’ narratives performed by squatters to legitimise their practices and movements. In particular, the anti-capitalist features of these counter-hegemonic responses are identified and elaborated, which adds to the topic’s literature.

Narratives of a Fractured Trust in the Swedish Model: Tenants’ Emotions of Renovation

2020-10-07T15:25:04+02:00

Research shows there is a current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities, where private as well as public rental housing companies use “renoviction,” or displacement through renovation, as a profit-driven strategy. This article focuses on emotions and renoviction, in particular the emotions of tenants currently facing forced renovations, in Sweden. We discuss how power is reproduced and questioned, and illustrate methods used by housing companies to carry out extensive renovation. The following questions have guided our analysis: What kinds of emotions are evoked among tenants experiencing an extensive, top-down and costly renovation? What particular injustices and violations are identified by the tenants in this situation? How can these violations be understood in relation to the current housing policy? Our research is qualitative and builds on semi-structured interviews with tenants as well as extensive ethnographic work in a neighborhood undergoing renovation, followed by steeply increased rents. We use the metaphor of “fractured trust” to conceptualize the emotional reaction of tenants, and argue that citizens´ trust in the Swedish welfare system is being broken locally, in the wake of ongoing top-down renovation processes, by use of a rationality that does not take into consideration tenants’ perspectives and needs. We conclude that anxiety, angst, anger, and loss, attached together in a common feeling of shock, were the most prevalent emotions expressed and were described by tenants as a response to unfair treatment. In the interviews, a complex set of violations performed by the housing company in a renoviction neighborhood is brought to the forefront here, and set in this context of systemic violence exerted against tenants in contemporary Sweden.

Beyond Utopia: Building Socialism Within and After Capitalism

2020-10-10T16:02:44+02:00

The article focuses on several figures who are particularly interesting in terms of identifying a radical critique of capitalism that does not shrink from the possibility of designing and imaging a different future. Following Michael Löwy, in our study we have identified relationships of ‘elective affinity’ between figures who might appear different and dissimilar, at least at first glance: the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the German communist Paul Mattick, the Italian Socialist Raniero Panzieri and the French social scientist Alain Bihr. After providing some biographical information, we analyze their respective paths to a socialism based on, and achieved through, self-organization and self-government.We do not intend to build a new tradition with this review of thinkers, most of whom were also political militants; rather, more modestly, we hope to suggest a path forward for both research and political activism. In order to show how significant the questions raised by these four intellectuals-militants still are even today, in the Conclusions we analyze the social and political experiment carried out by the Movement for a Democratic Society of the Rojava region in Syrian Kurdistan.

Volunteering as Media Work: The Case of the Eurovision Song Contest

2020-10-07T16:00:45+02:00

This article explores volunteering in relation to the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), which took place in Stockholm in 2016 and in Kyiv in 2017, with the aim of shedding light on volunteering as a form of “media work”. Following from this, the article aims to problematize the theoretical concept of free labour and analyse the symbolic exchanges and currencies involved in employing a “free” labour force. Through interviews with volunteers, this article explores what volunteers at huge media events do, how their work is organized, and what motivates them. The empirical basis for this article is an interview study with volunteers and volunteer organizers of the ESC in Stockholm (May 2016) and in Kyiv (May 2017), complemented with a document analysis of volunteer guidebooks and organizational reports. The article shows that eventfulness is an essential part of what volunteer labour brings to an event such as the ESC. It is also a key element in the production of economic value: eventfulness is a currency that expresses the value of the event itself and is a key feature of place branding. Furthermore, eventfulness – along with the feeling of being a part of an event, of something bigger, as it unfolds in time – is a key feature of the motivation for the volunteers who contribute with unpaid labour. As such, eventfulness can also be understood as a form of currency or symbolic capital that forms the main remuneration or “wage” earned by volunteers at an event such as the ESC.

On the Pending Robot Revolution and the Utopia of Human Agency

2020-10-07T15:28:04+02:00

A hallmark of modernist thought is the belief in science and technology as a socially revolutionary force. Consequently, new technologies have often been sequenced by pictures of another world to be. The birth of electronic data processing (EDP) was no exception. Provoking both hopes and anxieties, EDP and its subsequent process of automation has, ever since the launch of the first electronic data processing machines in the early 1950’s, been a cornerstone for countless extravagant visions of the future, such as the thought of an ever so impending “Robot Revolution”. This article builds from the basic assumption that visions of the future draw on notions of what at a given time is considered socially and politically desirable, unwanted or at all possible. It thus argues that the robot revolution could be studied as a form of reified anticipation through which possible social trajectories are made symbolically comprehensible. Focusing on the automation debate of the Swedish 1950’s, I argue that the robot revolution serves as a symbolic articulation of the social experiences of Swedish welfare society, and that it carries both ideological and utopian dimensions worth examining.

Disassembling and Reassembling a Sports Talent

2020-11-10T12:26:34+01:00

This article is rooted in an understanding of talent as something you do rather than something you either are or have. Talent is hereby seen as a phenomenon that comes into being through actions, rather than as an individualized, inherent capacity. Our perspective is informed by new materialist concepts that analyse talent development as an assemblage. Based on a case study focusing on Jamie, an injured badminton player, we argue that talent development produces a number of affects: it translates potential into a singular talent; it enables the conversion of talent into expertise; it turns doubt into belief; and it impedes other ways of coming into being for the athlete under development. The study provides insight into the micropolitics of talent development and into the ontological, pedagogical and ethical implications for the athlete and all the other actors entangled in a talent assemblage.

Marginalized Bodies of Imagined Futurescapes: Ableism and Heteronormativity in Science Fiction

2020-10-07T16:04:17+02:00

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of marginalized bodies in science fiction narratives by analyzing how physical disability and homosexuality/bisexuality have been depicted in popular science fiction film and television. Specifically, it analyzes what types of futures are evoked through the exclusion or inclusion of disability and homo/bisexuality. To investigate these futurescapes, in for example Star Trek and The Handmaid’s Tale, the paper uses film analysis guided by the theoretical approach of crip/queer temporality mainly in dialogue with disability/crip scholar Alison Kafer. Although narratives about the future in popular fiction occasionally imagines futures in which disability and homo/bisexuality exist the vast majority do not. This article argues that exclusion of characters with disabilities and homo/bisexual characters in imagined futures of science fiction perpetuate heteronormative and ableist normativity. It is important that fictional narratives of imagined futures do not limit portrayals to heterosexual and able-bodied people but, instead, take into account the ableist and heteronormative imaginaries that these narratives, and in extension contemporary society, are embedded in. Moreover, it is argued that in relation to notions of progression and social inclusion in imagined futurescapes portrayals of homo/bisexuality and disability has been used as narrative devices to emphasis “good” or “bad” futures. Furthermore, homo/bisexuality has increasingly been incorporated as a sign of social inclusion and progression while disability, partly due to the perseverance of a medical understanding of disability, instead is used as a sign of a failed future. However, the symbolic value ascribed to these bodies in stories are based on contemporary views and can thus change accordingly. To change the way the future is envisioned requires challenging how different types of bodies, desires, and notions of normativity are thought about. Sometimes imaginary futures can aid in rethinking and revaluating these taken-for-granted notions of normativity.

Hopeful Extinctions? Tesla, Technological Solutionism and the Anthropocene

2020-10-11T16:01:08+02:00

Over thirty years since Jean-Francois Lyotard declared the death of metanarratives, we currently find two apparently incompatible discourses that dominate imagined planetary futures. On the one hand, we encounter a metanarrative of technological progress has been fuelled by decades of advances in computational, networked, mobile and pervasive technologies. On the other, we find the apocalyptic discourse of the Anthropocene, whereby human activity is understood to be responsible for precipitating the sixth mass extinction of life in Earth’s geological record. This paper explores how the divergent futures of technological solutionism and ecological catastrophism encounter one another, focusing on Tesla as a case study where technological consumerism is posited as the solution to ecological catastrophe. Critically examining the materiality of digital technoculture challenges the immaterialist rhetoric of technological solutionism that permeates both neoliberal and leftist discourses of automation, whilst questioning the ‘we’ that is implicit in the problematic universalisation of Anthropocenic catastrophism, instead pointing to the deeply entrenched inequalities that perpetuate networked capitalism.

Ultimately, the paper asks whether it is possible to move beyond bleak claims that we must simply “work within our disorientation and distress to negotiate life in human-damaged environments” (Tsing 2015: 131), to assemble the fragile hope that Goode and Godhe (2017) argue is necessary to move beyond capitalist realism. Hope suggests an optimism that sits uncomfortably with the reality of mass extinctions, however, the scale of the ecological crises means that we cannot afford the fatalism associated with losing hope.

Paradoxes of Mentoring: An Ethnographic Study of a Mentoring Programme for Highly-educated Women with Migrant Backgrounds

2020-10-10T16:00:31+02:00

This article explores paradoxes that emerge in the mentoring of highly-educated, female, foreign-born job-seekers in Finland. Theoretically, the study is linked to the growing body of research scrutinising the integration or discrimination of migrants in working life. It analyses cultural practices and ideas that are visible and affect the mentoring interaction. On a more practical level, the paper determines how the mentors and mentees experience the mentoring, and how intercultural mentoring could be improved in order to promote mentees’ employment. The article is based on ethnography and 11 semi-structured interviews.

Two major paradoxes and their links to cultural meanings were identified: the over-emphasised focus on Finnish language (the language paradox), and the myth of the strong Finnish woman (the support paradox). These can be seen as having aspects of both cultural awareness and situation-specific awareness. Using situation-specific awareness, some mentors understood the best way forward was to break the rules of the mentoring programme and not to use Finnish in all communication. This enabled a more equal setting for professional discussions. In some rare cases, when the mentors did not use situation-specific awareness, a vicious circle emerged and mentees felt even worse about their abilities and working life opportunities. Similarly, although the myth of the strong Finnish woman can be an empowering and positive model for the mentee, it can have a negative impact on the mentor, enabling undercurrents in the mentoring discussions which can be experienced as harsh and even hostile. This, instead of encouraging and supporting, can result in the undermining and ‘othering’ of the mentee.

Vulnerable Normality: Popular Neuroimaging and the Discursive Logic of the (Dis)able(d) Brain

2020-10-10T16:03:46+02:00

The aim of this article is to analyse popular neuroimaging of (dis)able(d) brains as a cultural phenomenon, as well as to explore how there has been, during the last decades, a subtle but important change in the way “normal” brains are depicted in popular science. Popular neuroimaging is introduced and used as an empirical basis to analyse what Fiona Kumari Campbell sees as a critique against ableism. The empirical material consists of two British popular science documentaries (both produced by the BBC) on the topic of the brain: Human Brain (1983), and Brain Story (2004). The article argues that the position of normality and able-bodiedness has changed as the development of brain scanning techniques has emerged. In particular, there seems to have been a change in how the brain is visualized and talked about. New frameworks for understanding normality, disability and vulnerability have appeared. Furthermore, we claim that this shift needs to be studied from a theoretical perspective that analyses the discursive logic of the (dis)able(d) brain where an indistinctness transpires and creates a form of vulnerable normality.

After Work: Anticipatory Knowledge on Post-Scarcity Futures in John Barness Thousand Cultures Tetralogy

2020-10-11T16:01:19+02:00

What would happen if we could create societies with an abundance of goods and services created by cutting-edge technology, making manual wage labour unnecessary – what has been labelled societies with a post-scarcity economy. What are the pros and cons of such a future? Several science fiction novels and films have discussed these questions in recent decades, and have examined them in the socio-political, cultural, economic, scientific and environmental contexts of globalization, migration, nationalism, automation, robotization, the development of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and global warming. In the first section of this article, I introduce methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives connected to Critical Future Studies and science fiction as anticipatory knowledge. In the second and third section, I introduce the question of the value of work by discussing some examples from speculative fiction. In section four to seven, I analyze the Thousand Culture tetralogy (1992–2006), written by science fiction author John Barnes. The Thousand Cultures tetralogy is set in the 29th century, in a post-scarcity world. It highlights the question of work and leisure, and the values of each, and discusses these through the various societies depicted in the novels. What are the possible risks with societies where work is voluntary?

The Hamburgers in the Fridge: An Interview with Professor Nikolas Rose about Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Neuroscience and Critical Friendship

2020-10-11T16:01:49+02:00

During 2016 and 2017 the Cultural Studies Group of Neuroscience at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University in Sweden organised a seminar series titled the ‘Seminar on Neuroscience, Culture and Society’. Professor Nikolas Rose was one of the invited guest speakers; he is a researcher who strongly influences cultural reflections on neuroscience (Rose 2007, Abi-Rached & Rose 2010, Rose & Abi-Rached 2013). He visited us on the 22nd of March 2017 and during his visit Kristofer Hansson and Karolina Lindh took the pportunity to interview Professor Rose to hear more about his thoughts and experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscience researchers and researchers in the social sciences and humanities.

Visualising the Hypnotised Brain: Hysteria Research from Charcot to Functional Brain Scans

2020-10-12T15:59:51+02:00

Contrary to the widely held belief in the humanities that hysteria no longer exists, this article shows that the advent of new brain imaging technologies has reignited scientific research into this age-old disorder, once again linking it to hypnosis. Even though humanities scholarship to date has paid no attention to it, image-based research of hysteria via hypnosis has been hailed in specialist circles for holding the potential to finally unravel the mystery of this elusive disorder. Following a succinct overview of how hypnosis was used in the nineteenth century hysteria research, the article details how the relationship between hysteria and hypnosis is currently renegotiated in the context of brain imaging studies. It shows that the current research has so far failed to deliver on its promise of uncovering the link between hysteria and hypnosis. It further argues that despite huge technological advances in imaging technologies, contemporary researchers grapple with conceptual problems comparable to those that plagued their nineteenth century predecessors.

The Phenomenon of Brain World : Neuroculture in the Making by Patients with Parkinson’s Disease

2020-10-10T16:04:20+02:00

The aim of this article is to explore how the phenomenon of brain world, as a symptom of a possible emerging neuroculture, is perceived and enacted by patients with Parkinson’s disease, who, in their daily life, are subjected to neuroscience, most often as chronically ill individuals hoping for a cure, but also in some instances as participants in clinical trials. The article is based on a multifaceted ethnographic material that maps the experiences of biomedical research among patients with Parkinson’s. The main body of material consists of interviews carried out in 2012 and 2015, and comprises 19 transcripts of recorded conversations, conducted in groups as well as individually. The article argues that the exposure of the patients to clinical neuroscience gives birth to neuroculture. A materialist-discursive phenomenon called brain world—perceptions and enactments of the brain—is problematized on the basis of how patients cope with and reflect on their chronic illness in everyday life situations and in confrontation with clinical neuroscience. The embodied experience of the illness operates as the route into the brain world and also becomes the ground for how this world is featured with specific properties. Brain world is in this respect a contradictory entity: both plastic and fragile, both accessible and too complex, both strange and known. Most of all, brain world, in the eyes of the patients, relates to a territory still dominated by neuroscientists.

Interdisciplinary Entanglements: A review of Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences, by Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald (2015): Palgrave Macmillan.

2020-10-11T16:02:13+02:00

No abstract available.

Neuro-Problems: Knowing Politics Through the Brain

2020-10-13T15:59:19+02:00

In recent years, neuroscientific knowledge has been applied far beyond its context of emergence to explain human behaviour in general and to address a host of specific societal problems. In this article, we discuss the emerging research field of ‘neuropolitics’ that seeks to bring neuroscientific methods and findings to political science. Neuropolitics is investigated as a particular way of approaching political problems as located in the brain. We argue that neuropolitics research gives expression to a rationality of government that allows researchers to put forward policy prescriptions based on neuroscientific knowledge. Neuropolitics thus run the risk of leading to what we call a ‘pathologisation of politics’, that turns political problems into biological deviations.

Everyday Imaginaries, Narratives and Strokes: An Ethnographic Exploration of Narratives among Stroke Patients and their Spouses

2020-10-12T16:00:17+02:00

That a stroke is a disruptive event in many people’s lives is no secret. That it also represents challenges to the communal construction of narratives between couples is less explored, and is the subject matter of this paper. With a narrative theoretical approach to ethnographic fieldwork conducted among couples where one partner has had a stroke, this article explores how everyday imaginaries are challenged when narratives are reassessed following a stroke. The paper suggests that sometimes the communal narratives are taken over by the part not directly afflicted by the stroke. Thus, when the non-afflicted spouse is in control of the narratives, they may be utilized as a way to monitor both the relationship as well as the brain of the spouse afflicted by the stroke.

The Sci-Fi Brain: Narratives in Neuroscience and Popular Culture

2020-10-14T15:58:59+02:00

The connection between neuroscience, popular media and lay perceptions of the brain involves the framing of complex scientific processes and results through familiar cultural narratives and metaphors. Such narratives are often built on the premise that neuroscience, with the help of powerful new technologies, will finally solve the mysteries of brain and mind, consciousness and morality. At the same time, popular culture—especially the science fiction genre—tends to focus on worst case scenarios of the implementation of technology. This article explores cultural narratives of what the brain is and how it functions in two different contexts—among neuroscientists and within popular culture. In particular, narratives about technology and the malleable brain as well as the notion of the mad scientist are studied. The article explores how these narratives are presented and used in popular culture and how neuroscientists relate to the narratives when describing their work. There is a contrast, but also a blurring of boundaries, between actual research carried out and the fictional portrayals of scientists constructing, or altering, fully functional brains. To some extent, the narratives serve as a background for the public’s understanding of, and attitude towards, neuroscience—something that must be taken into consideration when dealing with the therapeutic treatment of patients. The narratives of neuroscience in popular culture are to a certain degree shaped by actual scientific practices and findings, but neuroscience is also influenced by laypeople’s perceptions, which often have their roots in the narratives of popular culture.

Narrating the Gender-equal City - Doing Gender-equality in the Swedish European Capital of Culture Umeå2014

2020-10-13T15:59:07+02:00

There is a powerful narrative of Umeå as a progressive, gender-equal, tolerant city which has been important in relation to the investments in culture that the city has made, including the European Capital of Culture Year 2014. Viewing the city as process, as negotiated and contested representation, we study how narratives of gender-equality figure throughout Capital of Culture year, Umeå2014, and in the projects that were part of it. We examine how the talk about gender-equality interacts with notions of place and how they are interconnected with each other. We are interested in what happens with a major cultural project when gender-equality is emphasized as one of the key values, at the same time as the meaning and content of this concept is not specified. Studying official documents and municipal webpages concerning Umeå as European Capital of Culture, applications for co-funding of cultural projects and news articles, we scrutinize how gender-equality is used and given meaning by looking at the way it is operationalized both by the city officials and by those engaging in cultural activities. Gender equality became something that was highlighted in the bid to become European Capital of Culture and in the making of the programme for the year, and stories about the Umeå2014’s success in implementing a gender-equality perspective have been repeated and woven together into a yet another narrative of Umeå. They became part of an ongoing negotiation of the city’s identity.

Heritage Churches as Post-Christian Sacred Spaces: Reflections on the Significance of Government Protection of Ecclesiastical Heritage in Swedish National and Secular Self-Identity

2020-10-11T15:59:59+02:00

Sweden is often described as a country where secularization has come comparatively far. At the same time, state and church have remained relatively close, especially before the enactment of the decisions of increased separation of church and state in 2000. Sweden is also a country where the built heritage of the established church enjoys a strong legal protection. When relations between the state and the established church were reformed in 2000, this protection was left in place. This article offers an analysis of the significance ascribed to ecclesiastical heritage in the form of Church of Sweden heritage churches in government policy, focusing on the process leading up to the separation of church and state in year 2000. Using Mircea Eliade’s understanding of the sacred and the profane as a starting point for my analysis, I contextualize the significance of heritage churches is in the wider context of a post-Christian, and more specifically post-Lutheran, secularized society. I suggest that the ongoing heritagization of Church of Sweden’s church buildings could be seen as a process where they are decontextualized from the denominationally-specific religiosity of the Church of Sweden, but rather than being re-contextualized only as secular heritage, they could be more clearly understood as becoming the sacred places, and objects, of a post-Lutheran civil religion and generalized religiosity, i.e. not simply a disenchantment, but also a re-enchantment. This could be understood as a continuation of traditions of approaching memory, and the sacred, developed in a society characterized by the near hegemony of the established church in the religious sphere, but also in partially counter-clerical movements, such as the Romantic movement.

Unruly Gestures: Seven Cine-Paragraphs on Reading/Writing Practices in our Post-Digital Condition

2021-07-02T14:35:18+02:00

Unruly gestures presents a hybrid performative intervention by means of video, text, and still images. With this experimental essay we aspire to break down various preconceptions about reading/writing gestures. Breaking away from a narrative that sees these gestures foremost as passive entities – as either embodiments of pure subjective intentionality, or as bodily movements shaped and controlled by media technologies (enabling specific sensory engagements with texts) – we aim to reappraise them. Indeed, in this essay we identify numerous dominant narratives that relate to gestural agency, to the media-specificity of gestures, and to their (linear) historicity, naturalness and humanism. This essay disrupts these preconceptions, and by doing so, it unfolds an alternative genealogy of ‘unruly gestures.’ These are gestures that challenge gestural conditioning through particular media technologies, cultural power structures, hegemonic discourses, and the biopolitical self. We focus on reading/writing gestures that have disrupted gestural hegemonies and material-discursive forms of gestural control through time and across media. Informed by Tristan Tzara’s cut-up techniques, where through the gesture of cutting the Dadaists subverted established traditions of authorship, intentionality, and linearity, this essay has been cut-up into seven semi-autonomous cine-paragraphs (accessible in video and print). Each of these cine-paragraphs confronts specific gestural preconceptions while simultaneously showcasing various unruly gestures.

* The article has been updated since first publication. The only change is the URL to the video that is referred in the article, which has been changed since the journal has been migrated to a new system.

From Autonomy to Anonymity: Information Technology Policy and Changing Politics of the Media System in Indian Democracy

2020-10-07T16:02:53+02:00

The prominence of information and communications technology (ICTs) in defining India’s media modernity can be gauged by the growing reach of online social media as well as continuing expansion of digital media channels and satellite broadcasting even in the early 21stCentury. Policies concerning information technologies, from telegraph to satellite networks, have also been central to media politics and with the rise of new media, internet related policies have similarly become pivotal to the interaction between the state and media system. Drawing from a comparative media system perspective, this paper argues that while there has been no major constitutional or legal overhaul, as yet, new ideas and information technology policy activism are reshaping the contours of state action and ‘autonomy’ of the press in India’s democracy. Comparing technology debates in an earlier era, when satellite networks swept across the media system, with the more recent deliberations around liabilities for digital intermediaries, the paper unpacks the nature of change and locates its origins in the revival of discursive institutions (Schmidt 2002, 2008) of technology policy since the early 2000s. Technology related ideas, I argue, now serve as institutions, able to function as a ‘coordinating discourse’ (ibid) that have revived ideals of an autonomous media. Technology inflected ideals of ‘anonymity’ also counter the ‘communicative discourse’ (ibid) of Hindutva and cultural nationalist politics of media which framed the issue of autonomy in the ascendant phase of print and electronic media capitalism until the 1990s.

Social Media, Violence and the Law: ’Objectionable Material’ and the Changing Countours of Hate Speech Regulation in India

2020-10-10T16:02:04+02:00

With the advent of the internet and increasing circulation of hate speech, and material that has been linked to public order disturbances, there has been a shift in the legal discourse around hate speech. What has emerged, especially post the striking down of section 66A of the Information Technology Act, are categories such as ‘objectionable’, ‘provocative’ content. The focus has shifted from the content itself, what it says, and the intention of the author, to being able to pre-empt the circulation of such material. Law is increasingly invoked to prevent speech (through prior restraint) rather than post facto investigation and prosecutions. This in turn has given rise to a range of institutional mechanisms such as monitoring labs that are now part of policing practice. Additionally, civil society organizations are now collaborating with police to help trigger mechanisms to take content off internet platforms. Increasingly it is through keywords and algorithmic searches that the category of hate speech has been defined rather than traditional legal doctrine. In the words of Lawrence Lessig, code plays the role of law, and the architecture of the internet becomes policy. This paper will examine the issues outlined above relying heavily on a series of interviews with lawyers, policy analysts, journalists, academics, civil society activists, and police personnel conducted in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Pune.

Tamil Takes Centre Stage: Tradition and Modernity in Indian Television

2020-10-07T16:03:22+02:00

This paper draws attention to the role of language in mediated modernities in India through an analysis of Sirappu Pattimandram (Special Debate), a Tamil-language debate show on the politically-affiliated corporate Sun TV network in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. The show provides an opportunity for the articulation of anxieties over how social and economic changes affect the private lives of Tamil speakers. These anxieties are contained through the use of Tamil-language oratory which recasts quotidian everyday problems in an ancient literary idiom that provides reassurance through imagined continuity with a glorious past.

Minorities in Indian Urdu News: Ahmadis, Journalistic Practice and Mediated Muslim Identity

2020-10-10T16:02:18+02:00

A case study of a protest campaign against the Ahmadiyya community in Punjab and its coverage in Urdu language news media of India, this paper locates its narrative at the intersection of media, politics and religion. It seeks to advance the field theory project beyond western media systems by applying it to Indian Urdu news. It demonstrates that the religious field is a neighbouring field of Urdu news and the former wields powerful influence over the latter. Moreover, the religious field with the help of news media uses politics to have its voice heard. The paper specifically reads into the manner in which Urdu dailies covered Majlis Ahrar-e Islam Hind’s (a Muslim interest group) protest campaign to cancel Pranab Mukherjee’s (then Finance Minister of India) visit to Qadian, Punjab in 2009. He was set to participate in an annual function of the Ahmadis who are a persecuted minority group among Muslims. The protest campaign, with an active support of Urdu dailies, got transformed into a media campaign against the Ahmadis and was successful in getting the Minister’s visit cancelled. The paper investigates the dynamics of collaboration between Urdu news and the ulama that made possible transformation of anti-Ahmadi campaign into a media campaign. It attempts to elucidate the uncritical support that Majlis Ahrar-e Islam Hind received from Urdu dailies. For this purpose, it delves into normative structure of Urdu news field and its journalistic practices. It draws attention to their implications for Indian Muslim identity.

White Skin/Brown Masks: The Case of ‘White’ Actresses From Silent to Early Sound Period in Bombay

2020-10-11T16:00:57+02:00

My paper explores categories of gender, ethnicity, modernity and performance through the figure of the ‘white’ actress in the early years of Indian cinema (1920-1940). Film was a lucrative site of business for intrepidly ambitious individuals in search of reinvention in Bombay. For women from ‘white’ backgrounds, cinema became a means to recast their identity; helping them reclaim the public sphere in new and radical ways. The trace of ‘white’ actresses in the history of Indian cinema configures and transforms the status of performers and performance from the silent to the early sound period. The industry attracted a large number of Anglo Indian, Eurasian and Jewish girls, who became the first group of women to join the industry uninhibited by the social opprobrium against film work. I use hagiographic records, film reviews and stills to map the roles women from the Anglo Indian and Jewish communities were dressed up to ‘play’ in the films. These roles helped perpetuate certain stereotypes about women from these communities as well as impinged on the ways that their identity was configured. Through the history of the Anglo Indian and Jewish women in the larger public sphere I lay out and highlight the field from where individuals and personalities emerged to participate in the cinematic process. I see the community as marking and inflecting a system of signs on the body of these women through which identity was constructed and their attempts at reinvention were engendered - a process of individuation, of ‘being’ and of being framed within a particular logic of the popular imaginary frames of representation.

The Political Significance of Spotify in Sweden – Analysing the #backaspotify Campaign using Twitter Data

2020-10-10T16:03:17+02:00

This article discusses the political significance of the streaming music company Spotify in Sweden, taking as a case a coordinated campaign in late spring 2016, known by the hashtag #backaspotify (translated as “support Spotify!”), which was mainly played out on the social media platform Twitter. The campaign is analysed using a set of data retrieved from Twitter, examining both the content and the interactions in 1,791 messages. Results show that the main political issue concerned the lack of access to rented apartments in central Stockholm, and that the main actors in the campaign were predominantly associated with public affairs consultants and the youth wings of political parties belonging to the centre-right. The campaign, however, was very short-lived and had diminished significantly already after two days. We conclude that Spotify transcends its role as a streaming music company, and additionally can be used as a point of reference in political campaigns to promote issues that are of wider scope than the music industry alone.

Beyond Capitalist Realism – Why We Need Critical Future Studies

2020-10-15T16:00:17+02:00

This paper introduces the interdisciplinary field of Critical Future Studies (CFS). CFS investigates the scope and constraints within public culture for imagining and debating different potential futures. It interrogates imagined futures founded – often surreptitiously – upon values and assumptions from the past and present, as well as those representing a departure from current social trajectories. CFS draws on perspectives from various disciplines including sociology, political studies, intellectual history, cultural history, media and cultural studies, utopian studies, science and technology studies, and philosophy. CFS also engages with discourses and ideas from the natural sciences (including popular science), computing and economics. And, given our concern with public culture, CFS aims to contribute constructively to vigorous and imaginative public debate about the future – a futural public sphere – and to challenge a prevalent contemporary cynicism about our capacity to imagine alternative futures while trapped in a parlous present. To that extent, we propose CFS as a programme of engaged and open-ended social critique, not as a solely academic endeavour. Our paper begins by describing the relationship between CFS and mainstream Future Studies. Subsequently, we discuss the contemporary context for Critical Future Studies. Here we make the case that CFS is a timely and even urgent project at our current historical juncture, arguing also for the significance of both utopian and dystopian imaginings. We then go on to discuss methodologies within CFS scholarship. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the values underpinning CFS. Overall, this paper not only describes CFS as a field of research but also serves as an invitation to cultural scholars to consider how their own work might intersect with and contribute to CFS.

Even Better than the Real Thing? Digital Copies and Digital Museums in a Digital Cultural Policy

2020-10-12T16:02:21+02:00

This article investigates how a digital turn and digital copies have influenced ideas, roles and authorities within a national museum sector. It asks whether digital mu-seums and their digital reproductions expand and/or challenge a traditional cul-tural policy. Two specific cases are highlighted to inform the discussion on these questions – the Norwegian digital museum platform DigitaltMuseum and Google Art Project. The article argues that there is a certain epochalism at play when the impact of a digital turn is analysed. At the same time, some clear major changes are taking place, even if their impact on cultural policies might be less than expec-ted. I propose that one of the changes is the replacing of authenticity with accessi-bility as the primary legitimating value of museum objects.

Collecting uncollectables: Joachim Du Bellay

2020-10-14T16:00:11+02:00

Lists of wonders have circulated for millennia. Over and over, such inventories of spectacular man made constructions have been rewritten, re-edited and reimagi-ned. Both the wonders and the lists of wonders, preferably of the seven, have had a profound and long-lasting effect, and have been abundantly imitated, copied and reworked. Renaissance creative thinking was obsessed with the seven wonders of the ancient world, and early-modern Europe experienced a surge of visual and verbal depictions of wonders. This article is about a remarkable list of seven wonders, included in one of Joachim Du Bellay’s canonical poems on Roman antiquities (Antiquités de Rome), published in Paris in 1558. Du Bellay shapes his list of wonders by exploring pat-terns of both repetition and mutability. Almost imperceptibly, he starts suggesting connections between 16th-century Rome and distant civilizations. Through the eyes of a fictive traveller and collector, the poet venerates the greatness and la-ments the loss of ancient buildings, sites and works of art, slowly developing a ver-bal, visual and open-ended gallery, creating a collection of crumbling or vanished, mainly Roman, architecture. This poetic display of ruins and dust in the Eternal City is nourished by the attraction of the inevitable destruction of past splendour and beauty. In the sonnets, Du Bellay imitates classical models and patterns. Whi-le compiling powerful images and stories of destruction, he combines techniques associated with both a modern concept of copy and more ancient theories of co-pia. In this context, this article also explores whether Pliny’s Natural History might be a source for the imaginary collection of lost sites and wonders in Du Bellay’s Antiquités.

The Art of Copying: Five strategies for Transforming Originals in the Art Museum

2020-10-11T16:05:20+02:00

This article discusses copies within the field of art museums by way of mapping strategies for copy practices. This mapping leans heavily towards parts of the wri-tings of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Against the backdrop of this theoretical premise, the article distinguishes five main strategies. Firstly, the copies which of-ten are considered to be typical museum copies, characterize the strategy for the disseminating relation between original and copy, that is, reproductions, magnets, etc. This strategy implies how copy practices are closely integrated into museum practices in general. Secondly, the supplementing relation between original and copy will be introduced. This strategy frames, for example, artists’ citations of other works and forgeries. Both show that copy practices often lead to new originals, in principle, ad infinitum. Thirdly, this leads to the strategy for the displacing relation between original and copy which encompasses, for example, artistic reworkings of other artists’ originals and conservatorial restorations. This approach partly ex-cludes the copy and partly displaces the original, while still, unavoidably, referring to the latter. In general, this strategy signifies the latent instability of the origi-nal. Fourthly, the strategy for the informational relation between original and copy will be discussed as it has a vital function in terms of talking about museum originals and copies. This is the strategy which grants the original artifacts their status as museum objects. An informational copy is just as unique as an original object of art, and at the same time, it defines the original and is itself defined by this opposition. Lastly, the strategy for the imagined relation between original and copy follows. This strategy is dependent upon several of the previous approaches, and, in addition, handles signs that exist without explicit originals, as the strategy covers copies referring to originals which have disappeared, been destroyed, not seen yet, etc.; that is, this strategy produces images of originals not least by way of the disseminating relation between original and copy from the first strategy.

What is a ‘Good’ Copy of Edvard Munch’s Painting? Painting Reproductions on Display

2020-10-24T16:02:20+02:00

Paintings in museums might occasionally be replaced by a photoprint mimicking the original. This article is an investigation of what constitutes a good reproduction of an artwork (oil painting) that is meant to be displayed. The article discusses what the usefulness of reproductions depends on, applying the Valuation Studies approach, which means the primary concern is with the practice of valuing itself. In other words, the study focuses on how museum experts evaluate reproduc-tions of oil paintings. The article analyses three cases of displaying digitally prin-ted copies of Edvard Munch’s oil paintings between 2013 and 2015 in the Munch Museum and in the National Gallery in Oslo. The study is based on a series of semi-structured interviews with the experts, working at and for the museums, that were involved in producing and exhibiting of the photoprints: curators, con-servators, museum educators, and external manufacturers. The interviews were grouped into five clusters, which I have chosen to call registers of valuing following Frank Heuts and Annemarie Mol (2013). The described valuation practices have to do with delivering experiences to the public, obtaining mimetic resemblance, solving ethical aspects, exhibitions’ budget, and last but not least, with the time perspective.

Copies, Concepts and Time

2020-10-13T16:01:21+02:00

Copies are defined by their relation to an original. The understanding and evaluation of this relationship has been changing over time. A main argument of this article is that originals and copies are phenomena with no "natural" or essential meaning outside of their specific historical settings. The idea to be explored is how changing historicity regimes have transformed notions of originals and copies over time and how these differences also are reflected in the intrinsically temporal relation between the two concepts. The discussion will be framed by two theory sets. The first is Alexander Nagel and Christopher Woods investigation of two kinds of temporality that vied for dominance in works of art in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The second is Walter Benjamins discussion of artwork in the "age of mechanical reproduction", i.e. the twentieth century. The second half of the article seeks to add to the historical complexity described by both theory sets by introducing a concept of tradition and discussing the early modern ideals of exemplarity, emulation and copiousness.

Personal Utopia: The “Good Life” in Popular Religion and Literature in Contemporary Sweden

2020-10-10T16:05:19+02:00

This article examines the discourse of the “good life” in popular religion and literature in contemporary Sweden. The results indicate thnew spiritual movements (e.g. mindfulness and the Enneagram) situate traditional transcendental goals within the individual, immanent self and the utopian ideals (e.g. individual wellbeing and happiness) expressed in popular literature are to be achieved through changing individuals’ attitudes rather than their material and structural circumstances. Furthermore, this understanding of the individual relies on a culturally based discourse in which medicalized, therapeutic language, what Michel Foucault called “bio-power”, defines humanity and the human condition. This cultural discourse centers on the individual’s potential and responsibility to change dysfunctional habits, situations, and relationships, whereas structural, contextual, and situational solutions are ignored. The Swedish popular literature and religion examined here both express this discourse and constitute an important new form of authority when it comes to articulating new utopian ideals to relate to in everyday life, at work, and in family life.

If the Song has No Price, is it Still a Commodity? : Rethinking the Commodification of Digital Music

2020-10-10T16:07:22+02:00

In music streaming services like Spotify, discrete pieces of music no longer has a price, as has traditionally been the case in music retailing, both analog and digital. This article discusses the theoretical and practical implications of this shift towards subscriptions, starting from a critical review of recent literature dealing with the commodification of music. The findings have a relevance that is not limited to music or digital media, but also apply more broadly on the study of commodification. At the theoretical level, the article compares two ways of defining the commodity, one structural (Marx), one situational (Appadurai, Kopytoff), arguing for the necessity of a theory that can distinguish commodities from all that which is not (yet) commodified. This is demonstrated by taking Spotify as a case, arguing that it does not sell millions of different commodities to its users, but only one: the subscription itself. This has broad economic and cultural implications, of which four are highlighted: (1) The user of Spotify has no economic incentive to limit music listening, because the price of a subscription is the same regardless of the quantity of music consumed. (2) For the same reason, Spotify as a company cannot raise its revenues by making existing customers consume more of the product, but only by raising the number of subscribers, or by raising the price of a subscription. (3) Within platforms like Spotify, it is not possible to use differential pricing of musical recordings, as has traditionally been the case in music retail. Accordingly, record companies or independent artists hence can no longer compete for listeners by offering their music at a discount. (4) Within the circuit of capital. Spotify may actually be better understood as a commodity producer than as a distributor, implying a less symbiotic relationship to the recorded music industry.

More of the Same – On Spotify Radio

2021-06-23T17:03:18+02:00

Spotify Radio allows users to find new music within Spotify’s vast back-catalogue, offering a potential infinite avenue of discovery. Nevertheless, the radio service has also been disliked and accused of playing the same artists over and over. We decided to set up an experiment with the purpose to explore the possible limitations found within “infinite archives” of music streaming services. Our hypothesis was that Spotify Radio appears to consist of an infinite series of songs. It claims to be personalised and never-ending, yet music seems to be delivered in limited loop patterns. What would such loop patterns look like? Are Spotify Radio’s music loops finite or infinite? How many tracks (or steps) does a normal loop consist of? To answer these research questions, at Umeå University’s digital humanities hub, Humlab, we set up an intervention using 160 bot listeners. Our bots were all Spotify Free users. They literally had no track record and were programmed to listen to different Swedish music from the 1970s. All bots were to document all subsequent tracks played in the radio loop and (inter)act within the Spotify Web client as an obedient bot listener, a liker, a disliker, and a skipper. The article describes different research strategies when dealing with proprietary data. Foremost, however, it empirically recounts the radio looping interventions set up at Humlab. Essentially, the article suggests a set of methodologies for performing humanist inquiry on big data and black-boxed media services that increasingly provide key delivery mechanisms for cultural materials. Spotify serves as a case in point, yet principally any other platform or service could be studied in similar ways. Using bots as research informants can be deployed within a range of different digital scholarship, so this article appeals not only to media or software studies scholars, but also to digitally inclined cultural studies such as the digital humanities.

Tracking Gendered Streams

2020-10-16T15:59:14+02:00

One of the most prominent features of digital music services is the provision of personalized music recommendations that come about through the profiling of users and audiences. Based on a range of “bot experiments,” this article investigates if, and how, gendered patterns in music recommendations are provided by the streaming service Spotify. While our experiments did not give any strong indications that Spotify assigns different taste profiles to male and female users, the study showed that male artists were highly overrepresented in Spotify’s music recommendations; an issue which we argue prompts users to cite hegemonic masculine norms within the music industries. Although the results should be approached as historically and contextually contingent, we argue that they point to how gender and gendered tastes may be constituted through the interplay between users and algorithmic knowledge-making processes, and how digital content delivery may maintain and challenge gender relations and gendered power differentials within the music industries. Seen through the lens of critical research on software, music and gender performativity, the experiments thus provide insights into how gender is shaped and attributed meaning as it materializes in contemporary music streams.

Discovering Spotify - A Thematic Introduction

2020-10-26T16:02:19+01:00

No abstract available.

Negotiating identities through the ‘cultural practice’ of labia elongation among urban Shona women and men in contemporary Zimbabwe

2020-11-10T16:14:46+01:00

Dominant Eurocentric discourses on African traditional cultural practices linked to sexuality construct these practices as retrogressive for women in these localities. These discourses take the form of women and sexual rights promoted by some women activists and scholars, whose work mainly focuses on the so-called traditional rural women as victims of these gendered sexual practices. In many ways, such approaches manufacture and exaggerate differences between Western and African women, while reproducing colonial discourses that construct Africans as backward. This article interrogates the modern-traditional binary which underpin conventional representations of some sexual practices as cultural. Following African feminist scholars who argue for research which explores the significance and meanings such sexual practices hold for those women who engage in them, this article draws on a study I conducted with Shona speaking women and men in Zimbabwe who participated and/or were interested in the practice of labia elongation. The targeted women and men, in their 20s -30s, live in relatively affluent houses in Harare, and are identified as urban, modern and middle-class. The study sought to explore why such women (as well as men) who identify as modern were so interested and invested in a sexual practice that has often been constructed as traditional and cultural. By exploring how women and men invoke notions of culture and tradition, the article demonstrates the creative and complex ways in which the young adults position themselves in relation to this practice in particular, and in relation to gender and sexuality more generally.

(Un-)veiling the west: Burkini-gate, Princess Hijab and dressing as struggle for postsecular integration

2020-11-10T16:14:46+01:00

The ban of the burkini in the summer of 2016 in France is the latest stage in a long political history, where the French depreciation or fear of the veil, and of Islam, has come to play a more significant role since the end of the cold war. Unveiling female bodies at the beach in Nice expose conditioned values of the French republic. In this context, drawing black veils on public advertisements becomes a performative act commenting on consumerism, religion, secularity, and the imagined Muslim woman. In this article we discuss freedom and integration in “third spaces” via an analysis of “hijabisation” in street art and the official reactions against certain types of beachwear. In line with Talal Asad (2006) we want to raise the issue on how the secular state addresses the pain of people who are obliged to give up part of their religious identity to become acceptable. Race-thinking was once an explicit part of celebrated values like modernity, secularity, democracy and human rights. However, the fact that the idea of races has been erased from articulations of Western nations and international bodies does not mean that traces of race-thinking in the heritage from the enlightenment are gone. By following Princess Hijab and the “Burkini-gate” a nationalist fantasy intertwined with the idea of the secular state reveals itself and acts of un/dressing emerge as signs of integration revealing a challenged imperialist paradigm.

Decolonising the Rainbow Flag

2020-11-10T16:14:47+01:00

The aim of the article is to explore the location and the meaning given to the rainbow flag in places outside the hegemonic center. Through three case studies in the global North and South, held together by a multi-ethnographic approach, as well as a certain theoretical tension between the rainbow flag as a boundary object and/or a floating signifier, we seek to study where the flag belongs, to whom it belongs, with particular focus on how. The three case studies, which are situated in a city in the Global South (Buenos Aires), in a conflict war zone in the Middle East (the West Bank) and in a racialised neighbourhood in the Global North (Sweden), share despite their diversity a peripheral location to hegemonic forms of knowledge production regimes. Central to our analysis is how the rainbow flag is given a multitude of original and radical different meanings that may challenge the colonial/Eurocentric notions which up to a certain extent are embedded in the rainbow flag.

The Son’s Coming Home: Narrative Economies of Joseph Beuys’ Art

2020-10-12T15:59:41+02:00

This article deals with the narration of Joseph Beuys’ art in Germany. My focus is set on the ways that particular curatorial strategies have been applied to Beuys’ artistic practice in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. I contextualize the readings in the interests of different stakeholders involved in the rescaling of the artist’s heritage. Beuys’ framing in the two recent retrospective exhibitions in Berlin and Düsseldorf and the regular display of his works in the Hamburger Bahnhof leads me to argue that private collectors have become closely involved in the process of curating in novel ways, which in turn requires a new critical reading of exhibition practices. Narrative economy is a concept proposed for understanding these interests and their articulations in exhibition curation.

Rainbows of Resistance: LGBTQ Pride Parades Contesting Space in Post-Conflict Belfast

2020-11-10T16:14:47+01:00

The article seeks to demonstrate how marchers in the annual LGBTQ Pride Parade strategically contest and reclaim heteronormative public spaces in Belfast, Northern Ireland. There is an exploration of participants adapting transnational symbolic representations and discourses to the distinct national-local cultural milieu in which they are scripted and performed. The discursive frames, symbols, and performances of Belfast Pride are compared to those of sectarian parades in the city. The subaltern spatial performances and symbolic representations of Belfast Pride are depicted as confronting a universalized set of heteronormative discourses involving sexuality and gender identity, while at the same time contesting a particularized set of dominant local-national discourses related to both ethnonational sectarianism and religious fundamentalism in Northern Ireland.

The rainbow flag as friction: transnational imagined communities of belonging among Pakistani LGBTQ activists

2020-11-10T16:14:47+01:00

This article analyzes the frictions the rainbow flag creates between transnational, national and translocal discourses and materialities. It focuses on the ambivalent role that the transnational ‘rainbow’ space plays for community building for LGBTQ activists in in Pakistan. The rainbow flag can function as a way to mobilize an imagined transnational community of belonging, enabling people to politicize their experiences of discrimination as a demand of recognition directed at the state. But it can also enable homonationalism and transnational middle class formations that exclude groups of people, for example illiterates and people perceived of as traditional, such as Khwaja Siras. The article is based on auto-ethnographic reflections on encounters with activists in Pakistan, and critically discusses the problem of feeling ‘too comfortable’, as white, Western, middle-class researchers, exploring ‘imperial narratives’ dominating the feminist and LGBTQ activist transnational imagined community of belonging. It argues for the importance of recognizing the transnational space as a space in its own right, with different positions, communities and conflicts stretching around the globe.

Music, Memory, and Affect Attunement: Connecting Kurdish Diaspora in Stockholm

2020-11-10T16:14:49+01:00

This article takes its point of departure in Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of collective memory, adding the distinction made by Jan Assmann between communicative and cultural memory, and Alfred Schütz’s notion of communication, understood here as the sonorous communication of bodily affect. By combining and cross-fertilizing the concept of memory with that of affective experience, our aim is to take a new and productive perspective on music’s role as and in cultural memory as well as the crucial role played by affect attunement. As examples, we use interviews and observations from an on-going research project on the role of music in ethnically-based associations in Sweden. In addition, we show how music often transgresses the categorical distinctions of collective memory. The main questions we ask are a) to the extent that there is a difference between music serving as a means for and as content of collective memory (what the memory is “about”), how can we account for and explain this difference? and b) how does verbally-narrated content relate to the sound of music when it comes to collective memory?

The Performative Force of Cultural Products: Subject Positions and Desires Emerging From Engagement with the Manga Boys’ Love and Yaoi

2020-11-10T16:14:48+01:00

This article deals with questions about the performative power of cultural products that travel the world. The Japanese manga genre Boys’ Love and Yaoi has gained a broad readership outside of Japan during recent decades. This has cultivated an image of Japan as sexually radical and ‘as more than Japan’, something which has produced alternative subject positions and practises regarding gender and sexuality among Swedish Boys’ Love/Yaoi followers. With the help of the concept hyperreality and elaborations on materiality within feminist theories, this article discusses: Which images of Japan and Sweden are produced as manga Boys’ Love/Yaoi – as cultural products – travel from Japan to Sweden? Which subject positions and forms of desires emerge? In order to understand how cultural products create new subjectivities, images and desires, we also ask: What can a sharper focus on materiality and the agency of matter add to the understanding of the concept of hyperreality and the construction of new realities? We argue that embodied experiences of certain subject positions and desires challenge the idea of the hyperreal as a surface phenomenon. Further, the article shows how the image of “Japan” is often coloured by the desires that West cultivates about the ‘other’.

What Enhancement Techniques Suggest about the Good Death

2020-11-10T16:14:50+01:00

The contemporary increase in life expectancy in Western countries has led to an intensified focus on good ageing processes as a way to manage ageing populations. We argue that while qualifications of the ageing process such as active and healthy ageing endeavour to compress morbidity through enhancement techniques, the idea of the good old age also implicitly tells a tale about the ‘good’ death. We explore how current discourses depict old age as an active, engaged and independent life phase and construct a specific idea of the good death as one that is quick and painless. By engaging with literature on ageing, death and enhancement technologies as well as current Danish healthcare initiatives, we examine the paradoxical, contemporary notion of death as natural, quick, painless and controllable. Danish rehabilitation programmes are provided as an example of specific enhancement techniques that through motivation and physical activity orchestrate the good death in a body that has been as healthy as possible for as long as possible. However, when such techniques become a moral injunction rather than a choice, questions arise concerning the relationship between autonomy and death. We argue that the discursive construction of the good death happens in tandem with enhancement techniques that postpone death, and that this postponement of death has increasingly become more of an imperative than an autonomous decision.

Black Hawk-Down: Adaptation and the Military-Entertainment Complex

2020-11-10T16:14:42+01:00

This article investigates the non-fiction book Black Hawk Down (1999) by Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down the movie (2001) directed by Ridley Scott, and the computer game Delta Force: Black Hawk Down (2003). The article suggests that while the movie and the game must be studied as adaptations of the first text, the tools developed by adaptation studies, and that are typically used to study the transfer of narratives from one media form to another, do not suffice to fully describe the ways in which these narratives change between iterations. To provide a more complete account of these adaptations, the article therefore also considers the shifting political climate of the 9/11 era, the expectations from different audiences and industries, and, in particular, the role that what James Der Derian has termed the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (MIME-Net) plays in the production of narrative. The article thus investigates how a specific political climate and MIME-Net help to produce certain adaptations. Based on this investigation, the article argues that MIME-Net plays a very important role in the adaptation of the Black Hawk Down story by directing attention away from historical specificity and nuance, towards the spectacle of war. Thus, in Black Hawk Down the movie and in Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, authenticity is understood as residing in the spectacular rendering of carnage rather than in historical facts. The article concludes that scholarly investigations of the adaptation of military narratives should combine traditional adaptation studies tools with theory and method that highlight the role that politics and complexes such as MIME-Net play within the culture industry.

“It usually works out, but you never know”. Emotion Work as a Strategy for Coping in the Insecure Artistic Career.

2020-11-10T16:14:43+01:00

This article explores how contemporary Swedish visual artists manage and make sense of career insecurity through emotion work. The specific emotions discussed in the material are trust, hope and luck. Emotion work is related to coping in an increasingly insecure world of work in late modern capitalism, which has been theorized as relying on the creativity, passion and subjectivity of workers. Through analysing what the artists anticipate of their future careers, the study found the main desire of the artists to be the continuation of their creative endeavour—an endeavour not necessarily related to professional success but rather to identity formation. This understanding of success forms part of two overarching discourses found in the material: art as non-work discourse and the art world as arbitrary discourse, which both relate to certain emotional work when failing/succeeding to uphold the artistic creation. The prestigious arts education of the respondents is analysed as part of sustaining hope of continuation when future career prospects seem grim. Trust and luck are analysed as emotion work in relation to having experiences of success, even though the art world is discursively framed as arbitrary. The concluding argument of the article is that understanding emotion work in relation to the insecure or even failed career can shed light on resources related to social position rather than properties of the individual psyche.

Revitalising Borders: Memory, Mobility and Materiality in a Latvian-Russian Border Region

2020-10-12T16:04:21+02:00

In this paper I investigate how an international border is ‘revitalised’ in political discourses as opposed to lived experiences. Based on narratives I have collected from border dwellers on both sides of the current border between Latvia and Russia and placing them into a broader context of current border debates, I analyse how geographical and social mobility is remembered from Soviet times and reworked in current contexts. I argue that while politically the border is revitalised through abandoning and forgetting the Soviet past and through the idea of constant threats in the future, locally it is revitalised through giving a life to the abandoned: memories of ‘vigorous times’ in life-courses and material things. People who dwell at the border did not move themselves: the international border moved several times in one century leaving border dwellers’ memories and significant places on the ‘other’ side. I focus on how these borders were crossed in the past, how they are (not) crossed now, and the social meanings assigned to these circumstances. In the current context I follow diverse paths of reasoning that describe how the uneven flow of goods and people through the Latvian-Russian border shapes the power dynamic against which the people living in the border area used to reconstruct imaginaries of ‘Soviet times’ versus ‘Europe’ and ‘vigorous times’ versus decline.

Life-as-Lived Today: Perpetual (Undesired) Liminality of the Half-widows of Kashmir

2020-10-13T16:02:07+02:00

According to Victor Turner, all liminality must eventually dissolve, for it is a state of great intensity that cannot exist very long without some sort of structure to stabilize it. This paper takes his lead and attempts to describe the liminal status of those women, the whereabouts of whose husbands are not known (they are locally referred to as ‘half-widows’) in the conflict zone of Kashmir, India. The article examines the concept of liminality based on life as lived today by these half-widows and shows how the effects of liminality operate in their day to day life, making them extremely vulnerable victims. In this, it is an attempt to expand upon the concept of liminality, originally linked almost exclusively to rites of passage. Furthermore, this paper reflects on the idea of permanent liminality that has been elaborated by sociologist Arpad Szakolczai. The narratives of the half-widows of Kashmir provide an example of how they are trapped in a form of “permanent liminality” far beyond what was initially defined as a “temporal state”.

Introduction: Rupture and Exile: Permanent Liminality in Spaces for Movement and Abandonment

2020-10-13T16:02:23+02:00

No abstract available.

Seeking Dhasa; Finding Lhasa: Liminality and Narrative in the Tibetan Refugee Capital of Dharamsala

2020-10-12T16:04:10+02:00

This article explores the role of narrative and narrativity in stabilising identity in an exile setting, read here as a way to avert what Bjørn Thomassen calls the ‘danger’ inherent to liminality. It does this by analysing the shape and visualscape of the little Himalayan town of Dharamsala, which serves as the secular and religious ‘capital’ of Tibetan exile. It attempts to decode the narratives which allow ‘Dhasa’, as Dharamsala is colloquially known, to cohere and correspond to its metonymically aspirational other – Lhasa, the capital of old Tibet. There can be read in this act of assonant naming the beginnings of a narrative geared towards generating nostalgia for a lost homeland, alluding to the possibility of its reclamation and restitution in exile. This article explores how this narrative is evidence of the fact that it is in indeterminacy; in liminality in other words, that the ‘structuration’ that Thomassen proposes, becomes possible at all. Even as it alludes to the impossibility of transplanting cultures whole, the article also examines closely the Foucauldian notion of ‘trace residue’ inherent to ruptures in prior epistemes, treating this idea as central to creating new-‘old’ orientations for this refugee community in exile. Following Thomassen and Szakolczai, liminality is here treated as a concept applicable to time as well as place; individuals as well as communities, and social ‘events’ or changes of immense magnitude. It is this notion of liminality that the article proposes has to be a central concept in any exploration of exile groups which have to live in the spaces between the shorn identity markers of the past – rooted as these must be in a lost homeland – and the present, where they must be iterated or man-ufactured anew.

On the Edge of Existence: Malian Migrants in the Maghreb

2020-10-11T16:07:40+02:00

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Malian migrants and migration brokers in Mali, Algeria, Morocco, and France, this article investigates life in exile on the edge of Europe. Zooming in on the experiences of interlocutors in Morocco and Algeria, the article will explore the experiential dimensions of living in an extended liminality. Anthropologically, life in so-called places of transit, such as the Maghreb countries, has often been dealt with through the lens of liminality. In this article my aim is to build on the insights from such endeavors, and re-orient the focus by illuminating what this specific type of permanent liminality entails. I posit that a more suitable term to call this is ‘limbo’. This, I argue, consists of three main features. First, the motivation for leaving Mali is for most migrants embedded in the lack of opportunities for social mobility: the Malian youth who end up leaving, are in Honwana’s words, stuck in ‘waithood’ at home, in what many argue is a liminal social position. Second, social and political structures are not absent in the Maghreb, rather they are quite discernable and can be seen as continuations and mimicking of existing structures. Third, experiences of dramatic ruptures with humanity and morality are key characteristics of life on the edge of Europe.

Temporally Adrift and Permanently Liminal: Relations, Distalgia and a U.S. University as Site of Transition and Frontier

2020-10-07T15:31:26+02:00

This article seeks to explore temporal reconceptualizations and forms of nostalgia that first-year university men are experiencing and creating. It will explore the ways that time can be conceived of in relation to the present and a future that is not-yet-existent. The article takes as its starting point ethnographic fieldwork in the 21st century at a private, Catholic university in the U.S. and, in particular, men in an all-male residence hall. In focusing on this hall, it means to locate and localize the thinking in the context of the 21st century as well as within the U.S., including neoliberalism as a social and economic method of relating. Through the exploration of these men’s envisioning of themselves as their future selves and the way they review the self that is now, this article makes a claim that they are – through both their actions, ways of relating, and the societal positioning – multiply liminal. Further, it will explore the way that through this temporal representation they are endowing themselves as permanently liminal both currently and in the future. The article situates these men amidst the university as an institution, as well as seeking to elucidate the importance of this temporal creation as a building of forms of transition and frontier.

Photography Reframed

2020-10-14T16:00:52+02:00

This article discusses the benefits of analysing photography as mediated, reproduced and entangled in media systems, and consequently as part of a larger media culture. Moreover it combines technological considerations drawn from media archaeology with art historical analysis focusing on visual aesthetics. It considers two mediating devices for photography in the nineteenth century, the photo album and the illustrated press. As displayed, a media historical perspective airs new interpretations and understandings of processes and practices in relation to photography in the period. Thus what from a photo historical point of view might appear as an important, paradigmatic invention or a critical technical delimitation might from a media historical perspective seem to have been merely a small adjustment in a chain of gradual improvements and experiments in the dissemination and consumption of images. Thus photographic media specificity delimited by technical procedures and certain materials outputs, which was so strongly emphasized in the twentieth century, was evidently not fixed to materiality and rather opened and negotiated in the nineteenth century. Accordingly, responsiveness to the literal and figurative framing of photography as mediated, discloses other photo histories.

Culture Unbound Vol. 8 Editorial

2020-10-15T16:00:27+02:00

No abstract available.

Towards an integrated approach to emergency management: interdisciplinary challenges for research and practice

2020-10-12T16:05:15+02:00

This article presents an interdisciplinary vision for large-scale integrated emergency management that has been inspired by the transition from platform centric to integrated operations in the oil and gas fields, which uses remote emergency control centres collaborating virtually with local responders. The article discusses some of the most salient research challenges for integrated emergency management, including the role of mobile technology, human-centred sensing, citizen participation and social media, and the socio-cultural determinants of disaster management. The purpose of this article is to frame an integrated emergency management approach that adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, including human computer interaction, information systems, computer science, development studies and organization science employing different methodologies.Most importantly, we need to better understand the socio-cultural determinants of how people prepare to, respond and perceive disasters, in order to evaluate whether and what kind of information and communication technology (ICT) support is appropriate. There is need for more research as to why in some regions local people ignore official orders to evacuate, and rather follow the advice of local leaders, elders or religious leaders. In other instances, disasters are seen as ‘acts of God’ thus shaping disaster preparedness and response.

Political Communication in Disasters: A Question of Relationships

2020-10-13T16:02:57+02:00

Politicians are both a help and hindrance in the provision of information to the public before, during and after disasters. For example, in Australia, the Premier of the State of Queensland, Anna Bligh, was lauded for her leadership and public communication skills during major floods that occurred late in 2010 and in early 2011 (de Bussy, Martin and Paterson 2012). Similarly, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was praised for his leadership following 9/11. This is in contrast to the poor performance of political leaders during Hurricane Katrina (Cole and Fellows 2008, Olson and Gawronski 2010). Political actors’ lack of credibility and their poor situational awareness contributed to the problems. The involvement of political leaders in disaster communications is also problematic from the perspective of emergency agencies. For example, politicians who move their communication position from supportive to tactical can take over the role of providing official disaster information, such as evacuation warnings, without sufficient expertise, credibility or situational knowledge. This paper builds on the expanding body of research into the politics of disasters by exploring relationships with political actors from the perspective of emergency managers. Drawing on interviews with emergency agencies in Australia, Germany, Norway and the UK, we firstly examine when and what a politician should communicate during disasters and secondly, offer six principles toward a roadmap of involving political actors in the disaster communication process when life and property is at stake.

Multiscalar Narratives of a Disaster: From Media Amplification to Western Participation in Asian Tsunamis

2020-10-14T16:01:14+02:00

The international recovery system responds differently to disasters with similar characteristics. It answers to specific motivations that are not necessarily connected to the nature of the disaster. The variability of the answers given not only depends on the type of disaster but also, in particular, on the local social structure and on the transcalar narrative of the disaster used to move communities not directly affected to action. This paper therefore analyses the level of Western involvement in two Asian tsunami recovery plans and the role of the media in attracting Western private donations. To this end, Italian involvement in the two cases is discussed. Beginning with a literature review to support the argument that the media are crucial in stimulating private participation through ‘spectacularizing’ the disaster, this paper illustrates that, when spectacularization is insufficient, the media additionally adopts the strategy of ‘transposition’, leading to ‘appropriation’ of the event. In particular, during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, the transposition became the ‘Westernization’ of the narrative of the disaster. The process of transposition or Westernization, however, did not happen with the same modalities in the narrative of the Tohoku tsunami of 2011. In this case, the focus was more on the technological disaster that followed the natural disaster. The author concludes that emotional transposition of the disasters by the media played an important role in stimulating private donations and in spurring governmental relief in both the disasters. Foreign governments, however, are mainly moved by other factors such as ‘flag policy’ or what Olsen et al. (2004) identified as the concept of ‘donor interests’.

Who’s Calling the Emergency? The Black Panthers, Securitisation and the Question of Identity

2020-10-13T16:03:22+02:00

This article intervenes in a debate in cultural disaster studies that interprets disasters as objects, whose study opens up an understanding of societies’ fears, anxieties and vulnerabilities. Widening the scope of disaster studies, it proposes to view disaster not as an object but as an optics, a matrix that frames elements of social life as an emergency. Presenting the case of the American Black Panther Party for Self-Defense through a framework of security studies, the article explores the Black Panthers’ politics as a process of societal securitisation that allowed African Americans to mobilise politically by proclaiming an emergency. It traces a political trajectory that ranged from an early endorsement of revolutionary violence to the promotion of community services and casts this journey as a negotiation of the question of identity and ontological security in times of crisis. Drawing on Black studies and on stigma theory, it suggests finally, that the Panthers’ abandonment of violence represented a shift from identity-politics to an engagement with structural positionality.

Avatar in the Amazon - Narratives of Cultural Conversion and Environmental Salvation between Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

2020-10-15T16:00:38+02:00

In 2010 the New York Times reported that ‘[t]ribes of Amazon Find an Ally Out of “Avatar”’, James Cameron. The alliance was against the building of Belo Monte, a hydroelectricdam in the Xingu River in Brazil. Cameron made a documentary about Belo Monte, A Message from Pandora. Here he states that Avatar becomes real in the struggle against the dam. This appears to confirm U. K. Heise’s observation that the ‘Amazon rainforest has long functioned as a complex symbol of exotic natural abundance, global ecological connectedness, and environmental crisis’. This construal, however, downplays the ‘symbols’ cultural components. In this article I show that the image of an ecological ‘rainforest Indian’ and a particular kind of culture constitutes a crucial part of the Amazon as ‘a complex’ cross-disciplinary ‘symbol’. Firstly, I examine how an Amazonian topology (closeness to nature, natural cultures) is both a product of an interdisciplinary history, and a place to speak from for ethno-political activist. Next I analyze how Amazonian cultures have been turned into ‘ethnological isolates’ representing a set of grand theoretical problems in anthropology, not least concerning the nature/culture-distinction, and how environmentalism has deployed the same topology. Finally I examine how Avatar and one of its cinematic intertexts, John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest, is used as a model to understand the struggle over the Belo Monte. In a paradoxical way the symbolic power of indigenous people in ecological matters here appears to be dependent upon a non-relation, and a reestablishment of clear cut cultural boundaries, where ‘the tribal’ is also associated with the human past. Disturbingly such symbolic exportation of solutions is consonant with current exportations of the solution of ecological problems to ‘other places’.

Keeping Count of the End of the World: A Statistical Analysis of the Historiography, Canonisation, and Historical Fluctuations of Anglophone Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Disaster Narratives

2020-10-16T15:59:55+02:00

Over the past decade, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic disaster narratives seem to have become more popular than ever before. Since its inception in secular form in the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, the genre has experienced a number of fluctuations in popularity, especially in the twentieth century. Inspired by Franco Moretti’s influential Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), the aim of this study is to analyse the historiography, canonisation, and historical fluctuations of Anglo-phone apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic disaster narratives in literature and film through an elementary statistical analysis of previous surveys of the field. While the small database on which the study is based essentially consists of a meta-study of historiography and canonisation within the genre, disclosing which works have been considered to be the most important, the data is also used to assess the periods in which the most influential, innovative, and/or popular works were published or released. As an attempt is also made to explain some of the fluctuations in the popularity of the genre - with an eye to historical, cultural, medial, social, and political contexts – perhaps the study might help us understand why it is that we as a society seem to need these stories ever so often.

At the Mercy of Gaia: Deep Ecologial Unrest and America’s fall as Nature’s Nation in Kingdom of the Spiders

2020-10-12T16:06:18+02:00

This paper looks as the animal horror genre as a way to discuss current notions of ecology in relation to a specific American idea of being “Nature’s Nation”. The central work for the discussion is the movie Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) by John Cardos, which depicts how a small Arizona town is taken over by a “swarm” of tarantulas. Without any obvious explanation the spiders slowly but steadily invade the town and start killing both other animals and humans until they have completely covered the town in their web. The paper connects the movie to a long tradition of fiction describing how nature turns on humans and reverses the power relation between man and nature that is fundamental to modernity. Moreover, the paper connects the movie to Maurice Maeterlincks ideas of swarm communities as mani-fested by ants and termites to argue that these communities are ecologically superior to the the communities of man-made civilisation. Finally, the paper discusses Kingdom of the Spiders and animal horror in general in relation to recent ideas of non-human ecologies and critiques of anthropocentrism and makes the point that these works of fiction serve as both dramatic and philosophical visions of a world without humans.

Fears of Disaster and (Post-)Human Raciologies in European Popular Culture (2001-2013)

2020-10-18T16:00:03+02:00

This article aims at mapping the impact of ‘fears of disasters and crisis’ on European self-representations in terms of racial stereotypes, ‘white fantasies’, gender hierarchies, and heteronormativities. Its methodology is a critical discourse analysis of texts – specifically television series such as the BBC’s Dead Set (2009) and the first season of BBC US and UK, In the Flesh, (2013) and movies such as 28 Days Later (2002), L’Horde (2009), and World War Z (2013) – read through the lens of postcolonial theories, critical race and whiteness studies, the concepts of political philosophy and the theoretical insights of post-human feminism. This composite theoretical framework permits a grasp of gendered, racialised and classed fantasies behind the narratives of catastrophe and the visions of the post-apocalyptic world(s) the catastrophe is supposed to bring to life; it also allows an analysis of the meaning and articulations of catastrophe and post-world spatial constructions, and the latter’s relation to actual and imagined social hierarchies (gender, colour and class of the survivors). These are examined in order to understand whose eyes we are expected to imagine and experience the crisis/catastrophe through; the geographies of catastrophe and of post-world(s) (where in the world, and why); the relation between the undead and the living; life amongst the living before the undead threat; and the way protagonists look at the laws, rule, governmentalities, and use of violence in the past, present and future societies. These are a few of the themes that this article discusses in an attempt to uncover what fantasies of the present are hidden behind present memories of the future.

Introduction: Cultures of Disaster

2020-10-16T16:00:16+02:00

No abstract available.

Resilience and Complexity: Conjoining the Discourses of Two Contested Concepts

2020-10-07T15:31:46+02:00

This paper explores two key concepts: resilience and complexity. The first is understood as an emergent property of the latter, and their inter-relatedness is discussed using a three tier approach. First, by exploring the discourse of each concept, next, by analyzing underlying relationships and, finally, by presenting the Cynefin Framework for Sense-Making as a tool of explicatory potential that has already shown its usefulness in several contexts. I further emphasize linking the two concepts into a common and, hopefully, useful concept. Furthermore, I argue that a resilient system is not merely robust. Robustness is a property of simple or complicated systems characterized by predictable behavior, enabling the system to bounce back to its normal state following a perturbation. Resilience, however, is an emergent property of complex adaptive systems. It is suggested that this distinction is important when designing and managing socio-technological and socio-economic systems with the ability to recover from sudden impact.

On the Representation of an Early Modern Dutch Storm in Two Poems

2020-10-07T15:32:03+02:00

On 19th December 1660, a severe storm raged over the Dutch isle of Texel, causing severe damage. It proceeded to destroy parts of the city of Amsterdam. Both the sailor and merchant Gerrit Jansz Kooch and the priest Joannes Vollenhove wrote a poem about this natural disaster, presumably independently of each other. The poets perceived the storm differently: Kooch, an eyewitness of the storm, matter-of-factly portrays the calamity and details a feud between his son-in-law and a colleague to commemorate the day of the disaster. In contrast, Vollenhove personifies the winter storm and struggles to understand it. Their poems are valuable sources for a cultural historical analysis. After a brief review of historical severe storm research, I will analyse these poems from a cultural historical point of view. I will shed light on how this severe storm was represented poetically in the Early Modern Period.

Inhibited Intentionality and Cultural work: Reconsidering Gender and Female Success

2020-10-12T16:07:13+02:00

In this paper we suggest ways to reconsider the question regarding the relationship gender and creativity. First, we review the theoretical literature on gender and creativity, concluding that the dominant thought is that men are prevalent in making creative achievements, particularly when connected to the notion of ‘genius.’ Second, we review the empirical studies on gender and creativity, a body of literature that comes to the same overall conclusion. Third, we present an empirical case, a Scandinavian design school in which the relationship between gender and creativity is more nuanced, complex, and more dependent on context than both the theoretical and empirical literature would suggest. Based on this case, traits that are often described as hindrances for female agency and creativity are reconsidered. We conclude by suggesting that in certain creative contexts women use their ‘hindrances’ to produce fruitful strategies for overcoming historical gender inequalities, thus turning Iris Young’s classical argument--that women embody limitations--to give a productive and positive account of how women may become successful in creative work.

(Re)Shaping History in Bosnian and Herzegovinian Museums

2020-10-12T16:06:52+02:00

The current article explores how political changes in the past 130 years have shaped and reshaped three major museums in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The overall aim is to describe structural processes of national museum building in BiH and the ways the museological representation of history is connected to state and nation making and to political transitions and crises. The analysed museums are the National Museum of BiH, the History Museum of BiH, and the Museum of the Republic of Srpska. The source material analysed consists of the directories and the titles of exhibitions; secondary material, which describes previous exhibitions; and virtual museum tours. The article illustrates that during the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, which established the National Museum in 1888, the museum played an important part in the representation of Bosnian identity (bosnjastvo). After World War II, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, all three analysed museums were summoned to interpret the past in accordance with the guidelines of the communist regime. Since the 1990s, a highly ethnicized process of identity building and of the musealization of heritage, and history permeates all three museums analysed here. When it comes to the central exhibition-themes following the 1990s war, one could conclude that whereas the National Museum and the History Museum highlight the recent creation of an independent BiH and ostracize BIH-Serbs, the Museum of the Republic of Srpska asserts the ostensible distinctiveness of the Republic of Srpska and excludes the narratives about BiH as a unified and independent nation-state. If an agreement about the future of BiH and its history is to be reached, a step towards multi-vocal historical narratives has to be made from both sides.

Moving Forward: A Feminist Analysis of Mobile Music Streaming

2020-10-18T16:00:14+02:00

The importance of understanding gender, space and mobility as co-constructed in public space has been emphasized by feminist researchers (Massey 2005, Hanson 2010). And within feminist theory materiality, affect and emotions has been described as central for experienced subjectivity (Ahmed 2012). Music listening while moving through public space has previously been studied as a way of creating a private auditory bubble for the individual (Bull 2000, Cahir & Werner 2013) and in this article feminist theory on emotion (Ahmed 2010) and space (Massey 2005) is employed in order to understand mobile music streaming. More specifically it discusses what can happen when mobile media technology is used to listen to music in public space and investigates interconnectedness of bodies, music, technology and space. The article is based on autoethnographic material of mobile music streaming in public and concludes that a forward movement shaped by happiness is a desired result of mobile music streaming. The valuing of ‘forward’ is critically examined from the point of feminist theory and the failed music listening moments are also discussed in terms of emotion and space.

My Goodness, My Heritage! Constructing Good Heritage in the Irish Economic Crisis

2020-10-13T16:04:19+02:00

In 2008, the Republic of Ireland entered a severe financial crisis partly as a part of the global economic crisis. Since then, it has seen large raises in income taxes and cuts in state spending on health, welfare, education and on heritage, which has suffered relatively large cuts. This implies a need for rethinking choices and prioritisations to cope with the changing circumstances. Across Europe, the effects of the crisis on heritage, or the whole cultural sector, have yet mostly been highlighted in general or supposed terms rather than empirically analysed. But what actually happens to how heritage is conceptualised in times of crisis? Inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper explores representation of and argumentation for heritage in Irish state heritage policies pre and post the recession 2008. Much concerns regarding heritage management are discursively shaped. Policies, stating the authorised viewpoint, are thus key in the construction of heritage and its values in society. Recently, research has highlighted a shift towards more instrumentality in cultural policy due to wider societal changes. A crisis could influence such development. The analysis departs from an often-stated notion of heritage as a part of the Irish national recovery, but what does that imply? Focus is therefore put on how different representations of heritage and its values are present, argued for and compete in a situation with increasing competition regarding relevance and support. The paper shows how heritage matters are refocused, streamlined and packaged as productive, good-for-all, unproblematic and decomplexified in order to be perceived and valued as part of the national recovery. This includes privileging certain instrumental values, foremost economic, by means of specificity, space and quantification, while heritage’s contribution to social life, education or health, although often mentioned, are downplayed by being expressed in much more vague terms.

Introduction: Studying Junctures of Motion and Emotion

2020-10-19T16:00:11+02:00

No abstract available.

Modes and Moods of Mobility: Tourists and Commuters

2020-10-13T16:05:14+02:00

What can we learn from comparing different modes and moods of travel, among, for example, tourists and commuters? This paper contrasts these two very different kinds of mobility, and the ways in which they organise both motion and emotion. It is not only a question about how people interact with various systems of transport, but also how materialities and affects work together. An important topic is the question of how people acquire travelling skills. How do they learn to be a tourist or a commuter, to handle a train ride, navigate a transit space, or interact with strangers? A good reason to contrast commuters and tourists is also because they have often been studied within very different research paradigms. How can these different research traditions be put into a dialogue with each other, and help to develop methods for capturing the often elusive ways in which motion and emotion work together?

Towards a Postdigital Sensibility: How to get Moved by too Much Music

2020-10-14T16:02:17+02:00

The article explores the affective consequences of the new mode of instant access to enormous levels of musical recordings in digital format. It is suggested that this “musical superabundance” might weaken the individual’s ability to be affected by music in everyday life, while at the same time leading to a renewed interest in collective experience, in ways which are not limited to established notions of musical “liveness”. According to a theory of affect influenced by Spinoza, what is at stake is the capacity of the body to be affected by music. The article proposes that a renegotiated relationship between collective and individual modes of experiencing music can be conceptualized with help of Spinoza’s distinction between two kinds of affections: actions and passions. After scrutinizing the interface of hardware like Apple’s Ipod and online services like Spotify, the article proceeds by discussing three musical practices which can all be understood as responses to the superabundance of musical recordings: (1) the ascetic practice of “No Music Day”; (2) the revival of cassette culture; (3) the “bass materialism” associated with the music known as dubstep. While none of these approaches provide any solution to the problem of abundance, they can still be understood as attempts to cultivate a “postdigital sensibility”. The article tries to conceptualize the postdigital in a way that transcends the narrower notion of “post-digital aesthetics” that has recently been gaining popularity. Finally, it is argued that such a sensibility has a political significance in its potential to subvert the contemporary processes of commodification.

Mobile Misfortune

2020-10-15T16:01:26+02:00

This article examines how the emergent cocaine trade in Bissau, the capital of the west African country of Guinea-Bissau, has become entangled with and trickled into the life worlds, hopes and fears of the city’s many impoverished young men. The article is divided into two parts. While the first part looks at the predicament of youth and the hope of migration in Bissau, the second illuminates the anguish of deportation and the despair of being forcefully ‘displaced back home.’ Following in the footsteps of the young men that seek to navigate the cocaine trade, in order to obtain better lives for themselves and their families, it shows how involvement in the cocaine trade is both a curse and a catalyst. Though trading the drug may facilitate migration and mobility, generating social being and worth in the process, it is an activity that is haunted by the threat of deportation and the termination of the mobility it enables. This article, thus, looks at the motives and manners in which young men in Bissau become caught up in transnational flows of cocaine. It shows how motion is emotively anchored and affectively bound: tied to and directed toward a feeling of worth and realisation of being, and how migration from the global South often has negative potentiality as an end-point via the ascription of illegality and condition of deportability that shade it.

To Practice Mobility - On a Small Scale

2020-10-16T16:00:27+02:00

Children’s perspectives are practically absent in new mobility studies. In this article, I wish to describe and analyse how a number of children handle having to move between homes, parents and siblings, and how they practically, emotionally and socially navigate in this changeable landscape. My aim is to explore mobility as an embodied and emotional practice in which children employ different strategies. I focus on bodily micropractices, routines and coping strategies, the intermediate space that occurs on their continual journeys, and the feeling of being dispensable. It is an ethnographic exploration of how mobile and domestic lives are intertwined – on a small scale.

Body Image as Strategy for Engagement in Social Media

2020-10-07T15:32:17+02:00

Worldwide, the use of digital communication networks has been a key strategy in activist events involving demonstrations. Its use was evident in the media’s repeated publication of pictures taken on demonstrators’ mobile phones during actions that have overthrown heads of state during the Arab Spring in 2011. In countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, social network websites and mobile communication devices (phones and notebooks) were used widely for organizing participants and for recording events. This work intends to analyze not only how communication technologies have contributed to the emergence of such events but also how image production can be interpreted in such environments. Since the use of social media in protests caught the attention of broadcasting media in 2009 during demonstrations in Iran, a strong connection can be noticed between the content circulating through digital communication technologies and the body. For images produced during the Arab Spring, the same is observed with a series of strategies connecting body image and social mobilization. Our intention is to contribute to the debate of political images, considering the way they have been produced in contemporary society, which deals with a complex environment composed of communication technologies, social organization, and the body itself.

Introduction: Circulating Stuff on Second-hand, Vintage and Retro Markets

2020-10-16T16:01:00+02:00

No abstract available.

Culture Unbound Vol. 7 Editorial

2020-10-16T16:01:11+02:00

No abstract available.

Charity Shops and the Imagined Futures of Objects: How Second-Hand Markets Influence Disposal Decisions when Emptying a Parent’s House

2020-10-07T15:37:22+02:00

This article explores the processes whereby things are donated, or not donated, to charity shops. I draw on in-depth interviews conducted with adults who have sorted through the houses of older family members who have moved into residential accommodation, and in some cases subsequently died. The affective qualities of objects and the informants’ responsibilities to be ‘good’ family members by ensuring ‘safe passage’ for their parents’ possessions worked to ensure that many objects did not enter the second hand market, but were preserved within the family or wider social networks. Competing instincts to be ‘responsible consumers’ by not keeping things unnecessarily, worked to ‘move things along’ into charity shops, where informants believed the objects could come to be valued and singularised by other people. By providing an imagined future where goods can continue to be useful and have the opportunity to extend their biographical life, I argue that charity shops and other second-hand markets can help people to dispose of objects which they do not want to keep, but which they find difficult to throw away.

Reusing Textiles: on Material and Cultural Wear and Tear

2020-10-13T16:06:19+02:00

Focusing on Swedish context, this article discusses contemporary practices connected to clothes and home textiles that are no longer in use, comparing them to reusing practices from the middle of the nineteenth century and onwards. The focus is on how the textiles are objects for different sorting processes in private homes as well as on a flea market, and people’s ethical concerns connected to these processes. Until the early 1970’s the skills of mending, altering and patching was common knowledge, to women at least. The reusing processes were about wear and tear considerations from a material point of view. Today there are many more clothing and home textiles items in circulation, which have to be taken care of. To handle and sort textiles seems, among other things, to be about coping with different feelings connected with guilt and bad conscience. To avoid these feelings people are seeking ways of letting the textiles circulate in order to be reused by others.

Montreal Modern: Retro Culture and the Modern Past in Montreal

2020-10-15T16:02:09+02:00

Through analyses of the retro scenes in Montreal, Canada, the article discusses retro culture’s role as cultural memory. It is shown how Montreal’s cultural identity is formed by memories of modern culture such as the Red-light and Sin City reputation of the illicit nightlife of the 1940s and 1950s, and the space age modernism of the 1960s following the Expo 67 and Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. This is reflected in the city’s thriving retro culture through the study of two groups of retro shops. In circulating specific memories and objects in a specific context, retro is an important negotiation of the past in the present. Especially, it is stated that the retro culture displays “local accents” and a new focus on the specificities of modern culture giving a revaluation to a previously overlooked identity such as the Quebecité.

Market Hydraulics and Subjectivities in the “Wild”: Circulations of the Flea Market

2020-10-14T16:03:17+02:00

Since consumer researchers started paying attention to flea markets they represent common consumer and market research objects. Arguably, in the “natural laboratory” of the flea market, researchers can observe and theorize market and consumer processes “in the wild”, as forms of direct marketing and consumption. We build on existing flea market research through adopting a circulatory approach, inspired by actor-network theory (ANT). Rather than presenting a theory of (flea) markets, ANT is useful for studying markets from the perspective of grounded market-making processes. Consumption is understood as the interplay of consumers, marketers, retailers, and a wide array of artifacts and market mediators like products, economic theories and ideas, packaging, market space (in the physical sense) and furniture, etc. Our results point out that not only does such an approach enable analysis of features commonly studied within consumer research such as calculative action and social interaction, but also issues more rarely in focus in such research, such as cognitive patterns of consumer curiosity, emotions, senses, and affect. Furthermore, even though flea markets foremost are places of commerce and exchange of second hand goods, there is a large variety of other forms of flows or circulations going on “backstage” that enable the surface phenomena of second hand consumption to come into being. Many of these circulations, we argue, are material rather than immaterial Vendor and buyer subjectivities are thus understood as outcomes of circulatory dynamism that involves a range of material and immaterial flows.

Yard Sales: A Book and an Exhibition: From Selling Off Objects to Redeeming Memory

2020-10-13T16:05:36+02:00

The fate of everyday objects, when they reach the end of their lives — worn out, and sometimes even broken — varies a great deal. In some cases, their remains are exhibited in museums as instances of our heritage; in others, they end up in garages and attics, or are simply disposed of. This paper focuses on the social operations surrounding the redefinition of their status as second-hand objects. We pay special attention to what happens when they are requalified as objects of memory in yard sales. Over the past thirty years, such markets — where personal stories change hands — have become favoured destinations for Sunday outings in France. They are open-air museums, where new memories are cobbled together from old objects. We attempt to show what is at stake in these transactions and transitions through a presentation of a book and an exhibition (2011-2012) devoted to French yard sales.

Growing in Motion: The Circulation of Used Things on Second-hand Markets

2020-10-07T15:32:44+02:00

From having been associated with poverty and low status, the commerce with second-hand goods in retro shops, flea markets, vintage boutiques and trade via Internet is expanding in Sweden as in many countries in the Global North. This article argues that a significant aspect of the recent interest in second-hand and reuse concerns the meaning fulness of circulation in social life. Using classic anthropological theory on how the circulation of material culture generates sociality, it focuses on how second-hand things are transformed by their circulation. Rather than merely having cultural biographies, second-hand things are reconfigured through their shifts between different social contexts in a process that here is understood as a form of growing. Similar to that of an organism, this growth is continuous, irreversible and dependent on forces both internal and external to it. What emerges is a category of things that combine elements of both commodities and gifts, as these have been theorized within anthropology. While first cycle commodities are purified of their sociality, the hybrid second-hand thing derives its ontological status as well as social and commercial value precisely from retaining ‘gift qualities’, produced by its circulation.

Vintage, the First 40 Years: The Emergence and Persistence of Vintage Style in the United States

2020-10-15T16:02:25+02:00

This paper historicizes when wearing vintage clothing first became fashionable in the United States. I trace when the trend emerges in the U.S. and explore various ways the press framed secondhand/vintage clothes and anachronistic dressing. I contend that the emergence of vintage occurs as a form of alternative consumption alongside changes that occurred in the U.S. garment industry such as outsourcing and product licensing. These changes led many consumers to seek more authentic consumption experiences. Consumers with cultural capital found in vintage an alternative market for sourcing fashionable street style. Consumers attribute characteristics to vintage clothing that are typically part of authenticity discourse such as it being of exceptional quality, original, handcrafted, made from natural fibers, and providing continuity with the past. The authenticity of vintage is symbolically deployed in opposition to contemporary mass-produced clothing and standardized retail shopping experiences.

Representing the 2006 Palestinian Election in New Zealand Newspapers

2020-10-07T15:37:30+02:00

This study investigates the news and editorial representation of the 2006 Palestinian election appearing in three New Zealand newspapers—the Otago Daily Times, the Press and the New Zealand Herald—and finds that the attention of these newspapers is consistent with some elite Western nations’ policy towards the Middle East. These newspapers identify Palestine’s (Hamas-led) government as a threat, an identification that parallels the Western policy line. In addition, Hamas’s attack on Israel was prominently reported but nothing was said about the killings perpetrated by Israelis in the context of coverage of the 2006 Palestinian election.

Lennart Nilsson’s A Child Is Born: The Many Lives of a Best-Selling Pregnancy Advice Book

2020-10-07T15:38:05+02:00

This article examines the circulations and transformations of photographer Lennart Nilsson’s pregnancy advice book Ett barn blir till (A Child Is Born) through its five Swedish editions from 1965 to 2009 as well as some of the translations in English and other languages. Published by Bonnier, the leading media company in Sweden, the book combines images and texts to dramatise the story of conception, foetal development and pregnancy. In particular, the aim is to explore how various commercial, cultural and material processes have co-produced and changed the identity of A Child Is Born. Inspired by research on the biography of things, the article traces the life-course of the book and the photographic material it includes. Two principles of transformation are emphasised. In the first process, the book, although undergoing significant changes, preserved a material and discursive unity and moved in relatively fixed domains. This movement occurred in relation to an origin that can be understood in terms of creativity, authorship and copyright. The second process did not require the integrity of a creative work. Rather, it was the intense features of the book and its images, their affective and iconic power, which enabled the circulations and appropriations. It is argued that Nilsson’s book could be described as a thoroughfare for images and texts in constant motion, instead of a fixed and stable object. Entangled in a culture of circulation, it has taken on a dynamic of its own and has moved as much through accident as through design. In these changes, the book has become self-reflexive in its adjustments over a range of arenas and milieus. The life of (the images in) A Child Is Born encompasses many lives, each ensnared in the trajectories and transformations of others.

Performance Anxiety: Audit Culture and the Neoliberal New Zealand University

2020-10-13T16:06:57+02:00

This essay considers the role of audit culture and research output measurement regimes in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It explores the nature of neoliberalism and how it has worked its way into research and publishing, as well as departmental and teaching, contexts. This forms an important part of what Alison Hearn has called the promotional university, complete with bibliometrics and the attendant disciplinary mechanisms that work to produce “productive” researchers.

Open Access Scholarly Publishing on the Competitive Market: University Management as Obstacle and Enabler

2020-10-14T16:04:11+02:00

This article explores the relation between university management and open access scholarly publishing in Sweden. Open access is generally promoted in Swedish national research policy, referring to internationally adopted recommendations on free access to knowledge by researchers and citizens alike. In principle, the conditions for universities to not only promote but also actively contribute to open access by hosting open access scholarly journals could therefore be deemed adequate. In reality, however, many universities choose to adapt only to external systems of assessment and disregard internal demands from the research community. Since hosting open access scholarly journals is not favored by existing external systems of assessment, university management that does not also act on internal demands from the research community runs the risk of becoming an obstacle rather than an enabler of open access scholarly publishing.

The Patent and the Paper: a Few Thoughts on Late Modern Science and Intellectual Property

2020-10-13T16:07:19+02:00

Marie and Pierre Curie’s decision not to patent the discovery (1898) and later isolation (1902) of radium is perhaps the most famous of all disinterested decisions in the history of science. To choose publishing instead of patenting and openness instead of enclosure was hardly a radical choice at the time. Traditionally, we associate academic publishing with “pure science” and Mertonian ideals of openness, sharing and transparency. Patenting on the other hand, as a byproduct of “applied science” is intimately linked to an increased emphasis and dependency on commercialization and technology transfer within academia. Starting from the Curies’ mythological decision I delineate the contours of an increasing convergence of the patent and the paper (article) from the end of the nineteenth-century until today. Ultimately, my goal is to suggest a few possible ways of addressing the hybrid space that today constitute the terrain of late modern science and intellectual property.

How Green Is This Paper?

2020-10-15T16:02:56+02:00

The increasing governmentalization and commodification of knowledge are putting intense pressure on scholars to write and publish more, and in accordance with conventions that are not of their own making, due to benchmarks of success set by the applied sciences that suit business and the state. These tendencies are also producing a potentially unsustainable environmental burden that may be increasing, not decreasing, as we move more and more into an online publishing world. This recognition leads to three provocations: 1) There is too much scholarly publication to keep up with, and too much pressure to publish; 2) The future of all academic publishing will largely be determined by the sciences; and 3) We must consider the relative merits of publishing electronically rather than on paper in terms of the environment - in other words, asking “how green is this paper?”

Swedish Publications in a Global World

2020-10-16T16:01:22+02:00

This paper is about the problems of publishing in a global academic world. The Swedish monograph is slowly in decline in Sweden. The international peer-reviewed article is taking its place. Yet just as the monograph has had problems, this newer trend has multiple new quandaries. Instead of being read by a larger international audience, some articles tend to stay unread when neither the national nor the international public can find the results. Social scientists and humanities lack a specific venue or scene where results can be discussed by both experts and the public, such as Science or Nature. This is a problem since the public miss out on important, often tax-funded, knowledge, but also because academics miss out on having an audience and the impact that comes from meeting with the public.

Secondly many journals are so specialised that they influence not only the public’s understanding of research and their view on research but also the research and the researchers. Furthermore academics lack both the time to read all relevant articles and to write longer and more complex works, which would be beneficial to both the public and scholars as well. Therefore the race to get published, i.e. achieve excellence and have more impact, tends to affect the research. Researcher may even choose their subjects and how they write about them in order to get published rather than focusing on interesting questions.

Naturally possible solutions have been discussed, such as open access books and more stringent demands on the impact of the research and relevance to the public. However there are still no absolute answers.

Translation, Cultural Translation and the Hegemonic English

2020-10-15T16:03:18+02:00

This brief chapter problematizes the hegemonic position of the English language in Cultural Studies, which, in the author’s view, can be understood as a moment that stands against a true internationalisation of the project. Following an argument referring to the necessary ‘translation’ process (here seen as ‘re-articulation’, ‘transcoding’ or ‘transculturation’) Stuart Hall has put forward almost two decades ago, the essay, firstly, turns to the notion of ‘linguistic translations’, and deals, secondly, with what has been coined ‘cultural translation’. Discussing approaches developed by Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco and Homi Bhabha, the complex relationship between the two terms is being investigated. Finally, in a modest attempt to throw some light on this hegemonic structure, central aspects of the output of three important journals (European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies), i. e. an analysis of the linguistic and institutional backgrounds of the authors of the ten most-read and most-cited essays, are presented. Based on these findings I argue that it is not simply the addition of the discsive field (language) to the academic space (institution) that defines the mechanism of exclusion and inclusion. Rather, it is the articulation of both moments, i.e. that of language and that of the institution, which – in various contexts (but in their own very definite ways) – can help to develop that structure which at present is still hindering a further, more profound internationalisation of the project that is Cultural Studies.

Publishing for Public Knowledge

2020-10-18T16:00:39+02:00

No abstract available.

Displaced Borders: The Written Traumatic Borderline between Pskov Province and Chechnya

2020-10-14T16:06:20+02:00

This article examines the narrative construction of borders through an analysis of “non-professional writing” produced by the residents of Pskov. It discusses the construction of national borders and the symbolic meanings invested in them, with the empirical focus being placed on the symbolic Russian-Chechen border. The theoretical essence is the realization that due to the constructive and narrative natures of border production, the creation of a national borderline does not necessarily pre-suppose that the two sides share a geographical border. The article also addresses questions of traumatic memory and links border production with the concept of cultural trauma. By asking where Russia’s borders currently located, this article provides an example of the cultural construction and symbolic displacement of the “national border”, and a representation of how the national b/ordering processes differ when viewed from both “bottom up” and “top-down” perspectives in the contemporary Russian Federation.

Rattling Sabres and Evil Intruders: The Border, Heroes and Border-crossers in Panfennist and Soviet Socialist Realist Literature

2020-10-16T16:02:04+02:00

In this article I analyse Russian and Soviet Karelian literary texts written in Finnish at the time and in the style of socialist realism, and Finnish poems, songs and novels of the same era, proposing the idea of a ‘Greater-Finland’. I turned my attention to the question of how the depiction, construction and use of borders is handled in the respective texts, and look to determine whether the opposed ideologies of Soviet Communism and Panfennism led to similar or different artificial results. This analysis proves that the texts of the two ideologies generally draw strict distinctions between the ‘heroes’ of their own side and the bad ‘Others’. Only the heroes of the plot are able to either cross borders or to establish new ones. While in the Soviet texts opponents of Soviet society inside the Soviet Union are depicted as foreign and separated through ideological, symbolic and topographical borders, the Karelians in the Finnish texts are suspected as a hybrid people, spoiled by their contact with the evil Russians.

Adventurers, Flâneurs, and Agitators: Travel Stories as Means for Marking and Transgressing Boundaries in 19th and Early 20th Century Finland

2020-10-16T16:02:17+02:00

The article focuses on border crossings in travel stories, which were published in hand-written newspapers in 19th- and early 20th-century Finland. These papers were a popular tradition in student organizations and popular movements. Border crossings appear in travel stories in three different representations. Firstly, border crossings are repeated motifs in travel stories, both as challenging events and as small gestures and encounters. Travel stories demarcate boundaries, but they also provide a means for transgressing them. Secondly, hand-written newspapers as a literary practice highlight borders between oral and written communication. They were produced as one single manuscript copy, and published by being read out aloud in social events. Thirdly, the authors of hand-written newspapers were placed on the border of different positions in society such as class, gender and age. My analysis is based on the methodological discussion of small stories and personal experience narratives; travel stories can be defined as “local event narratives”. I have outlined four basic models for travel stories which emerge from hand-written newspapers: the great mission story, the grand tour story, the flâneur story and the retreat story. The analysis of travel stories is presented through four different case studies with a time range from the 1850s to the 1920s: these materials have been produced in two provincial student fraternities (osakunta), in the temperance society “Star” in Helsinki in the 1890s, and in the Social Democratic Youth Club in the small industrial town of Karkkila in the 1910s and the 1920s. Many parallel features can be observed in travel stories, even though the social background and ideology of the authors are quite different. Time and space are important aspects in travel stories, and they often demarcate boundaries of class and gender.

Facing the Otherness: Crossing the Finnish-Soviet Estonian Border as Narrated by Finnish Tourists

2020-10-18T16:01:00+02:00

This study examines Finnish travellers’ experiences of travelling across the sea frontier between Finland and Soviet Estonia during the period of 1965–1991. The article focuses on the narratives of Finnish tourists about border crossings and cultural encounters. The analysis concentrates on travellers’ relations and conceptions of the former Soviet Estonia and their descriptions of facing cultural otherness during their travels. The concept of otherness is used as an analytical tool to interpret the narratives.

Non-Russian Language Space and Border in Russian Karelian Literature

2020-10-15T16:05:19+02:00

This article examines Finnish language literature in Russian Karelia on the Russian–Finnish national borderland from the 1940s until the 1970s. It focuses on the concepts of the non-Russian language space and border that are constructed and studied in the context of three novels: Iira (1947), Tiny White Bird (1961), and We Karelians (1971). The article claims that the non-Russian language space and the national border started to be understood differently from the official degrees dictated by Moscow, as found in literature already from the late 1950s and early 1960s. From the 1950s onwards, the historical, linguistic, and cultural roots across the national border and the Finnish population were allowed to be recognized in literature. Furthermore, this article claims that in the 1970s, literature was able to represent such regional history, and also the closeness and permeability of the national border that influenced the lives of the Soviet Karelian non-Russian speaking population and their identity formation. This led to different ideas of the national border, in which the border and its functions and meanings became gradually more multi-voiced, ambivalent and controversial, in comparison to the conceptualization of the border as presenting a strict, impermeable boundary.

Discontinuity and Continuity in Representations of 20th Century Estonian History

2020-10-18T16:01:11+02:00

The theme of this article is how Estonians have described political changes in their autobiographical narratives. The discussion is based on the observation that the establishment of Soviet rule in Estonia in the 1940s is construed in the studies of life stories, on the one hand, as a discontinuity of ‘normal life’, and on the other hand, as continuity. It is remarkable that irrespective of the demarcation of state borders by political decisions, Estonian territory is still perceived as a single and eternal whole. To what extent is the perception of discontinuity or continuity related to experiencing political change and to what extent is it related to the method of narration, and to what extent does it depend on the choices made by the researcher? An analysis of the three life histories discussed in the article indicates that experiencing discontinuity or continuity in a specific historical context does not coincide with its depiction in life histories. The texts reflect both the diversity of narrative methods (coherent representation of different layers of recollections, the comparison and contrast of different situations, etc.), and the context of narratives – for example the interviewer’s effect on discussing a topic or the relation of a story to publicly discussed topics. Recollections are characterised by variability, however this may not become evident as studies focus on certain aspects of the narrative or interrelations of the topic and public discourses. The polysemic and ambivalent nature of the ‘border’ unfolds through the entangled interplay of territorial, political and cultural borders, their narrative articulation in life story telling as well as researchers’ choices.

Borders from the Cultural Point of View: An Introduction to Writing at Borders

2020-10-19T16:00:22+02:00

This introductory article to the special issue Writing at Borders suggests that cultural studies and the humanist point of view have significant explanatory potential concerning various borders and border crossings in multidisciplinary border studies. Cultural and human understandings of borders and border crossings grow from the research of ethnographic particularities on one hand, and of universal and culturally expressed human experiences of borders and border crossings (however culturally expressed) on the other. In this article, this explanatory potential is made visible by examining the history of cultural anthropology, where borders and border crossings have been recognized in research since the late 19th century. The aim of this concise introductory article is to outline through selected examples how territorial, social, and cultural borders and border crossings have been acknowledged and understood conceptually in the history of Anglo-American and European anthropology. The selected examples illustrate the gradual evolution of the conceptualization of the border from a territorially placed boundary and filter, to a semantically constructed, ritualized and performed symbolic border, and finally to a discursive (textual) construction.

Preface: Writing at Borders

2020-10-07T15:39:05+02:00

No abstract available.

Encounters along Micro-Level Borders: Silence and Metacommunicative Talk in Service Encounter Conversations between Finnish Employment Officials and Immigrants

2020-10-07T15:38:41+02:00

This article examines the interaction between Finnish employment officials and their immigrant clients in service encounter conversations. It employs the concepts of metacommunicative talk, silence, agency and asymmetric interaction situation. Such service encounters between native speakers of Finnish and immigrants going through the integration process and speaking Finnish as their second language constitute situations of institutional interaction, characterised by asymmetry. Asymmetry during the service encounter arises from the roles and power relations between the official and client, a familiarity with the routines associated with service encounters, and the use of Finnish as the language of conversation during the encounter.

This article examines two authentic service encounters, recorded in a Finnish employment office. The encounters are analysed using discourse analysis, combining micro-level analysis of language use and macro-level analysis of the situation. Interviews with the employment officials and background information collected from the officials and clients via questionnaires are used in support of the qualitative analysis.

Officials use different methods of interaction with their clients. In addition, the individual characteristics of officials and clients and their cultural differences influence the construction of interaction during a service encounter. Finnish officials can sometimes handle service encounters with very little talk – sometimes with hardly any talk at all. However, metacommunicative talk can serve as a vehicle for reinforcing the client’s agency and supporting the immigrant in learning the language and customs, as well as in establishing a foothold in the new community, and thereby promoting the integration process as a whole.

Culture Bound and Unbound: Concurrent Voices and Claims in Postcolonial Places

2020-10-15T16:04:18+02:00

No abstract available.

If the Borders Could Tell: The Hybrid Identity of the Border in the Karelian Borderland

2020-10-15T16:04:34+02:00

This paper analyses the nature of the border. The paper poses the question of whether a border, in this case the national border between Finland and Russia in the Finnish Karelian border region, can have its own distinctive identity[ies], and if so, could the border itself be or become a hybrid – a border subject. To examine the hybridization process of the border, this paper draws on individual experiences of the border that are illustrated using interview material. In addition, by analysing historical documents, literature and historiography, the paper shows how the border has affected people’s relationship with the border itself and also their perception of regional landscapes, regional memories and identity. On the other hand, this process can be reversed by exploring how people have changed and embodied the border. The paper utilises the framework of John Perry’s theory of “reflective knowledge”, where both conscious experience and the knowledge it yields differ from physical knowledge that is explicitly characterized in terms of empirical facts. Exploring these relationships enhances our understanding of the role of “private knowledge” and its contribution to the understanding of borders.

The Fictitious World Traveller: The Swede on Timor and the Noble Savage Imagery

2020-10-07T15:38:24+02:00

Travel writing soared in the Western world in the early-modern era with the widening geographical knowledge. This was accompanied by a genre of travel fiction. The present study analyses a short Swedish novella from 1815, Swensken på Timor (The Swede on Timor), “translated” by Christina Cronhjelm from a purported English account. It is a romantic tale of a Swedish sailor who is shipwrecked and is adopted by an indigenous group on the Southeast Asian island Timor, marrying a local woman and converting to Islam. The novella is remarkable for the positive portrayal of indigenous society and to some extent Islam. The article discusses the literary tropes influencing the account, and the partly accurate ethnographic and historical details.

Creating the Authentic? Art Teaching in South Africa as Transcultural Phenomenon

2020-10-14T16:05:09+02:00

The question about what art and craft from Black individuals in South Africa should look like as well as how and for what purposes it could be created was of prominent importance within the contact zone of educational institutions from the 1930s onwards. Art teachers of mostly European origin established provisional art educational venues for African students first, within the curricula of mission schools and then as workshops and art schools in their own right. They transferred modernistic concepts from Europe into the South African context, yet were also confronted with divergent expectations of their students and the overarching policy of Bantu Education that was launched in 1953.

A closer look at selected case studies reveals complex and ambivalent theoretical approaches that were negotiated and discussed in the seemingly autonomous context of art schools and workshops. The teachers’ attitudes seemed to oscillate between the search for an ‘authentic’ African idiom and the claim to partake in global archives or in the making of an art history that was imagined as universally applicable. Art educational institutions perceived as transcultural contact zones exemplify a genesis of modern art from South Africa that was formed by mutually influencing perspectives apart from the restrictions for and the re-tribalisation of Black people imposed by the apartheid regime.

Concurrences in Contemporary Travel Writing: Postcolonial Critique and Colonial Sentiments in Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate all the Brutes and Terra Nullius

2020-10-14T16:05:21+02:00

Recent research highlights contemporary travel writing’s complicity in global politics, and the genre is claimed to reproduce the discourses that constitute our understanding of the world. It has also been argued that the genre holds a possibility to help us gain further knowledge about contemporary global politics, as it may work as an arena where global politics is commented on, intervened with and re-shaped. With this double view, current research exemplifies how scholars today grapple with the challenge of accounting for simultaneous and sometimes conflicting histories and conditions that are altered and affected by colonial contacts, practices and ideologies, and by recent globalisation. This article explores this double characteristic of the travelogue through the concept of concurrence, and discusses how this concept is useful as a tool for a new understanding of the genre. How can this concept be employed in an analysis of travel writing that is deeply engaged in a critique of colonialism and its legacy in today’s globalism but is simultaneously enmeshed in and complicit with the legacy that is critiques? “Concurrence” is introduced as a concept for such analysis since it contains both the notion of simultaneity and competition. It is suggested that “concurrence” provides a conceptual framework that allows us to account for controversies, intersections and inequities without reinscribing them into a reconciled and universalizing perspective. In exploring the concept of concurrence, this article provides an initial analysis of two contemporary Swedish travel narratives by Sven Lindqvist. The analysis is focused on the genre’s tension between fact and fiction, its discursive entanglement in colonialism, and the problem and possibility of writing postcolonial critique by use of this genre.

Friction or Closure: Heritage as Loss

2020-10-15T16:03:45+02:00

Heritage is a discourse that aims at closure. It fixates the narrative of the past through the celebration of specific material (or sometimes immaterial non-) objects. It organizes temporality and construct events and freezes time. How does this unfold in the case of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Stone Town, Zanzibar? It is a place of beauty and violence, of trade, slavery and tourism, and the World Heritage narrative does not accommodate all its significant historical facts and lived memories. In this article I will discuss some of these conflicting or competing historical facts.

The anthropologist Anna Tsing has developed the concept-metaphor friction as a way to discuss the energy created when various actors narrate “the same” event(s) in different ways, and see the other participants’ accounts as fantasies or even fabrications. I will use my position as researcher and my relations to different sources: informants, authorities and texts, and discuss how different accounts relate to and partly construct each other; and how I, in my own process as an analyst and listener, negotiate these conflicting stories, what I identify as valid and non valid accounts. The case in this article is Stone Town in Zanzibar and the development and dissolution going on under the shadow of the UNESCO World Heritage flag; a growing tourism; a global and local increase in islamisation; and the political tension within the Tanzanian union. My main focus is narratives of the identity of Zanzibar since heritagization constructs identity.

An Eighteenth-Century Ecology of Knowledge: Patronage and Natural History

2020-10-16T16:01:42+02:00

This article analyses the construction and dissemination of natural-history knowledge in the eighteenth century. It takes the mapping and narration of Orkney as a case study, focusing on the local minister and amateur natural-historian George Low and his network of patron-client relationships with such prominent natural historians as Joseph Banks and Thomas Pennant. It focuses too on Low‘s network of informants and assistants among local island farmers, and argues that canonical natural-history texts were the products of collaborative and interdependent processes that included a large number of actors from all strata of society. To conceptualise how natural-history knowledge was created in this period, the article applies the metaphoric description ‘an ecology of knowledge’. This approach enables a focus on a large number of actors, their collaboration and influence on each other, while also paying attention to asymmetrical power relationships in which competition and appropriation took place.

Re-rigging Othering: Subversive Infantilisation in Contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian Prose

2020-10-18T16:00:50+02:00

In this article I put forward the concept of subversive infantilisation to designate a phenomenon in contemporary Bosnian literature, which by using a certain kind of childish outlook on the world undermines paternalistic and balkanist Western discourse on Bosnia and Herzegovina. By analysing primarily the portrayal of the role of mass media in a few literary texts, principally books by Nenad Veli?kovié and Miljenko Jergovié, I highlight the way in which these texts “re-rig” and by means of irony and exaggeration illuminate the problematic logic inherent in the subject position from which one represents the other. Textual characteristics of subversive infantilisation are contextualised further and seen as a discursive continuation of experiences of the 1990s war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

An Historian’s Critique of Sustainability

2020-10-20T16:00:34+02:00

The most common word-based image of sustainability is a balanced three-way relationship between the environment, society and the economy, sometimes portrayed as a triangle, sometimes as a Venn diagram. The idea is that if you consider all three equally you will have a sustainable outcome. After twenty years of use, however, it has yet to yield a radically different approach to policy, planning or business. The combination of abundant and cheap energy and an emphasis on production has resulted in the separation of economics from both social and biophysical worlds. The long-established practice of isolating the three elements makes re-associating them difficult. Even if it were possible, a more holistic approach to human welfare, both in relation to the natural and social worlds, is likely to bring societies closer to sustainability. The suggestion is that a framework that starts from the premise of providing meaningful work and meaningful lives will support the flourishing of other species as well as the human species.

Looking Like People; Feeling Like People: The Black Body, Dress and Aesthetic Therapy in the Caribbean

2020-10-16T16:04:01+02:00

In the Caribbean, the practice of getting dressed matters because it is a practice of attending to the body. Under a colonial regime, black bodies were ill-treated and selves were negated. Clothing played an instrumental role in the abuse of bodies and the stripping of a sense of wellbeing. Attire was one key way of demarcating master and slave and rendering some members of society null and void. Enslaved Africans, who were forcibly brought across the Atlantic to the New World, were considered chattel or commodities rather than people and clothes functioned in a way that reinforced that notion. Yet, dress became a strategy of subversion – of making chattel, property or ‘non-people’ look like people. The enslaved recognised that, through clothes, it was possible to look and feel free. Today that legacy remains. Clothing is seen not only as that which can make a people ‘look like people’ but also feel like people – clothing sets up a specific structure of feeling. This paper pivots on notions of looking and feeling like people while deploying Joanne Entwistle’s conceptual framework of dress as situated bodily practice. The article locates its investigation in the Caribbean, examining the philosophy and practice of Trinidadian clothing designer Robert Young. The article establishes him as a source of aesthetic therapeutic solutions in the Caribbean. It argues that his clothing designs produce a therapeutic discourse on the Black Caribbean body – a discourse, which facilitates a practice of getting dressed that gives a sense of agency, self-empowerment and psychic security even if that sense is embodied temporarily; lasting perhaps only as long as the garment is worn.

Therapeutic Solutions, Disciplinary Ethics and Medical Truth on Self-Help TV

2020-10-16T16:04:13+02:00

This article will consider the use of therapy television – specifically the self-help television program The Dr. Phil Show – as a locus of government. Specifically, I will examine the ways in which ethics are addressed as biopolitical problems of the self through the often disciplinary instruction of the therapist. In this respect The Dr. Phil Show is representative of a shift in the talk show genre away from the tabloid model to a pedagogical model. Self-help talk shows are increasingly concerned with the cultivation of the soul, the production of truth and the discipline of the body. I demonstrate this by analyzing a series of Dr. Phil Show episodes centered on the confession and obesity, respectively. I emphasize the connection between TV expertise – here embodied in the discourse of the expert/therapist Dr. Phil McGraw – and neo-liberal goals requiring subjects to both care, and take responsibility, for themselves.

Preventative Therapeutics: A Study of Risk and Prevention in Australian Mental Health

2020-10-18T16:02:04+02:00

his study investigates the preventative therapeutics of two major Australian mental health organisations – beyondblue and The Black Dog Institute. The aim of this study is to examine how the resilience-based programs of both organisations reconfigure clinical and preventative expertise into new forms of ‘anticipatory action’ (Anderson 2010). First, this article situates beyondblue and the Black Dog Institute within their historical contexts to consider how issues of risk and protection have become essential to mental health care today. Second, it examines the institutional practices of beyondblue and the Black Dog Institute and the role of clinical and preventative expertise as enacted forms of authority. Finally, this study investigates the intellectual and biokeeping technologies promoted through both organisations“ resilience-based pedagogies. The view taken in this study is that such technologies actively participate in the making of new therapeutic cultures and practices. Moreover, as biomarkers continue to act as indicators of future states of ‘unhealth’ (Dumit 2012: 112), biokeeping technologies will continue to act as essential elements in the governmentality of mental health and wellbeing.

Happiness Studies and Wellbeing: A Lacanian Critique of Contemporary Conceptualisations of the Cure

2020-10-18T16:02:15+02:00

Criticising the discourse of happiness and wellbeing from a psychoanalytic perspective, this article is in five parts. The first offers a brief philosophical genealogy of happiness, charting its diverse meanings from ancient Greece, through Medieval Scholasticism and on to bourgeois liberalism, utilitarianism and neoliberalism. The second contextualizes contemporary happiness in the wider milieu of self-help culture and positive psychology. The third explores the growing influence but also methodological weaknesses of the field of Happiness Studies. The fourth then focuses specifically on the notion of wellbeing and the impact it has had on changing definitions of health itself, particularly mental health. The fifth and final section then turns to psychoanalysis, its Lacanian orientation especially, to explore the critical resources it offers to counter today’s dominant therapeutic cultures. It also emphasises psychoanalytic clinical practice as itself an ethico-political challenge to the injunction to be happy that lies at the heart of consumer culture.

“Not a Vacation, But a Hardening Process”: The Self-Empowerment Work of Therapeutic Craft in Nova Scotia

2020-10-19T16:00:52+02:00

This article will examine the development of a state-sponsored therapeutic craft regime in Nova Scotia in the early to mid-twentieth century. Built on the notion that postwar residents needed “work therapy – not a vacation, but a hardening process” (Black n.d. a: 3) – therapeutic craft emerged in Nova Scotia through a complex combination of the individualization of work habits, the desire to construct an antimodern regional identity around handwork, and the notion that both infirm patients and the province as a whole could be healed from economic stagnation through craft. Key to the success of Nova Scotia’s therapeutic craft regime was occupational therapist Mary E. Black’s career as director of the provincial government’s Handicrafts and Home Industries Division from 1943 to 1955. Black’s healthcare training led her to seek out therapeutic possibilities in everyday work activities, not to mention a therapeutic solution to what she called “the attitude of most Nova Scotians…[:] defeatism” (Black 1949: 46). Her ability to turn seemingly disparate things – such as Scandinavian design, the ordered work of occupational rehabilitation, and a phenomenological focus on what she called “individualistic existence” (Black n.d. b: 2) – into a unified therapeutic solution demonstrates that the contemporary rise of therapeutic culture under the increased individualism of the neoliberal era has an established historical root in the postwar period that remains important to understand.

The Self-Help Book in the Therapeutic Ontosphere: A Postmodern Paradox

2020-10-20T16:00:44+02:00

he self-help book is a prominent cultural and commercial phenomenon in the therapeutic ontosphere which permeates contemporary life. The generic term ’ontosphere’ is here co-opted from IT to describe a notional social space in which influential conceptualisations and shared assumptions about personal values and entitlements operate without interrogation in the demotic apprehension of ’’. It thus complements the established critical terms ’discourse’ and ’episteme’. In the therapeutic ontosphere the normal vicissitudes of life are increasingly interpreted as personal catastrophes. As new issues of concern are defined, it is assumed that an individual will need help to deal with them and live successfully. Advice-giving has become big business and the self-help book is now an important post-modern commodity. However a paradox emerges when the content and ideology of this apparently postmodern artifact is examined. In its topical eclecticism the genre is indeed unaligned with those traditional ’grand narratives’ and collective value systems which the postmodern critical project has sought to discredit. It endorses relativism, celebrates reflexivity and valorizes many kinds of ’personal truth’. Moreover readers are encouraged towards self-renovation through a process of ’bricolage’ which involves selecting advice from a diverse ethical menu along-side which many ’little narratives’ of localized lived experience are presented as supportive exemplars. However in asserting the pragmatic power of individual instrumentality in an episteme which has seen the critical decentering of the human subject, the self-help book perpetuates the liberal-humanist notion of an essential personal identity whose stable core is axiomatic in traditional ethical advice. And the heroic journey of self-actualization is surely the grandest of grand narratives: the monomyth. Thus the telic self-help book presents the critical theorist with something of a paradox.

Revisiting Dearing: Higher Education and the Construction of the ’Belabored’ Self

2020-10-19T16:01:14+02:00

Several authors have identified a ’therapeutic turn’ in education in the UK, at all levels of the system. In this paper I focus on and develop this claim, specifically in relation to the Higher Education sector. I seek to do two things: First, I argue that the ‘self’ which is identified by commentators on the therapeutic turn needs to be reworked in the direction of McGee’s idea of the ’belabored’ self. This is because the therapeutic turn serves, I argue, a set of wider economic goals arising from the restructuring of capitalism which followed in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973 and the subsequent breakdown of the post-war (1939-1945) consensus around the purpose of public policy, of which education is an important part. Second, I revisit an important document in the history of the UK Higher Education sector: the National Committee of Inquiry Into Higher Education’s 1997 report Higher Education In The Learning Society (known popularly as the Dearing Report, after its chair, Sir Ron Dearing). I argue that that the committee’s ambition to bring about a learning society characterised by lifelong learning played an important and neglected part in bringing about the therapeutic turn in higher education in the UK. The project of creating a learning society characterised by lifelong learning, advocated by the Dearing Report, should properly be recognised as an exhortation to embark upon a lifetime of labouring upon the self.

Introduction: Therapeutic Culture

2020-10-07T15:40:59+02:00

No abstract available.

Inner Peace and Global Harmony: Individual Wellbeing and Global Solutions in the Art of Living

2020-10-15T16:07:29+02:00

his paper explores the discourse in the Art of Living (AOL), a Hindu derived transnational meditation movement, which suggests that solutions to global problems are best addressed at the individual level. Ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews and an analysis of published material suggest that the primary concern of the AOL is the reduction of stress and anxiety for the individual practitioner. This reduction of stress not only means that the individual practitioner develops ‘inner peace’, but also contributes to global harmony. AOL is an exemplar of ‘therapeutic solutions’, which are characterized by disillusionment with established institutions and a quest for inner meaning. AOL articulates this therapeutic solution, not only in terms of narcissistic needs, but links this quest for inner meaning to wider social and global concerns.

Reconceptualising Well-being: Social Work, Economics and Choice

2020-10-07T15:39:32+02:00

In this paper we examine the intersection of well-being, agency and the current political and economic structures which impact on social work with adults and in doing so contribute to ‘interpreting and mapping out the force fields of meaning production’ (Fornäs, Fredriksson & Johannisson 2011: 7). In it we draw upon Sointu’s (2005) work which identified the shift from conceptualising well-being in terms of ‘the body politic’ to conceptualising it in terms of ‘the body personal’ and identified parallels with understanding well-being in English social work. There has been a shift in the nature of social work in the United Kingdom in how the question of agency has been addressed. For many years this was through the traditional notion of autonomy and self-determination (Biestek 1961) and later collective approaches to welfare and services (Bailey & Brake 1975). The development of paradigms of mainly personal empowerment in the 1980s and 1990s (Braye & Preston-Shoot 1995) saw social work become less associated with collective engagement in welfare and more concerned with the enhancement of individual well-being (Jordan 2007). Whilst the rhetoric of well-being, in contemporary English social work, continues to include autonomy and self-determination, this is focused primarily upon the narrower concepts of independence and choice (Simpson 2012).

The UK Department of Health’s A Vision for Adult Social Care: Capable Communities and Active Citizens (DoH 2010) is the template for national social care policy to which all Local Authorities in England had to respond with an implementation plan. This paper draws on a documentary analysis of two such plans drafted in 2012 in the wake of an ‘austerity budget’ and consequent public expenditure reductions. The analysis considers the effect of economic imperatives on the conceptualisation of individual choices and needs in the context of Local Authorities’ responsibilities to people collectively. A concept of ‘reasonableness’ emerges, which is used to legitimize a re-balancing of the ‘body personal’ and the ‘body politic’ in the concept of well-being with the re-emergence of an economic, public construction. Our discussion considers why this is happening and whether or not a new synthesised position between the personal and political is being developed, as economists and policy makers appropriate well-being for their ends.

A Critical Study of Informal New Media Uses in Sweden

2020-10-07T15:39:08+02:00

This study looks at a variety of “informal” uses of new media and ICTs. The term informal describes popular uses of digital technologies that often exist outside the norms, laws, and codes that dictate how digital technologies and networks are to be used. Such activities include what is commonly described as “piracy,” but also embrace different peer-to-peer practices. Informal activities develop due to the affordances of digital technologies, which allow space for creativity and personalization of use, but are also due to broader sociocultural variables and contextual issues. In general terms, informal activities are those that concern the amateur activities of people using digital programs, tools, and networks. Media scholars see great potential in new media/ICT affordances, as related to the proliferation of grassroots participation, communication, and creativity. Nevertheless, a growing critical literature forces us to examine the actualization of such potential. This paper discusses the aforementioned issues by looking at new media/ICT uses in Sweden; it departs from critical perspectives that take into consideration the political economy of new media, and the cultural-political critiques of late-modern consumer societies.

The Malady of UNESCO’s Archive

2020-10-15T16:05:54+02:00

This paper offers a critical examination of UNESCO’s cultural heritage conventions with special regard to the declared transhumanism of the organization’s first director-general, Sir Julian Huxley. While Huxley’s advocation of eugenics is a well-established fact, this part of his intellectual heritage is usually not considered overtly aligned to his ideas about cultural preservation. On closer consideration, however, improvement and preservation (both cultural and biological) turn out to be closely associated concerns in the field of Huxley’s intellectual vision.

Blogging Family-like Relations when Visiting Theme and Amusement Parks: The Use of Children in Displays Online

2020-10-16T16:03:01+02:00

This paper combines sociological perspectives on family display, internet studies on family and private photography and a child studies perspective on the display of children. The paper proposes that blogging practices related to visits to theme and amusement parks in Sweden provide a new arena for people to display family-like relationships. In the different displays, adults mainly use pictures of children in the blogs to demonstrate their ability to perform family-like relationships. The paper suggests that this form of child-centred display, a visualized child-centredness, done during the park visit as well as in the blogging, is part of the construction of contemporary childhoods and what it means to be a child today and has not been theorized in earlier research on the display of family-like relations.

The Nature of Society: Enmapping Nature, Space and Society into a Town-green Hybrid

2020-10-15T16:06:17+02:00

The paper describes the transformation of derelict land into a ‘town-green’ and the role legislation played in transforming social and natural relationships. Town-green denotes a legal status under the Great Britain Commons Act (2006) that protects certain open spaces from building development; the status requires that a space must simultaneously have a specific social quality (i.e. ‘town-ness’) and a specific natural quality (i.e. ‘green-ness‘). This hybrid condition requires an alliance between society and nature in a certain configuration (referred to here as nature₂ and society₂). In this empirical study it involved the participation and consensus of local residents, volunteer gardeners as well as nature itself; flowers needed to bloom and grass had to grow in order for the hybrid town-green status to be conferred. There are two distinct phases of this transformation; the first is the change in identities and configuration of the constituents of town and green. This involved the production of a modified ‘real’ world with: different plants and flowers; reconfigured spatial arrangements; as well as different social actors. The second phase is a shift from changes in the ‘real’ world towards an ‘enmap’ – a displacement of myriad actors into documentation. This transfer from a complex messy reality into an enmap permitted the legitimation of the new network to be accepted as a ‘town-green’. What the research reveals, other than hints for gardeners and community activists, is how material and non-material; social and natural; spatial, discursive and temporal worlds are hybridised.

Enacting Green Consumers: The Case of the Scandinavian Preppies

2020-10-16T16:03:12+02:00

The aim of this paper is to develop and illustrate an analytic approach that brings the active making and makings of green consumer images to the fore. Efforts to “know” the green consumers have generated multiple representations. Enactments of the green consumer are not innocent but also play a role in shaping how we understand and approach sustainable consumption. Because of this it is important to examine and critically discuss how green consumers are enacted today.

This paper develops an approach that allows us to examine how green consumers are enacted and discuss the consequences these constructions might have for sustainability. Theoretically, a performativity approach drawing on theories from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and economic sociology is used to discuss the enactment of green consumers. Empirically, focus is on Boomerang – a Swedish fashion retailer, brand, and producer – and its marketing practices.

The analysis shows how the marketing work of the Boomerang Company leads to the enactment of the Green Scandinavian Preppy. This specific version of the green consumer is a combination of the knowledgeable green connoisseur – a consumer that knows quality when he/she sees it – and the green hedonist in search of the good life. The Green Scandinavian Preppy wants to enjoy nature, go sailing, and do so wearing fashionable quality clothes. This is a consumer that knows quality, appreciates design, and has the means to pay for both. While this is a version of the green consumer that might be appealing and thus have the potential to promote a version of green consumption, it is also a green consumer image that has lost much of its political power as green consumption is framed as simply another source of pleasure and identity-making.

Work at the Periphery: Issues of Tourism Sustainability in Jamaica

2020-10-18T16:01:32+02:00

The tourism industry in Jamaica, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, has provided government interests and tourism stakeholders with increasingly profitable economic benefits. The development and prosperity of the ‘all-inclusive’ vacation model has become a significant aspect of these benefits. Vacationers from North America and Europe are particularly attracted to tourism destinations providing resort accommodations that cater to foreign visitors, offering ‘safe spaces’ for the enjoyment of sun, sand, and sea that so many leisure-seekers desire. Safety and security are progressively becoming more relevant within the contexts of poverty, crime, and tourist harassment that are now commonplace in many of these island destinations. This model of tourism development, however, represents a problematic relationship between these types of hotels and the environmental, political, and economic interests of the communities in which they are located. The lack of linkage between tourist entities and other sectors, such as agriculture and transportation, leaves members of local communities out of the immense profits that are generated. Based on a review of relevant literature and ethnographic research conducted in one of Jamaica’s most popular resort towns, this paper considers the ways in which the sociocultural landscape of a specific place is affected by and responds to the demands of an overtly demanding industry. Utilizing an anthropological approach, I explore local responses to tourism shifts, and analyse recent trends in the tourism industry as they relate to the concept of sustainability.

Contesting ‘Environment’ Through the Lens of Sustainability: Examining Implications for Environmental Education (EE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)

2020-10-19T16:00:32+02:00

This article reflects on implications of presenting nature as a social construction, and of commodification of nature. The social construction of nature tends to limit significance of nature to human perception of it. Commodification presents nature in strict instrumental terms as ‘natural resources’, ‘natural capital’ or ‘ecosystem services’. Both construction and commodification exhibit anthropocentric bias in denying intrinsic value of non-human species. This article will highlight the importance of a deep ecology perspective, by elaborating upon the ethical context in which construction and commodification of nature occur. Finally, this article will discuss the implications of this ethical context in relation to environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD).

Sustainabilities in the Cultural Economy

2020-10-15T16:07:17+02:00

No abstract available.

The Free Encyclopaedia that Anyone can Edit: The Shifting Values of Wikipedia Editors

2020-10-23T16:02:16+02:00

Wikipedia is often held up as an example of the potential of the internet to foster open, free and non-commercial collaboration. However such discourses often conflate these values without recognising how they play out in reality in a peer-production community. As Wikipedia is evolving, it is an ideal time to examine these discourses and the tensions that exist between its initial ideals and the reality of commercial activity in the encyclopaedia. Through an analysis of three failed proposals to ban paid advocacy editing in the English language Wikipedia, this paper highlights the shift in values from the early editorial community that forked encyclopaedic content over the threat of commercialisation, to one that today values the freedom that allows anyone to edit the encyclopaedia.

How Readers Shape the Content of an Encyclopedia: A Case Study Comparing the German Meyers Konversationslexikon (1885-1890) with Wikipedia (2002-2013)

2020-10-20T16:01:16+02:00

How knowledge is negotiated between the makers of encyclopedias and their audiences remains an ongoing question in research on encyclopedias. A comparative content analysis of the published answers of letters to the editor of the German Meyers Konversationslexikon (Korrespondenzblatt) from 1885 and the discussion pages of the article potato of the German Wikipedia (2013) reveals continuities as well as changes in the communication between encyclopedia producers and their audiences. The main reasons why readers and editors communicate are the need for updated factual information, an exchange on editorial principles and the intellectual exchange of ideas on ideological and philosophical questions in relation to the encyclopedic content. Editors and readers attach a lot of importance to the process of verifying information through bibliographical references. Whereas, for the editors of Meyers Konversationslexikon the leading role of experts remains undisputed, Wikipedians work in a contradictory situation. They are on the one hand exposing knowledge production to a permanent process of negotiation, thereby challenging the role of experts, on the other hand relying strongly on bibliographical authorities. Whilst the reasons for the communication between readers and editors of Meyers Konversationslexikon and among Wikipedia contributors coincide, the understanding of the roles of readers and editors differ. The editors of the Korrespondenzblatt keep up a lecturing attitude. As opposed to this, administrators in Wikipedia want to encourage participation and strive to develop expertise among the participating contributors. Albeit power relations between administrators, regular authors, occasional authors and readers continue to exist they are comparatively flat and transient. Regardless of these differences, the comparison between Meyers Konversationslexikon and Wikipedia indicates that the sine qua non for activating an upwards spiral of quality improvement is that readers accept, learn and cultivate common rules – including how to deal with dissent – and identify with the product at least so far as that they report mistakes.

Reviewing Encyclopaedia Authority

2020-10-24T16:02:30+02:00

As traditional encyclopaedias appear to be loosing the favour of the general public, the current paper investigates the extent to which encyclopaedias are still presented as authoritative texts. Here, authority in texts is mostly construed from the theory of cognitive authority according to Józef Maria Bochenski, Richard De George, and Patrick Wilson; in particular from their reflections on the roles, measures and bases of cognitive authority. The content of 80 book reviews on science and technology encyclopaedias is analysed in order to highlight comments pertaining to encyclopaedia authority. Although many aspects of cognitive authorities are covertly discussed within these book reviews, encyclopaedias are not explicitly presented as absolute authorities.

Knowledge for Sale: Norwegian Encyclopaedias in the Marketplace

2020-10-18T16:04:20+02:00

Encyclopedias present and contain knowledge, but historically they have also been commercial commodities, produced for sale. In this article, we study the self-presentations of a selection of Norwegian encyclopedias, as these are expressed in the form of commercial images, advertising texts and slogans. We thus present a brief but detailed study of what might be called a number of paratextual matters associated with 20th-century Norwegian encyclopedias, with the aim of identifying the most significant or recurring topoi in the material. Our analysis shows that claims about speed and modernization are among the most conspicuous ingredients in these self-presentations, claims which, we argue, feed into a particular logic of a particular version of 20th-century modernity. The article begins with an analysis of the commercially successful Konversationslexicon, the first Norwegian encyclopedia, published in 1906 and for a long time market leader of the bourgeois tradition. The Konversationslexicon was produced with the explicit aim of providing a source of conversation for the educated classes, a new and expanding group of readers. We also show how the publisher Aschehoug went on to strengthen its own position in this market through a sophisticated process of differentiation. Seen as a contrast to these market leaders, we explore the Norwegian tradition of counter-encyclopaedias, with the radical PaxLeksikon as our main example. This encyclopaedia came into existence as a result of a strong ideological motivation and was run by left-wing idealists. Nevertheless, and perhaps inevitably, it ended up situating itself within the same market mechanisms and the same commercial logic as the bourgeois encyclopaedias. The article ends by a brief consideration of the change from commercial print encyclopaedias to internet-based encyclopaedias, and of the new challenges this poses in a small nation, rhetorically and in the struggle for funding.

Knowledge and the Systematic Reader: The Past and Present of Encyclopedic Learning

2020-10-19T16:02:16+02:00

Though digital media have unquestionably affected the features and functions of modern encyclopedias, such works also continue to be shaped by factors thoroughly conventional by the end of the historical Enlightenment. As William Smellie, editor of the first Encyclopædia Britannica (1768-71) wrote, “utility ought to be the principal intention of every publication. Wherever this intention does not plainly appear, neither the books nor their authors have the smallest claim to the approbation of mankind.” The “instructional designers” and “user-experience specialists” of the online Britannica are the inheritors of all those authors and editors who before and after Smellie’s time devised different plans and methods intended to maximize the utility of their works. The definition of utility and with it the nature of encyclopedic knowledge continues to change both because of and despite technological difference; if digitization has in some ways advanced the ideals of Enlightenment encyclopedias, then it has in other ways allowed for the re-inscription of certain flaws and limitations that encyclopedias like the Britannica were specifically designed to overcome. By examining not only what one might read in the encyclopedia but also the ways in which one might read it, this article demonstrates the extent to which the notion of encyclopedic utility depends on historical context.

What do we Think an Encyclopaedia is?

2020-10-25T16:02:17+01:00

The death of the encyclopaedia is increasingly reported in connection with the abandonment of hard copy reference publishing, the dispersal of library reference collections and the preference for end-users to seek information from search engines and social media. Yet this particular form of the book evolved in a very specific way to meet the needs of knowledge-seekers, needs which persist and perhaps flourish in an age of information curiosity. This article uncovers what is meant by ‘encyclopaedia’ by those who produce and use them. Based on survey and interview research carried out with publishers, librarians and higher education students, it demonstrates that certain physical features and qualities are associated with the encyclopaedia and continue to be valued by them. Having identified these qualities, the article then explores whether they apply to three incidences of electronic encyclopaedias, Britannica Online, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Wikipedia. Could it be that rather than falling into obsolescence, their valued qualities are being adopted by online forms of knowledge provision?

Introduction: Changing Orders of Knowledge? Encyclopaedias in Transition

2020-10-26T16:02:41+01:00

No abstract available.

Crowdsourcing Knowledge Interdiscursive Flows from Wikipedia into Scholarly Research

2020-10-16T16:06:15+02:00

Information increasingly flows from smart online knowledge systems, based on ‘collective intelligence’, and to the more traditional form of knowledge production that takes place within academia. Looking specifically at the case of Wikipedia, and at how it is employed in scholarly research, this study contributes new knowledge about the potential role of user-generated information in science and innovation. This is done using a dataset collected from the Scopus research database, which is processed with a combination of bibliometric techniques and qualitative analysis. Results show that there has been a significant increase in the use of Wikipedia as a reference within all areas of science and scholarship. Wikipedia is used to a larger extent within areas like Computer Science, Mathematics, Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities, than in Natural Sciences, Medicine and Psychology. Wikipedia is used as a source for a variety of knowledge and information as a replacement for traditional reference works. A thematic qualitative analysis showed that Wikipedia knowledge is recontextualised in different ways when it is incorporated into scholarly discourse. In general, one can identify two forms of framing where one is unmodalised, and the other is modalised. The unmodalised uses include referring to Wikipedia as a complement or example, as a repository, and as an unproblematic source of information. The modalised use is characterised by the invocation of various markers that emphasise – in different ways – that Wikipedia can not be automatically trusted. It has not yet achieved full legitimacy as a source.

Store Norske Leksikon: Defining a New Role for an Edited Encyclopaedia

2020-10-20T16:00:55+02:00

Store norske leksikon (SNL) [Great Norwegian Encyclopaedia] is an edited, online encyclopaedia that strives towards radical transparency. Our aim is for as many parts of text production as possible to be visible to everyone, much like in the model that Wikipedia has pioneered. Unlike Wikipedia, however, contributors to SNL are required to use their full name, and encouraged to supply biographies that explain their background and qualifications within a field or topic.

’This One’s for VIP Users!’: Participation and Commercial Strategies in Children’s Virtual Worlds

2020-10-07T15:41:02+02:00

Through the integrated framework of participation theory and political economy, this article analyzes participatory opportunities in the virtual world Habbo Hotel, and how participation is constrained and framed by the producer’s commercial strategies, which are based on advertising and sales of virtual goods. The study also looks into the ways in which the producer Sulake Corporation discursively represents the virtual world, and how the users with various forms of tactics try to bypass the commercial constraints. The methods used include observations of the English and Swedish language versions of Habbo Hotel, document analysis, and an interview with one designer employed by Sulake. The results show how participation in this virtual world takes minimalist forms, and that it is foremost an arena for interaction and consumption. Users’ participation in the virtual world is constrained by the commercial strategies in numerous ways, and the producer strategically takes advantage of children’s need to gain status in their peer group, in order to get them to purchase on the site. Habbo Hotel is represented by the producer as a safe and creative environment with learning opportunities for the children. Observations of the virtual world instead reveal Habbo as a panopticon-like shopping mall where users, through the practice of begging and other tactics, try to resist the commercial strategies. Virtual worlds could be potential spaces for children’s participation and contribute to a democratization of the social; however, this study shows how participation in this virtual world is clearly structured and limited for commercial purposes.

The PST Project, Willie Herrón’s Street Mural Asco East of No West (2011) and the Mural Remix Tour: Power Relations on the Los Angeles Art Scene

2020-10-07T15:41:06+02:00

This article departs from the huge art-curating project Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980, a Getty funded initiative running in Southern California from October 2011 to April 2012 with a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. One of the Pacific Standard Time (PST) exhibitions was Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, running from September to December 2011 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This was the first retrospective of a conceptual performance group of Chicanos from East Los Angeles, who from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s acted out critical interventions in the politically contested urban space of Los Angles. In conjunction with the Asco retrospective at LACMA, the Getty Foundation co-sponsored a new street mural by the Chicano artist Willie Herrón, paying homage to his years in the performance group Asco. The PST exhibition program also included so-called Mural Remix Tours, taking fine art audiences from LACMA to Herrón’s place-specific new mural in City Terrace in East Los Angeles. This article analyze the inclusion in the PST project of Herrón’s site-specific mural in City Terrace and the Mural Remix Tours to East Los Angeles with regard to the power relations of fine art and critical subculture, center and periphery, the mainstream and the marginal. As a physical monument dependent on a heavy sense of the past, Herrón’s new mural, titled Asco: East of No West, transforms the physical and social environment of City Terrace, changing its public space into an official place of memory. At the same time, as an art historical monument officially added to the civic map of Los Angeles, the mural becomes a permanent reminder of the segregation patterns that still exist in the urban space of Los Angeles.

The Invisible City: Exploring the Third Something of Urban Life

2020-10-16T16:05:20+02:00

With this article I intend to contribute to the debate about how to study urban life. Firstly, I argue for the relevance of invisible and silent aspects of cities and inbetween sutures, which I understand to mean a third ’something’ beyond forms and flows. Secondly, I explore several examples and draw on arguments from Wittgenstein and Lefebvre to frame this hypothesis. Thirdly, I use the chess game as a metaphor to illustrate the multiplicity and unpredictability of engagements of urban life. Finnally, I propose to approach cities in an open-ended and ordinary way, paying attention to dialectically interconnected processes and the particular conditions of possibility for knowledge.

What Future for Traditional Encyclopedias in the Age of Wikipedia?

2020-10-18T16:02:57+02:00

The launch and rapid domination of Wikipedia as a reference tool for the Internet was as dramatic as it was unexpected. Wikipedia broke so many of the rules of reference publishing, which, even if not formally codified, had been widely accepted for many years: the use of (usually named) authorities as expert contributors, and the presence of moderating editors to ensure balanced structure. All this appeared to have been swept away with Wikipedia, and, not least because Wikipedia content is given away rather than sold, the competition between Wikipedia and most general-purpose encyclopedias was a sad and rather one-sided affair. One by one the existing commercial print general encyclopedias admitted defeat; among the latest is Brockhaus, the leading German encyclopedia brand, which ended publication early in 2013.

Land of 10,000 Facts: Minnesota’s New Digital Encyclopedia

2020-10-19T16:01:25+02:00

Mnopedia is the recently created, born digital encyclopedia of the state of Minnesota. It is a project of the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), the state’s leading cultural heritage institution and one of the largest and oldest historical societies in the nation. The MNHS has been in existence since 1849 and tells the story of Minnesota’s past through exhibitions, extensive libraries and collections, twenty-six historic sites, educational programs, book publishing, and both financial and inkind assistance to county and local historical societies throughout the state. It provides a strong base for an encyclopedia to grow from.

Wikipedia

2020-10-18T16:03:22+02:00

Above my desk is a quote by Albert Einstein: “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater.” One of Einstein’s problems, of course, was that since he was a pioneer, there were not many who could give him the correct answers.

Wikipedia is in some ways in the same position. It is presently the 6th most visited website in the world (Alexa 2014), it is the only donor-supported website in the top 50 list, and Mozilla is the only other non-profit in the top 25 list (Gardner 2013). Few other very large websites use only copyright-free material, written and maintained by anyone, with a decision system that has been described as consensus-driven. Even the five-year strategic plan for the Wikimedia Foundation was crowd-sourced (Wikimedia 2011b).

Introduction: Social Movements: Ritual, Space and Media

2020-10-23T16:03:02+02:00

No abstract available.

Go East, Old Man: The Ritual Spaces of SS Veterans’ Memory Work

2020-10-19T16:03:23+02:00

This article uses social-movement analysis to understand the rituals, memory-work and spatialties of Waffen-SS veterans and their sympathizers. Most social-movement analysis focuses on left-wing protesters; our concern is with the marginalized counter-narratives, rituals and -spaces produced by the self-proclaimed misunderstood “heroes” of World War Two. This counter-hegemonic self-definition is essential to these former world-war soldiers who, despite an internal mythology of idealistic self-sacrifice, are vilified in West-European master narra-tives. We discuss how, during the 1990s, veterans and their sympathizers sought to replace rituals of memory-work in the newly-opened East. We look at how the Waffen-SS’s ritual memory-work is “replaced” in alternative settings, including – perhaps surprisingly – Russia itself. Here, Waffen-SS veterans use new, official, semi-sacred places to anchor both an alternative identity and an alternative definition of the central meanings of modern European history.

Elementary Forms of Religious Life in Animal Rights Activism

2020-10-18T16:06:19+02:00

Many scholars have noted that secular belief systems, despite lack of a spiritual base, can possess qualities and display features similar to religion. The most well-known and forceful formulation of this is, arguably, Durkheim’s claim that elementary forms of religious life pervade collective life in all societies. This article suggests that animal rights activism can fruitfully be analyzed as an instance of “secular religion”. Drawing on Durkheim and based on a study of animal rights activists in Sweden, the article identifies a number of elementary forms and experiences of religious life in animal rights activism. These include overwhelming conversion experiences, a division of the world into sacred and profane, concern about protecting the sacred, commitment to spreading the message and living out one’s faith, the feeling that suffering and guilt have meaning, and the constitutive role of common symbols and rituals. The article argues that it is in the light of the activist group as a moral community formed around a sacred ideal that these religious elements are best understood. At the same time, the animal rights activists challenge established boundaries between sacred and profane, when dismantling the symbolic boundary between humans and animals.

Lovable Anarchism: Campus Protest in Japan From the 1990s to Today

2020-10-20T16:02:11+02:00

This is a paper on the transformation of campus activism in Japan since the 1990’s. Japan’s so-called freeter movements (movements of young men and women lacking regular employment) are often said to have emerged as young people shifted their base of activism from campuses to the “street”. However, campuses have continued to play a role in activism. Although the radical student organisations of the New Left have waned, new movements are forming among students and precarious university employees in response to neoliberalization trends in society and the precarization of their conditions. This transformation has gone hand in hand with a shift of action repertoire towards forms of direct action such as squatting, sitins, hunger strikes, and opening “cafés”. In this paper I focus on the development of campus protest in Kyoto from the mid-1990s until today to shed light on the following questions: How have campus-based activists responded to the neoliberalization of Japanese universities? What motivates them to use art or art-like forms of direct action and how are these activities related to space? I investigate the notions of space towards which activists have been oriented since the 1990’s, focusing on three notions: official public space, counter-space and no-man’s-land. These conceptions of space, I argue, are needed to account for the various forms campus protest has taken since the 1990s.

Klimax Working for the Climate: Through Humor, Play, and the Redefinition of Space

2020-10-20T16:02:00+02:00

This article focuses on the strategies of protest employed by the climate-change activist network Klimax (circa 2007-10). My questions are: What, in their view, was the main threat to our environment? How did they protest against it? The study is based on a close examination of twenty – four protest actions, undertaken during the years 2009-11, as described on the movement’s own KLIMAX homepage. I am interested in how the website’s narratives and visuals demonstrate the ways in which individiual actions’ specific protest strategies challenge the current social order. The analysis of these texts and visuals is based on concepts and theories derived from Cultural Studies, textual analysis and theories of representation, research on New and social resistance movements, emotion sociology and cultural–social approaches to place.

The Revolution Will be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring

2020-10-19T16:02:48+02:00

The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an un-precedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolutionary struggle. But they also effect a sea-change in the way in which we view and understand YouTube itself. This article argues that the political significance of these videos lies less in their explicit content, than in their aesthetics - that is, in the new formal and sensory propositions that they constitute, the ways in which they “redistribute the sensible” (Rancière).

The prologue proposes, following Judith Butler, that “the people” who are the subject of history are essentially a performative event, rather than a pre-existing entity, and that to write about revolution therefore requires a performative and allegorical approach. The first section reviews the current academic notion of “vernacular video” in the light of Ivan Illich’s work of the early 1980s on vernacular language and values, and argues that a stronger, more political conception of the vernacular is necessary to do justice to these works. The second section offers a close reading of one particular video from the Libyan uprising, and argues that it offers less an example, than an allegory of the dialogical relationship between the individual and the collective that defines the moral economy of the vernacular. The article concludes by proposing that the right response to such videos is not (just) more theory or criticism, but rather to seek to emulate their radically egalitarian forms of practice.

From Wasteland to Flower Bed: Ritual in the Website Communication of Urban Activist Gardeners

2020-10-18T16:05:10+02:00

The goal of this article is to explore the website communication of urban activist gardeners by focusing on the concept of ritual as a heuristic category. In contrast to the majority of those doing research on ritual, I use a systems-theoretical approach in applying the concept of ritual to communication processes. I explore the role played by ritual in communication in order to answer questions such as, “What is specifically unique about the ritual mode of communicating?” and, following from this, “What function do these rituals serve in communication?” My subject, urban garden activism, is thus addressed from the perspective of media- and communication research.

First, I briefly describe urban activist gardening and how communication is usually structured on their websites. Second, I present an outline of some theories and concepts of communication and ritual within media studies, and give a brief account of the systems-theoretical approach that I use. Third, I define some areas of ritual – that is, ritualized patterns of communication found in the urban activist gardeners’ empirical material – so as to provide answers regarding the means and function of ritual in communication.

Terms of Engagement: Re-Defining Identity and Infertility On-line

2020-10-18T16:05:21+02:00

This article focuses on the identity work that takes place on the biggest Polish Internet forum for infertile people (www.nasz-bocian.pl). It is an example of a wider trend of “digital groupings created by and for those who struggle with the physical and emotional burden of a disease or disability, and through blogs, chats and forums contact others who have similar experiences, while staying anonymous. Participating in on-line discussions often leads to various forms of social engagement, both on-line and off-line. The sick, their family members, partners and friends cooperate in order to change the public discourse, as well as the regulation and financing of research and the treatment of certain diseases. Emergence and proliferation of such digital groupings raise questions such as: what ails these communities? How the collective identity is constructed on-line? This article examines “boundary work, which is a specific element of collective identity construction processes. The analysis concerns how the borders are established between the different sub-groups within the digital community, and how this process involves producing novel forms of identity based on a fragmented “socially legitimized childlessness. It focuses on a sub-forum” Conscious Childlessness and is based on qualitative analysis of the posts placed there. This sub-forum was established by users who do not necessarily share the dominant collective identity around which the social mobilization on infertility in Poland coalesces. They refuse to see themselves as sick people, or as patients, attempting to construct a new collective identity based on the idea of choice and the pursuit of happiness.

’Being in the Zone’ of Cultural Work

2020-10-19T16:03:45+02:00

In the cultural industries, workers surrender themselves to ultra-intensive work patterns in order to be recognised as properly creative subjects. In its more affirmative versions, there is a recurrent idea that captures that special moment of crea-tive synthesis between the ever-striving worker and the work – the moment of ’being in the zone’. Being in the zone (hereafter BITZ) describes the ideal fusion of the intensively productive mind and the labouring body. But what precisely is this ’zone’, and what is its’ potential? As part of a wider project examining exemplary and intensified subjectivity, in this article I examine BITZ from different perspectives. The main aim is to contrast affirmative readings of BITZ (mostly derived from ’positive’ social psychology) with other, more critical perspectives that would seek to politicise the conditions of its emergence and examine its range of social effects. The overall aim of the article is therefore to suggest the kinds of social and cultural frameworks that might facilitate exploration of the political potential of BITZ in different kinds of empirical context.

You are Not a Loan: A Debtors Movement

2020-10-19T16:04:18+02:00

Written from the participant perspective of the author, the article documents the debt resistance movement that is one of the enduring offshoots of Occupy Wall Street. Addressing the household debt crisis in the wake of the financial crash, it focuses in particular on student debt, approaching an aggregate 1.2 trillion in the U.S., with defaulters numbering in the tens of millions. The emergence of The Occupy Student Debt Campaign is analyzed, along with the initiatives of its successor, Strike Debt, including the Rolling Jubilee and the Debt Resistors Opera-tions Manual. The article concludes by arguing that debt will be the frontline of anticapitalist struggles in the 21st century, just as the struggle over wages dominated the twentieth century.

Beyond the Model Worker: Surveying a Creative Precariat

2020-10-18T16:06:47+02:00

The figure of the self-reliant, risk-bearing, non-unionised, self-exploiting, always-on flexibly employed worker in the creative industries has been positioned as a role model of contemporary capitalism. Although the notion of the model-worker is a compelling critical diagnostic of the self-management of precarity in post-Fordist times, I argue that it provides an insufficient perspective on labour and the so-called creative economy to the extent that it occludes the capacity to contest among the workforces it represents. Informed by a larger research project, this article thematises salient features of select collective responses to precarity that are emerging from workers in nonstandard employment in the arts, the media, and cultural industries. The discussion is structured in three main parts: the first, ag-gregation, identifies initiatives in which employment status – rather than a specific profession or sector – is the basis of assembly and advocacy; the second, compensation, highlights unpaid work as a growing point of contention across sectors; and the third, occupation, describes cases in which precarious cultural workers are voicing their grievances and engaging in direct action in the context of wider social movements. These dimensions of the contemporary response to precarisation in the creative industries are at risk of being overlooked if the research optic on workers’ strategies is focused upon a single sector or a particular profession. In conclusion, I emphasise that the organisations, campaigns, and proposals that are surveyed in this article are marked by tensions between and among accommodative adaption, incremental improvements, and radical reformism vis-à-vis precarity.

The Neoliberal Self

2020-10-20T16:02:32+02:00

This article proposes an ideal type of the neoliberal self as the preferred form of life in the economic, political and cultural circumstances of present-day developed and developing capitalism. The neoliberal self combines the idealised subject(s) of classical and neoclassical economics – featuring entrepreneurship and consumer sovereignty – with the contemporary discourse of ’the taxpayer’, who is sceptical of redistributive justice, and a ’cool’ posture that derives symbolically – and ironically – from cultures of disaffection and, indeed, opposition. In effect, the transition from organised capitalism to neoliberal hegemony over the recent period has brought about a corresponding transformation in subjectivity. As an idea type, the neoliberal self cannot be found concretely in a ’pure’ form, not even represented by leading celebrity figures. The emergent characteristics of the ideal type, though not set out formally here, accentuate various aspects of personal conduct and mundane existence for illustrative and analytical purposes. Leading celebrities, most notably high-tech entrepreneurs, for instance, operate in the popular imagination as models of achievement for the aspiring young. They are seldom emulated in real life, however, even unrealistically so. Still, their famed lifestyles and heavily publicised opinions provide guidelines to appropriate conduct in a ruthlessly competitive and unequal world.

Cultural Governance and the Crisis of Financial Capitalism

2020-10-18T16:07:19+02:00

Cultural policies in Europe were designed, albeit in significantly different ways national and ideological lines, as an additional component of the Welfare State. They were supposed to bring about democracy in cultural consumption by removing the obstacles on the road to giving access to symbolic goods. Since the ‘80s and the neo-liberal turn, this democratic imperative has declined, and was even labeled a complete failure, and new goals for cultural policy emerged: developing the conditions for a creative society, supporting city branding, and encouraging private sponsorship. This change in political justification created new contradictions and some disenchantment among the professionals who were, in growing numbers, employed in the cultural sector. The current crisis of capitalism has two main consequences. Shrinking budgets add new limits on cultural policy as culture tends to be identified as a “supplement of soul” when basic needs are no longer addressed and new claims for full democratic access to cultural resources.

What Difference do Derivatives Make? From the Technical to the Political Conjuncture

2020-10-23T16:03:12+02:00

In the aftermath of the great bailout of capital in 2008 (and still ongoing) finance has often been seen as external and parasitical to the real economy. Instead, finance and other forms of capital have become more closely articulated and interwoven. A critical social logic of the derivative is offered here, following on Marx’s analysis of the commodity, to consider what is meant by dominance of finance, what difference finance makes and the politics of debt. The derivative provides key insights into the apparently detached process by which money seems to beget more money, and at the same time discloses the internal socialization and interdependence that is at the root of a politically generative mutual indebtedness.

Compulsory Creativity: A Critique of Cognitive Capitalism

2020-10-24T16:03:00+02:00

Contemporary capitalism can be labelled cognitive capitalism. In this dynamic, demanding and extremely transformative mode of production, knowledge becomes a strategic force of production and an important commodity, while concepts and ideas become items. This article sheds light on some of the implications of the emergence of a cognitive capitalism. In response to modern oxymorons, such as compulsory creativity and mandatory originality, this article offers various attempts to interpret and criticise how human inventiveness and a whole range of externalities get attuned to economic and market strategies, depriving them their natural, social and individual qualities. The aim of this article is to renew and sharpen a critique of the new type of capitalism and to foster some normative bricks that might be able to inspire alternative ways of thinking and living.

The Alternative to Post-Hegemony: Reproduction and Austerity’s Social Factory

2020-10-24T16:03:10+02:00

In the transitions to advanced liberal States and post-Fordist economic paradigms, it is argued that the distinction between work and sociality has become blurred. This marks the emergence of the “social factory” where sociality is industrialised and industrialisation has become increasingly centred on immaterial, social activity. It is further argued that this regime has generated a new articulation of socio-economic relations based on biopower and systems of control alongside the irruptive agency of multitude. Consequently, it is often suggested that the concept of hegemony can no longer adequately explain manifestations of power and resistance. The argument is that we live today in a state of post-hegemony. This paper challenges the theoretical and pragmatic underpinnings of this position at a number of levels, arguing that the lived politics associated with the imposition of Austerity economics across Europe, but particularly as manifest in Ireland, undermine the assertion that hegemony is no longer a relevant conceptualisation of power dynamics. In particular it uses feminist thinking to challenge the epochalisation inherent to arguments of post-hegemony, arguing instead for a return to engagement with the reproductive logic of hegemonic discipline.

Culture Unbound Volume 6, Editorial

2020-10-20T16:04:17+02:00

With this volume, Culture Unbound celebrates its five-year anniversary. This makes a good opportunity both to look back at what we have achieved and to gaze ahead to what we have planned for the future.

This new volume, which will be more extensive and ambitious than ever, thus marks a readiness and willingness to engage with some of the most acute problems and complex transformation that society faces. We hope and believe that this not only expresses the ambitions of Culture Unbound but also reflects a more general tendency within contemporary cultural research. In order to better accommodate the most recent developments within the field of cultural research, and facilitate intellectual discussion and critical analysis of contemporary issues we also plan to expand our repertoire of published material. In the coming year Culture Unbound will therefore introduce a section of texts we have chosen to call ‘Unbound Ideas’. Here we welcome academic essays and texts of a somewhat shorter format and freer approach to scholarly convention than our usual full-length research articles. These essays will take different – perhaps speculative or conjectural – positions, or give a new perspective on pressing topics or recently emerged concerns within cultural research.

Introducing Capitalism: Current Crisis and Cultural Critique

2020-10-23T16:04:14+02:00

No abstract available.

Karl Marx and the Study of Media and Culture Today

2020-10-29T16:04:06+01:00

The task of this paper discusses the role of Marx in analysing media, communica-tion and culture today. An analysis of three contemporary Cultural Studies works – Lawrence Grossberg’s monograph Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, John Hartley’s monograph Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies and Paul Smith’s edited volume The Renewal of Cultural Studies – shows that there is an agreement that the economy needs to be taken more into account by Cultural Studies, but disagreement on which approach should be taken and what the role of Karl Marx’s works shall be. The paper argues that Marx’s labour theory of value is especially important for critically analysing the media, culture and communica-tion. Labour is still a blind spot of the study of culture and the media, although this situation is slowly improving. It is maintained that the turn away from Marx in Cultural and Media Studies was a profound mistake that should be reverted. Only an engagement with Marx can make Cultural and Media Studies topical, politically relevant, practical and critical, in the current times of global crisis and resurgent critique.

Beyond Kulturkritik: Along the Supply Chain of Contemporary Capitalism

2020-10-26T16:02:52+01:00

Notions of Kulturkritik stemming from twentieth century accounts of mass con-sumption present culture as an effect of the mode or relations of production. Culture becomes the means by which capitalism imposes itself as an ideological system. This paper asks how Kulturkritik might be revived or revisited in the current moment of capitalist globalisation. Focusing on changes to production systems introduced by the growth of logistics and supply chain management, it argues that cultural processes of translation, signification, communication and argument have become deeply and materially embedded in the development of capitalism. Particular attention is paid to how infrastructure and technology shape relations of capital and labour. The paper asks how the subjective force of labour can exploit the vulnerabilities inherent in supply chains and confront the networked forms of organisation that enable contemporary capitalism. Overall the aim is to establish a role for culture in struggles against capitalism and to rethink the place of critique and ideology in the wake of such an approach.

Imagined, Real and Moral Economies

2020-10-19T16:05:10+02:00

This article explores three different inflections of the idea of economy: imagined, real and moral. Each offers a distinctive way of thinking about economies and each raises the possibility of providing critical purchase on the formations of ’actually existing capitalisms’. The article begins from the idea of imagined economies given the proliferation of such imaginaries, not least in the wake of the fi-nancial crisis. In political, public and policy discourse, economies have become the focus of intense fantasy and projection. The resulting imaginaries underpin a range of economic, public and social policies. Importantly, they articulate a foundational distinction between economic and other sorts of policy. The idea of imag-ined economies opens the space for a certain type of critical engagement with contemporary political economy. In a rather different way, ideas of the ’real economy’ have also been the site of critical work - distinguishing between ’real’ relations and practices involved in the production of material objects (and value) in the contrast with virtual, digital, financialised economies. This article treats the ‘real economy’ as one further instance of an imagined economy. Like the concept of the ’real economy’, E.P. Thompson’s exploration of a ’moral economy’ also offers a standpoint from which critical analysis of the current economic, political and social disintegrations might be constructed. Thompson’s articulation of a moment in which collective understandings of economies as fields of moral relationships and obligations dramatises the contemporary de-socialization of economies, even if it may be harder to imagine twentieth and twenty first century capitalisms as moral economies that the current crisis has disrupted. Again, the article treats ’moral economies’ as another form of imagined economy, in part to make visible the shifting and contested character of what counts as ’economic’.

Labour Against Capitalism? Hegel’s Concept of Labour in Between Civil Society and the State

2020-10-25T16:02:40+01:00

The concepts and phenomena of civil society, political economy and labour are ambivalent matters in Hegel’s political philosophy. They simultaneously contain productive and destructive potential in the realization of the political community. This article investigates Hegel’s concept of labour against the backdrop of his theory of civil society in order to bring forth the ambiguous role of labour in relation to the ’capitalism’ of civil society. According to Hegel, labour is both economically productive and the activity by which the society and its members can transcend the mere capitalistic dimensions of society. Labour can therefore simultaneously be understood as capitalistic and non-capitalistic in Hegel’s political philosophy. The cultivating dimensions of labour in Hegel’s theory offer a counterpart to the mere capitalistic forms of labour. Labour can therefore be used as a promising platform for the discussion of the relation between economy and culture and for the revitalization of capitalism critique.

The General Illumination which Bathes all the Colours: Class Composition and Cognitive Capitalism for Dummies

2020-10-20T16:03:15+02:00

For many years, the concept of cognitive capitalism has been an important subject for elaboration, discussions, and polemics. In this essay, we will not summarize the various theoretical details of the debate; instead, we will try to clarify the political nature of the concept and examine what is at stake from a theoretical point of view. Then, we will give some provisional and explorative answers to some of the central questions on cognitive capitalism: What does it mean? In what sense is it useful as a tool for the struggles? What kinds of class composition and antagonist subjectivity are embodied in this concept?

First, we will explain why cognitive labour does not identify a particular sector of the class composition. We will use the term ’cognitivization’ (becoming cognitive of labour) to elaborate on the process of redetermination of the whole class composition.

Secondly, we will summarize a genealogy of cognitive capitalism and its peculiarities. Based on our readings, it is not a stage of development, but the site of a new battlefield in the ongoing class struggle.

Thirdly, we will point out the tension underlying cognitive capitalism, i.e., the tension between cooperation and capture, autonomy and subordination.

Finally, we will point out the problem of re-thinking a central category from operaismo: the class composition.

Following this pathway, we can underline the main theoretical and political question: What are the points of rupture in cognitive capitalism?

Becoming Trivial: The Book Trailer

2020-10-19T16:06:03+02:00

Despite the introduction of audiobooks and e-books, printed stories still are in high demand. However, in a globalized world which is more and more ruled by mass media and technology, it is increasingly difficult for writers and publishers to promote their books. The solution is almost ironic: popular media, which is assumed to decrease readership, is turned into a tool to increase the number of readers. In 2002 the book trailer emerged as a new web-based marketing strategy for the launch of new books. Since then the appearance of the book trailer has changed considerably. The article examines specific examples and highlights methods that establish the relationship between the content of the book and its representation in the book trailer. Although guidelines apply for the production of book trailers, such as constraints relating to time and content, there are no limitations for the imagination of the producers. A book trailer may be simple, supported only by music and pictures, but they may also be as complex as short films. Additionally, book trailers are not limited to the promotion of one specific genre or age group. Depending on the viral potential of social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, and Tumblr book trailers reach a global audience and, therefore, open up new markets. It can be argued, while book trailers have not yet reached the realm of the everyday, they will gradually come to the attention of academics and this article wants to present a starting point for this development.

Playing with Personal Media: On an Epistemology of Ignorance

2020-10-19T16:06:14+02:00

Mobile devices are ubiquitous and increasingly an integral part of everyday media usage. One remarkable development in the field of personal media (smartphones, tablet computers, etc.) is the trivialization of their interfaces and appearance, especially when compared to the complexity of the underlying software and hardware. The iPhone and its successors trump with usability, they offer simple and seemingly direct access to many functions. Software can be handled with basic hand gestures or voice control, no expert knowledge is required to use the devices. Rather, current apps and operating systems are designed for a playful approach that favours unbiased exploration.

The article investigates forms of the trivial in both device materiality and interface design from a media studies perspective. Pertinent philosophical positions on human-technology relationships by Günther Anders and Hans Blumenberg are discussed to explore the ramifications of a highly productive epistemology of ignorance. A focus is placed upon the process of blackboxing, a technique of invisibilization common to media technologies wherein the social and material prerequisites of a given artefact are hidden from users. The black box also serves as a model of thought to offer a way of analysing unknown complex systems as proposed in cybernetics, and it has more recently been picked up and refashioned in significant ways in actor-network theory.

Playing with personal media is situated between the poles of user infantilization and the freedom of exploring new practices. Triviality in interface design is ambiguous in that it denies insight into more fundamental processes but at the same time creates a space for playful variation not requiring professional knowledge. The article aims to negotiate between positions of elitist criticism and affirmative technophilia, which are widespread in the discourse on mobile devices.

Fashion’s Final Frontier": The Correlation of Gender Roles and Fashion in Star Trek

2020-10-20T16:04:30+02:00

Since its creation in 1966, Star Trek has been a dominant part of popular culture and as thus served as the source for many cultural references. Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to realize his vision of a utopia but at the same time, he used the futuristic setting of the show to comment on the present time, on ac-tual social and political circumstances. This means that each series can be regarded as a mirror image of the time in which it was created. The clothing of the characters in the different series is one part of that image. The uniforms of The Original Series show influences of the 1960s pop art movement as well as the mini-skirt trend that experienced its peak in that decade. In the course of almost 40 years, however, many things changed. In the 1990s, in Deep Space Nine and Voyager, a unisex uniform replaced the mini-dresses, with few exceptions; the colorful shirts gave way to ones that were mostly black. This trend continues into the new century. This essay interprets the evolution of the female officers’ uniforms from femi-nized dresses to androgynous clothing over the development of the series as a reflection of the change of gender roles in contemporary American society. The general functions of the female characters’ uniforms are the central object of its analysis while the few, but noteworthy exceptions to this pattern are given specific attention. Finally, one of the most intriguing lines of enquiry is, how the prequel series Enterprise, supposed to be set before The Original Series, but produced and aired from 2001 to 2005, fits in the picture.

Narrated Political Theory: Theorizing Pop Culture in Dietmar Dath’s Novel Für immer in Honig

2020-10-23T16:04:24+02:00

In recent decades, debates on the relationship between pop culture and the political have transgressed academia and have even been prominent in pop (media) discourses and texts, including pop literature. Amongst the contributions at the intersection of art, theory and entertainment are the novels and essays by the German author Dietmar Dath. Taking the example of his novel Für immer in Honig (Berlin 2005/2008), it will be discussed how the book reloads and theorizes pop culture, and how a common cultural-theoretical narrative of de-politicized pop is challenged by the imaginative narratives of the novel.

It will be argued that Dath’s references to affective ‘mattering maps’ of pop culture, that on the one hand tend to fall into the pitfalls of exclusive ‘pop sophistication’, nevertheless play a key role for his aesthetical/theoretical project of political emancipation, and that these references can be viewed as examples of why popular passions matter for the formation of political identities/subjectivities as well as for the production and reading of political theory.

From Losing to Loss: Exploring the Expressive Capacities of Videogames Beyond Death as Failure

2020-10-24T16:03:52+02:00

In games, loss is as ubiquitous as it is trivial. One reason for this has been found in the established convention of on-screen character death as a signifier for failure (Klastrup 2006; Grant 2011; Johnson 2011). If that’s all that games have to offer in terms of addressing an existential trope of human experience, the worried protectionist concludes, shouldn’t we dismiss this intrinsically flat medium as inferior to more established media forms such as film or literature? (Ebert 2010). Contrary to this view, this paper discusses gameplay examples that shed light on how this medium might leverage its expressive resources to arrive at rich representations of loss.

First, the notion of loss implied in Sigmund Freud’s work “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) will be discussed in relation to losing in games. Looking at procedurality, fictional alignment and experiential metaphor as three expressive gameplay devices identified by Doris Rusch (2009) will help explain the expressive shortcoming of losing and lay out what is at stake with profound gameplay expression. Moreover, it will serve as the keywords structuring the following analysis of three videogames, Final Fantasy VII (1997), Ico (2001) and Passage (2007), and their design decisions fostering deep representations of loss. Keeping the Freudian notion of loss in mind, we can trace its repercussions on the three expressive dimensions respectively. Following a separate analysis of each gameplay example, the last section will discuss some commonalities and differences and arrive at the identification of desired object, permanent disruption and linearity as design aspects modeling loss in more compelling ways than losing.

British Asians, Covert Racism and Exclusion in English Professional Football

2020-10-25T16:03:17+01:00

This article examines the exclusion of British Asians from English professional football. At present, there are eight British Asians with professional contracts out of over 4,000 players. This statistic is increasingly noteworthy when we consider that, first, football is extremely popular across British Asian groups and, second, Britain is home to over 4 million British Asians (the UK’s largest minority ethnic group). Following a brief introduction as well as a discussion of racisms, the work will provide an overview of the barriers that have excluded British Asian football communities from the professional ranks. In particular, I shall discuss some of the key obstacles including overt racism, ‘all-Asian’ football structures and cultural differences. However, the focus of this paper is to explore the impact and persist-ing nature of institutional racism within football. With the aid of oral testimonies, this work shall present British Asian experiences of covert racism in the game. I shall therefore demonstrate that coaches/scouts (as gatekeepers) have a tendency to stereotype and racialize British Asian footballers, thus exacerbating the British Asian football exclusion. Finally, the article will offer policy recommendations for reform. These recommendations, which have come out of primary and secondary research, aspire to challenge institutional racism and combat inequalities within the game.

Introduction: Pursuing the Trivial

2020-10-20T16:06:18+02:00

No abstract available.

The Great British Music Hall: Its Importance to British Culture and ‘The Trivial’

2020-10-29T16:04:16+01:00

By 1960, Britain’s once-thriving Music Hall industry was virtually dead. Theatres with their faded notions of Empire gave way to Cinema and the threat of Television. Where thousands once linked arms singing popular songs, watch acrobatics, see feats of strength, and listen to risqué jokes, now the echoes of those acts lay as whispers amongst the stalls’ threadbare seats.

The Halls flourished in the 19^th Century, but had their origins in the taverns of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. Minstrels plied their trade egged on by drunken crowds. As time passed, the notoriety of the Music Hall acts and camaraderie produced grew. Entrepreneurial businessman tapped into this commerciality and had purpose-built status symbol theatres to provide a ‘home’ for acts and punters. With names like The Apollo giving gravitas approaching Olympian ideals, so the owners basked in wealth and glory.

The Music Hall became the mass populist entertainment for the population. Every town had one, where everyone could be entertained by variety acts showing off the performers’ skills. The acts varied from singers, joke-tellers, comics, acrobats, to dancers. They all aimed to entertain. They enabled audiences to share a symbiotic relationship with one another; became recruitment officers for the Army; inspired War Poets; showed short films; and they and the halls reflected both the ideals and foibles of their era.

By using Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling as its cornerstone, the article will give a brief history of the halls, whilst providing analysis into how they grew into mass populist entertainment that represented British culture. Case studies of famous artistes are given, plus an insight into how Music Hall segued into radio, film and television.

’We Have Become Niggers!’: Josephine Baker as a Threat to Viennese Culture

2020-10-23T16:05:19+02:00

Early 1928 Josephine Baker, by that time a famous dancer and singer, came to Vienna to be part of a vaudeville show. Even before her arrival the waves went high – her possible presence in Vienna caused a major uproar there. Various commentators constructed an image of Baker that was based on the assumption that she was seriously attacked on the values of traditional European culture and, furthermore, true Viennese culture.

In my essay, where I address the Viennese Negerskandal more directly, I explore the various discourses that produced this ‘event’ along the interface of mass culture/avant-garde and high/low culture. It is evident that these events centre on a construction of ‘blackness’ and of ‘black cultural expression’; it goes without saying that racism and sexism play a central role.

I will, however, try to contextualize the ‘nigger scandal’ in a broader setting: against the background of Vienna in the late 1920s the perceived threat of ‘Americanisation’ will be discussed.

’Walking With’: A Rhythmanalysis of London’s East End

2020-10-26T16:03:13+01:00

In this paper, I will be looking at the practice of walking through the lens of rhythmanalysis. The method is brought to attention by Lefebvre’s last book Rhythmanalysis (2004) in which he suggests a way of interrelating space and time; a phenomenological inquiry hinged on the concrete experience of lived life. My interest in the nuance of walking was initially evoked by the structural film Fergus Walking which was made by the film maker William Raban in 1978. I will explore the potential of using structural films in sensitising us to the temporal-spatial relationship of things. The main body of the paper centres around two themes: Firstly I address the primacy of movement as a mode of engaging with the world. It is through ‘muscular consciousness’ (Bachelard 1964: 11) that walking becomes a form of experiential knowing, feeling, connecting and protesting. Secondly, I examine the practices of walking in relation to the radical transformations of the Docklands’ landscape since the beginning of the 1980s. I propose that the contesting interests of different groups can be explored by analysing the rhythmic interactions of their activities. The transition and recomposition of an economy from locally based industrial activities to globalised financial services were manifested in the syncopation of regeneration rhythms to the living rhythms of the Docklands. The fast changing urban landscapes were negotiated through alternative ways of navigating the streets, hence engendering a different set of rhythms.

Taking a Hike and Hucking the Stout: The Troublesome Legacy of the Sublime in Outdoor Recreation

2020-10-24T16:04:12+02:00

As Henry Thoreau noted in the 1850s, the simple act of walking can be loaded with political and spiritual meaning. Today, taking a hike as an act of engaging in outdoor recreation is equally non-trivial, and therefore subject of the following analysis. As this paper argues, outdoors recreation is still influenced by the legacy of the Sublime and its construction of wilderness. This troublesome legacy means that the cultural self-representation of outdoor sports – and the practice itself – lays claim to the environment in ways that are socially and sometimes even ethni-cally exclusive.

This essay uses William Cronon’s critique of the cultural constructedness of wilderness as a point of departure to see how Western notions of sublime nature have an impact on spatial practice. The elevation of specific parts of the environ-ment into the category of wilderness prescribes certain uses and meanings as nature is made into an antidote against the ills of industrial civilization, and a place where the alienated individual can return to a more authentic self. This view then has become a troublesome legacy, informing the cultural self-representation of those uses of “wilderness” that are known as outdoor recreation.

In its cultural production, outdoors recreation constructs “healthy” and “athletic” bodies exercising in natural settings and finding refuge from the everyday al-ienation of postmodern society. Yet these bodies are conspicuously white, and the obligatory equipment and fashion expensive. Outdoor recreation is a privileged assertion of leisure, often denoting an urban, affluent, and white, background of the practitioner. These practitioners then lay exclusive claim on the landscapes they use.

As trivial as taking a hike or any other form of outdoors recreation may thus seem, they put a cultural legacy into practice that is anything but trivial.

A Stitch in Time: Changing Cultural Constructions of Craft and Mending

2020-10-20T16:05:20+02:00

Over the course of the twentieth century, the availability of cheap, mass-produced fashion has contributed to a decline in everyday domestic mending skills. Indeed, as mass-manufactured goods have become cheaper for the global population it has become normative consumer behaviour to dispose of any item that is less than perfect, even when the damage is entirely superficial, leading Clark to claim that: ‘mending has died out’ (2008: 435).

However, in recent years there has been an apparent revival in domestic mending, aided and evidenced by the emergence of sewing and mending groups in the UK, mainland Europe and North America. This has coincided with a growing interest in more sustainable material goods (McDonough & Braungart 2002; Fletcher 2008), and a small body of academic work around the notion of craftsmanship (e.g. Sennett 2008; Crawford 2009). Of particular interest here is the history of mending of clothing and household goods, as well as recent incarnations of mending as both an individual and group activity. In the past year, researchers from diverse theoretical backgrounds have also highlighted the role of mending in everyday material goods providing further insights into the subject (Laitala & Boks 2012; Middleton 2012; Portwood-Stacer 2012).

An examination of mending reveals a complex picture in which gender, class, aesthetics and social motivations interweave with the imperatives of consumer culture. Whilst historically it is generally constructed as a feminine activity, and carried connotations of material deprivation, contemporary mending is often motivated by environmental concerns and a desire to reduce consumption. Ultimately, mending is demonstrated to be an under-researched subject loaded with cultural meaning, and ultimately, is shown to be anything but a trivial activity.

Communicating Culture in Practice

2020-10-24T16:05:18+02:00

No abstract available.

Balancing Acts: Culture as Commodity Among Business Consultants

2020-10-07T15:42:28+02:00

In this article the authors intend to analyze how the concept of culture is packaged, sold and delivered as a commodity. It is based on an ethnographic study of a Swedish consultancy in the field of cross-cultural communication and the relationship between the company and its clients. The clients were primarily foreign executives working in Sweden or Swedish expatriates, preparing for life abroad. The significance of culture-as-commodity will be explored from the perspective of the company as well as its clients in order to shed light on how the concept of culture can be communicated and what happens to it in the process. The study shows how the company combines theoretical perspectives from anthropology and intercultural communication with the aim to deliver a complex yet accessible understanding of culture to its clients.

The analysis shows that these perspectives both clash and synergize, creating contradictions as well as turning culture into an accessible and useful tool for clients. The authors argue that researchers in the field of applied cultural analysis can learn from the example put forth by the balancing act between these two perspectives on culture performed by the company. The authors conclude that although the commodification process reduces and simplifies the meaning(s) of culture, the company still manages to put culture on the agenda, demonstrating to its clients how, why, and in what ways it matters to them.

Time-Space Flexibility and Work: Analyzing the “Anywhere and Anytime Office” in the Entertainment, New Media, and Arts Sector

2020-10-23T16:06:20+02:00

The applied cultural analysis work presented in this article was conducted with independent professionals who work in a flexible time-space format – known as telework – for the entertainment, new media, and arts sector in the Los Angeles area. Most participants are associates of the production and post-production boutique “Studio Can” as well as the curatorial new media and arts nonprofit organization “PalMarte.” When working in a flexible time-space format, boundaries between leisure/family life and work at home, or personal and public realms, tend to become blurred. This blurred context involves a web of cultural complexity that exists behind the materialization of boundaries. Through empirical material, this article examines rhythms and mechanisms between flexibility and stability, unveiling a viscous consistency of everyday life. This work helps to better understand the relation between leisure/family life and work at home, as well as stability and change, to rethink these realms and how they relate to each other but also how they transform one another. Although culturally different, these realms are bridged through the material culture that surrounds them. As conveyors, objects (such as a heating pad) and activities culturally transport participants between realms. Research methods combined time-diaries, interviews, observation, visual ethnography, and autoethnography. While applying academic knowledge into a non-academic setting to rethink realms and how they relate and transform each other in a bridged relationship, this work is also an invitation to rethink the relationship between the realms of academia and non-academia.

Invisible Lines Crossing the City: Ethnographic Strategies for Place-making

2020-10-20T16:07:12+02:00

Helsingborg, a coastal city in southern Sweden, initiated a long-term re-development project called H+ in 2009, aiming to convert industrial harbor space in the city’s south into a new, livable urban neighborhood and city center. The project aims to create an open and ’tolerant city’ in Helsingborg over the next twenty years. In 2010-2011, H+ used an open-source planning method as a strategy to incorporate multiple working methods and ideas into the planning process. As a cultural analyst, my role with the H+ project and the City of Helsingborg was to mediate social and cultural perspectives and development strategies between plan-ners and citizens. Focusing the project’s vision towards incorporating existing communities and their values, I applied an ethnographic method to culturally map Helsingborg’s social cityscapes. Cultural mapping integrates social and physical places into one map. It is a useful methodological tool in accessing ’cultural’ knowledge, translating ethnographic data into usable maps for city planners in the process of developing the H+ area. This article addresses how ethnographic meth-ods and cultural mapping engages with and revitalizes city planning, essentially a process of place-making the H+ area. An applied cultural analytical approach provokes planning practices and questions how and if planning can be more open and inclusive through deeper understandings of unique places that emerge from the relationships between people and spaces. The ’invisible,’ yet well-known, segregating line (a street called Trädgårdsgatan) in Helsingborg creates a particular condition that the city must contend with in order to achieve its vision of a ’toler-ant city.’

From Creep to Co-op: Research(er) Paying the Cost of Discplacement?

2020-10-25T16:03:49+01:00

As discussed by planning researchers Jalakas & Larsson (2008), in Sweden, societal issues such as social sustainability, urban life and gender fails to travel from comprehensive documents in the urban planning system to the legislative ones (i.e. the “detailed development plans”). This might, as this essay argues, have to do with the absence of “cultural brokers”, i.e a kind of translator of the narratives told in a particular society. Can researchers act as such translators – increasing the precence of cultural and everyday-life experiences in legislative planning documents? This essay discusses problems and possibilities with an ethnography engageing with/in society.

The Resilience of Music Copyrights: Technological Innovation, Copyright Disputes and Legal Amendments Concerning the Distribution of Music

2020-10-24T16:04:52+02:00

The introduction of the Internet and the convenient, although often illicit, file-sharing of copyrighted artistic products which it made possible has put Intellectual Property Right/IPR laws under stress. It is not the first and possibly not the last time that this phenomenon has occurred in connection with a technological shift. This paper contains a short history of the fundamentals of the processes which led to the incorporation of new means of distribution of artistic products in the Intellectual Property Rights regulations. It starts with music printing technology in Venice around the year 1500. It takes a leap to the recording devices of four centuries later. Via the introduction of broadcast devices, it ends with the blank media levies. The paper describes the events in the countries that created the first legal documents for these four types of technological inventions. Arguments pro and con IPR law differ but stakeholder positions remain the same.

Double or Extra? The Identity of Transnational Adoptees in Sweden

2020-11-10T16:15:22+01:00

Transnational adoption has been well-established and successful in Sweden. The notion of double identity is espoused today, embracing the national identity of the birth country as well as the Swedish identity; but it is often adoptive parents more than adoptees who are concerned with this. Hidden in the double identity, there is a presupposition of the type of axiom expressed in terms such as ’blood is thicker than water’, placing biological origin as the essential value. However, some adoptees are more positive and flexible in constructing their identities, which should be worth more attention. This biologised ideology may discriminate adoptees and immigrants; it betrays a flaw in the Swedish self-image of their society as ’colour blind’ and ’anti racist’.

Yours in Revolution: Retrofitting Carlos the Jackal

2020-10-20T16:06:29+02:00

This paper explores the representation of ’Carlos the Jackal’, the one-time ’World’s Most Wanted Man’ and ’International Face of Terror’ – primarily in cin-ema but also encompassing other forms of popular culture and aspects of Cold War policy-making. At the centre of the analysis is Olivier Assayas’s Carlos (2010), a transnational, five and a half hour film (first screened as a TV mini-series) about the life and times of the infamous militant. Concentrating on the various ways in which Assayas expresses a critical preoccupation with names and faces through complex formal composition, the project examines the play of ab-straction and embodiment that emerges from the narrativisation of terrorist violence. Lastly, it seeks to engage with the hidden implications of Carlos in terms of the intertwined trajectories of formal experimentation and revolutionary politics.

"Something is at Stake": Northern European Cultural Studies Where, How, and Why?

2020-10-07T15:42:54+02:00

In this article, I address the current state of cultural studies in Northern Europe and more specifically in the Nordic countries, especially in Denmark. I take my point of departure in offering an answer to the question, what is cultural studies anyhow? and raise some questions about its future directions. From that, I then discuss how we can reason about regional cultural studies since in so doing we are caught in a dilemma: on the one hand, it provides a way to nuance hegemonic his-tories and ways of mapping the international field but, on the other hand, it also inevitably leads to new generalizations and new inclusions and exclusions. I go on to examine first the (im)possibility of scaling (regional, national, etc.) and, next, the challenge it raises at different levels of setting, i.e., Northern Europe, the Nor-dic countries, and Denmark. Finally, I focus on national, i.e., Danish cultural stud-ies and return to the question of the future of the discipline.

Portuguese Cultural Studies/Cultural Studies in Portugal: Some Thoughts on the Making and Remaking of a Field

2020-10-23T16:08:18+02:00

This article discusses the overall situation of cultural studies in Portugal. It starts by analysing some of the courses and graduate programmes currently on offer. The results suggest that cultural studies is experiencing a fast academic expansion. While this seems to be entangled with top-down institutional changes, in the wake of the Bologna process and the turn to the cultural/ creative industries and as part of a more general shift to the ’new economy’, there are reasons to believe that al-ternative understandings of cultural studies have not died out. The name ’cultural studies’ continues to cause unease in some academic quarters (namely, in literary studies) and there is ambiguity regarding what is meant by it. Cautioning against the tendency to reduce Portuguese cultural studies to a straightforward import from the Anglophone world, I argue for the need to conduct historically informed research on local strands and traditions of cultural theory and critique. I conclude that only a combined synchronic and diachronic approach – one that is sensitive to national and transnational contexts and intersections – will allow us to gain a bet-ter understanding of the deep-running contradictions that characterise the field, helping us to clarify the stakes and reconnect to a socially relevant and critique-orientated intellectual project.

Cultural Studies in Turkey: The State of the Art

2020-10-24T16:06:38+02:00

Recent socio-political developments have rendered cultural studies of the Republic of Turkey an ever-widening field of study, as they lead apparently to a probable paradigm shift in a society that was once thought to be purely Western-oriented. The analysis of this transformation is before all else a cultural studies task. Accordingly, this paper has two aims: one, to make a a brief survey of cultural studies work that has been done so far in Turkey; and two, draw attention to the various problems encountered by the instruction and practice of cultural stud-ies in the country.

Cultural Studies and Sociology of Culture in Germany: Relations and Interrelations

2020-10-25T16:04:42+01:00

Over the last three decades, attitudes towards cultural studies in Germany have developed within contexts of contact and conflict with a variety of disciplines, e.g. ethnology, anthropology, sociology, as well as the sociology of culture, liter-ary studies and Kulturwissenschaft(en). On the one hand there is a strong academic interest in how cultural studies perceives and analyzes media culture, popular culture and everyday life. On the other hand boundaries with humanities and social science remain, which leads to criticism and conflicts with cultural studies and its achievements.

I will discuss some of the problems concerning the perception and reception of cultural studies among representatives of Kulturwissenschaft(en) and sociology of culture. Furthermore I will draw on the role of cultural studies in thematizing cultural change and conflicts, and its ability to do so in a way that shows the importance of culture and politics.

Cultural Studies, History and Cosmopolitanism in UK

2020-10-07T15:43:03+02:00

This article reviews aspects of the historical relationship between cultural studies and history in the UK university context and illustrates the specificity of cultural history approaches by drawing on the author’s own work on cosmopolitanism.

European Cultural Studies: Pathways in an Unbound Geography

2020-10-26T16:03:52+01:00

No abstract available.

Acknowledgements

2020-10-24T16:07:10+02:00

No abstract available.

Culture Unbound Vol. 5 Editorial

2020-10-29T16:04:48+01:00

We are proud to present the fifth volume of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research. This time we have some important news to share. First, the journal’s scholarly success has been financially rewarded, in that Culture Unbound has received two different publishing grants: one from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and the other from the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS). Together these two grants cover most of the costs for Martin Fredriksson’s work as executive editor, which forms the core of our rather minimal costs. The remaining expenses are covered by our three collaborating host institutions at Linköping University: the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS), the Department of Culture Studies (Tema Q) and the Swedish Cultural Policy Research Observatory (SweCult).

Introduction: Feminist Cultural Studies

2020-10-29T16:04:37+01:00

No abstract available.

"Will We be Tested on This?": Schoolgirls, Neoliberalism and the Comic Grotesque in Swedish Contemporary Youth Theatre

2020-10-24T16:06:16+02:00

This article is based on an ethnographic participation study of the production of a play called All about the ADHD and A+ Children of Noisy Village (ännu mer om alla vi ADHD- och MVG-barn i Bullerbyn) staged at one of Sweden’s most prominent playhouses for children’s and youth theatre: ung scen/öst. Within the familiar setting of the classroom, the play takes on the challenging task of questioning and scrutinizing the complex and tangled situation of contemporary neoliberal ideas and practices, their connections to capitalism and their impact on everyday school-life. This in front of an audience consisting mainly of individuals who were not even born at the time when the political map was radically re-drawn in Berlin in 1989, and who have grown up during a period when neoliberal governance has gained increasing influence in Swedish culture and society. The play mediates its dense, political content and its descriptions of teenagers’ everyday lives through a large portion of good old-fashioned entertainment, with music, singing and bizarre, laughter-provoking situations.

The main research question to be answered in the article is: In what ways are the abstract contemporary economic-political manifestations of power and govern-ance expressed in this good-humored play for youth, and how can this be read from a feminist perspective? Hence, the article circles around three nodes that intersect in various ways: theatre, economic-political issues and feminist perspectives. The theoretical framework of the article is primarily based on a merger between, on the one hand, feminist social science and, on the other, feminist cultural analysis.

Disturbing Femininity

2020-10-26T16:03:32+01:00

When Helle Thorning-Schmidt in 2011 became the first female Prime Minister in Denmark, this “victory for the women” was praised in highly celebratory tones in Danish newspapers. The celebration involved a paradoxical representation of gender as simultaneously irrelevant to politics and – when it comes to femininity – in need of management. Based on an analysis of the newspaper coverage of the election, I argue that highlighting gender (in)equality as either an important political issue or as something that conditions the possibilities of taking up a position as politician was evaluated as a performative speech act, i.e. an act that creates the trouble it names. Ruling out gender equality as relevant was, however, continually interrupted by comments on how Thorning-Schmidt and other female politicians perform gender in ways that fit or do not fit with “doing politician”. These com-ments tended to concern the styling of bodies and behaviour and followed well known – or sticky – gendered scripts.

Perfume Packaging, Seduction and Gender

2020-10-07T15:42:33+02:00

This article examines gender and cultural sense-making in relation to perfumes and their packaging. Gendered meanings of seduction, choice, consumption and taste are brought to the fore with the use of go-along interviews with consumers in perfume stores. Meeting luxury packages in this feminized environment made the interviewed women speak of bottles as objects to fall in love with and they de-scribed packages as the active part in an act of seduction where they were expecting packages to persuade them into consumption. The interviewed men on the other hand portrayed themselves as active choice-makers and stressed that they were always in control and not seduced by packaging. However, while their ways of explaining their relationship with packaging on the surface seems to confirm cultural generalizations in relation to gender and seduction, the article argues that letting oneself be seduced is no less active than seducing. Based on a combination of actor network theories and theories of gender performativity the article points to the agency of packaging for constructions of gender and understands the inter-viewees as equally animated by the flows of passion which guide their actions.

Sex Dilemmas, Amazons and Cyborgs: Feminist Cultural Studies and Sport

2020-10-20T16:07:46+02:00

In this article, I discuss sport and physical activities as a field of empirical investigation for feminist cultural studies with a potential to contribute to theorizing the body, gender and difference. Sport has, historically, served to legitimize and rein-force the gender dichotomy by making men “masculine” through developing physical strength and endurance, while women generally have been excluded or di-rected towards activities fostering a “feminine suppleness”. The recent case of runner Caster Semenya, who was subjected to extensive gender tests, demon-strates how athletic superiority and “masculine” attributes in women still today stir public emotions and evoke cultural anxieties of gender blurring. But the rigid gender boundaries have also made sport a field of transgressions. From the “Soviet amazon” of the Cold War, transgressions in sport have publicly demonstrated, but also pushed, the boundaries of cultural understandings of gender. Gender verification tests have exposed a continuum of bodies that cannot easily be arranged into two stable, separate gender categories.

In spite of the so called “corporeal turn”, sport is still rather neglected within cultural studies and feminist research. This appears to be linked to a degradation, and fear, of the body and of the risk that women – once again – be reduced to biology and physical capacity. But studies of sport might further develop under-standings of the processes through which embodied knowledge and subjectivity is produced, in a way that overcomes the split between corporeality and discursive regimes or representations. Furthermore, with the fitness upsurge since the 1980s, the athletic female body has emerged as a cultural ideal and a rare validation of “female masculinity” (Halberstam) in popular culture. This is an area well-suited for “third wave” feminist cultural studies that are at ease with complexities and contradictions: the practices and commercialized images of the sportswoman are potentially both oppressive and empowering.

Reproduction, Politics, and John Irving’s The Cider House Rules: Women’s Rights or "Fetal Rights"?

2020-10-23T16:06:51+02:00

While hotly debated in political contexts, abortion has seldom figured in explicit terms in either literature or film in the United States. An exception is John Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules, which treats abortion insistently and explicitly. Although soon thirty years old, The Cider House Rules still functions as an important voice in the ongoing discussion about reproductive rights, responsibilities, and politics. Irving represents abortion as primarily a women’s health issue and a political issue, but also stresses the power and responsibility of men in abortion policy and debate. The novel rejects a “prolife” stance in favor of a women’s rights perspective, and clearly illustrates that abortion does not preclude or negate motherhood. This article discusses Irving’s novel in order to address abortion as a political issue, the gender politics of fictional representations of abortion, and the uses of such representations in critical practice. A brief introduction to the abortion issue in American cultural representation and in recent US history offers context to the abortion issue in Irving’s novel. The analysis focuses on abortion as it figures in the novel, and on how abortion figures in the criticism of the novel that explicitly focuses on this issue. The article argues that twentyfirst century criticism of Irving’s text, by feminist scholars as well as explicitly anti-feminist pro-life advocates, demonstrate the pervasive influence of antiabortion discourses illustrates, since these readings of Irving’s novel include, or reactively respond to, the fetal rights discourse and the “awfulization of abortion.” The article further proposes that the novel’s representations of reproductive rights issues – especially abortion – are still relevant today, and that critical readings of fictional and nonfictional representations of reproductive rights issues are central to feminist poli-tics.

Gendering Cultural Memory: Balzac’s Adieu

2020-10-24T16:05:29+02:00

In this essay I examine the en-gendering of cultural memory in Honoré de Balzac´s story Adieu (1830), which proceeds from a repressed trauma originating in historical events. Balzac wrote the story in the spring of 1830, i. e. at a time when the French discontent with the Restoration regime was soon to explode in the July Revolution. The story is considered to claim that the Restoration regime’s repression of revolutionary history will recieve serious consequences in the present. But the question is how the now of the Restoration can best be linked to the then of the Revolution and the Empire? How can history be represented in a productive way, without silencing traumatic memories? My suggestion is that the abyss be-tween now and then has to be met with an ethically informed respect for difference. Stéphanie, the protagonist, dies when Philippe creates an exact replica of the traumatic situation in which they were separated many years ago. She then became a sex slave to the retiring French army, dehumanized during the hard Russian campaign, an experience that also dehumanized her. This Philippe refuses to acknowledge, since he wants to retrieve the woman he knew. That can of course never happen, but in insisting on it, I would claim that he actually renders Stéphanies life after the trauma impossible. Instead of emphasizing the distinction between past and present, Philippe overlooks it, with the severe consequence of Sté-phanie’s death. In my analysis I relate to pertinent discussions in the interdisciplinary field of cultural memory studies (an expanding field of research within the wider frame of cultural studies), but since it rarely discusses gender aspects I find it essential to relate also to feminist scholars who continually have scrutinized issues concerning memory and history writing.

Virtue as Adventure and Excess: Intertextuality, Masculinity, and Desire in the Twilight Series

2020-10-23T16:07:15+02:00

The vampire is still primarily a literary figure. The vampires we have seen on TV and cinema in recent years are all based on literary models. The vampire is at the same time a popular cultural icon and a figure that, especially women writers, use to problematize gender, sexuality and power. As a vampire story the Twilight series both produces and problematizes norms in regard to gender, class and ethnici-ty. As the main romantic character in Twilight, Edward Cullen becomes interesting both as a vampire of our time and as a man. In a similar way as in the 19th century novel the terms of relationship are negotiated and like his namesake Edward Rochester, Edward Cullen has to change in important ways for the “happy end-ing” to take place. In spite of a strong interest in sexuality and gender norms in relation to vampires very few studies have focused exclusively on masculinity. This article examines the construction of masculinity in relation to vampirism in the Twilight series. It offers an interpretation of Stephenie Meyer’s novels and the character of Edward as part of a broader field of feminist (re-)uses of the vampire in modern literature with its roots in the literary tradition from Austen and the Brontë-sisters as well as from classic Gothic fiction.

Degrees of Intersectionality: Male Rap Artists in Sweden Negotiating Class, Race and Gender

2020-10-25T16:04:01+01:00

“Intersectionality” has become a highly influential concept in gender research over the last 25 years. Debates have focused on differences and power asymmetries between women, in terms of race but also addressing class, age, sexuality, ability and nation. However, intersectional paradigms have been used to a much lesser extent in gender studies on men. This article seeks to contribute to an emerging discussion about intersectionality and masculinity by analyzing rap lyrics in Swedish songs. The data consists of a broad sample of rap lyrics by male artists 1991-2011, which is analyzed through poststructuralist discourse analysis and queer phenomenology. The analysis shows how classed discourses can be described in terms of orientation and flow, how racialization is articulated in terms of place, and the role of normative notions of gender and sexuality in anti-racist discourses. It is argued that this interconnectedness – class being related to race, which in turn is profoundly gendered – is neither well captured by the prevailing notion of “masculinities” in gender studies on men, nor by the “constitution” vs. “addition” dichotomy in intersectionality debates. Instead, it is suggested that degrees of intersectionality might be a more fruitful way of theorizing intersectionality in rela-tion to men.

The Soundtrack of Revolution Memory, Affect, and the Power of Protest Songs

2020-10-25T16:04:12+01:00

All cultural representations in the form of songs, pictures, literature, theater, film, television shows, and other media are deeply emotional and ideological, often difficult to define or analyze. Emotions are embedded as a cultural and social soundtrack of memories and minds, whether we like it or not. Feminist scholarship has emphasized over the past decade that affects and emotions are a foundation of human interaction. The cognitive understanding of the world has been replaced by a critical analysis in which questions about emotions and how we relate to the world as human beings is central (Ahmed 2004: 5-12).

It is in this memory-related instance that this article discusses the unexpected reappearance of a long forgotten song, Hasta siempre, as a part of my personal musical memory. It is a personal reflection on the complex interaction between memory, affect and the genre of protest songs as experiences in life and music. What does it mean when a melody intrudes in the middle of unrelated thoughts, when one’s mind is occupied with rational and purposive considerations? These memories are no coincidences, I argue, they are our forgotten selves singing to us.

Introduction: "Objectification, Measurement and Standardization"

2020-11-10T16:15:32+01:00

The articles in this issue of Culture Unbound were presented at a multidisciplinary conference entitled “Objectification, Measurement and Standardization” held at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, in January, 2012. It was organized by the Department of Social Anthropology, NTNU Social Research and the university’s Globalization Program.

Funny Numbers

2020-11-10T16:15:31+01:00

The struggle over cure rate measures in nineteenth-century asylums provides an exemplary instance of how, when used for official assessments of institutions, these numbers become sites of contestation. The evasion of goals and corruption of measures tends to make these numbers “funny” in the sense of becoming dishonest, while the mismatch between boring, technical appearances and cunning backstage manipulations supplies dark humor. The dangers are evident in recent efforts to decentralize the functions of governments and corporations using incen-tives based on quantified targets.

Sound Objects and Sound Products: Standardizing a New Culture of Listening in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

2020-11-10T16:15:31+01:00

In this chapter I develop the psychological underpinnings of environmental music towards an understanding of how the goals of cognitive and behavioral psychologists contributed to a new kind of listening at the beginning of the twentieth century. I begin with an examination of nineteenth-century concerns about both the physical and psychological effects of music and fraught debate among experimental psychologists of the role of musical expertise in the laboratory. These concerns were, I argue, rooted in the assumption of a direct, corporeal connection between the generation and reception of music, usually bound within a single, individual body. In the twentieth century, new technology liberated the listener from a temporally- and geographically-bound experience of music. The Tone Tests, Re-Creation Recitals, and Mood Change “parties” of Thomas Edison and the psychologist Walter Bingham show that recording technology allowed for a normalization and standardization of listening not previously possible in the music halls and laboratories of the nineteenth century. Rather paradoxically, since it also made music more accessible to the individual listener, recorded music, mobilized by industrial psychologists and record companies alike, created a new sound experience actively designed for the lowest common denominator of mass listening. It also contributed to the cultivation of a new practice of mass listening. The new mass listening practice presents broader questions about the definition of music and its functional role – If the function of music is to be ignored, is it still music?

Towards the Gigantic: Entification and Standardization as Technologies of Control

2020-11-10T16:15:31+01:00

This paper is based on studies of how standardized entities work as elements in a regime to control risk and hazardous work. Drawing on empirical examples from the petroleum industry and infrastructure sectors, we illustrate not only the mechanisms by which particular modes of entification are involved in regimes of control but also their shortcomings and seductive powers as representations. We show how the world is semantically captured and organized to consist of controllable standardized entities by the organizational regimes in the industries we have studied. This mode of entification is particularly effective in providing transcontextual mobility, as the registered entities can enter the ever-expanding information infra-structures of modernity. Although information infrastructures comprise the standards regulating communication, they commonly materialize in information and communication technologies (ICT) that provide an increasing number of effective and ubiquitous pathways through which standardized semantic signs can move and have effects. This is a core concern in the increasing focus on management by detailed regimes of accountability, measurement and standardization seen in most modern organizations. These developments, combined with the representational shortcomings of the standardized entifications, lead to a movement towards the gigantic. An ever-increasing number of signs with increasingly higher granularity are produced in order to control an ever-elusive non-entified world.

The Right Kind of Feedback: Working through Standardized Tools

2020-11-10T16:15:29+01:00

This article discusses the implications of working through globally integrated computer systems in transnational firms and addresses in particular employees’ possibility to give feedback on how these systems are working. The aim is to contribute to the literature on the standardization of IT with a focus on co-production by questioning the apparent neutrality of feedback processes.

The literature focusing on co-production has shed light on the fact that stand-ardized IT systems are not fixed, but rather flexible in the sense that they are con-tinuously developed based on user feedback. However, based on my empirical case, I argue that employees identified the existence of a frame for acceptable criticism. Two different cases of business critical IT systems are presented; these cases share a common consensus among managers and employees that the systems required improvements. However, employees had experiences of providing business critical feedback on functionality that had not been acted upon. Consequently, when evaluating their possibility to provide feedback, this was not just interpreted in the sense of functionality of the system, but also the perceived prestige of the stakeholders of the systems, which in turn had implications for both the relationship between the central organization and employees and the functionality of the systems.

Real Virtuality: Power and Simulation in the Age of Neoliberal Crisis

2020-11-10T16:15:30+01:00

Departing from a discussion of transformations in the premises of managerial rationality and “managementality” as a pacemaker of the (post)modern social order, as it is steeped in economic crisis, the paper critiques and extends Baudrillard’s constructs of “simulation” and “hyperreality” to illuminate significant developments in the global culture complex of neoliberalization. With empirical illustrations of superfinancialization, transparency and surveillance, the paper explores converging patterns of how models of “neo-management” are created by and constructs new post-political and simulated social worlds. The paper concludes that a key feature of the contemporary “managementalities” that orchestrate and give rise to major models of the neoliberal culture complex, is their capacity for constructing new simulated, yet ontologically distinct, spaces that lie beyond the power of representation. We conceptualize this ontological space as “real virtuality”. The templates of neo-management not only constantly “conquer new land” and subsume it under simulated hyperrealities, they actively “create new lands” with differential ontological statuses of varying gravity.

Towards Moral and Authentic Generalization: Humanity, Individual Human Beings and Distortion

2020-11-10T16:15:30+01:00

The article treats the issue of generality. How may one conceive of the relationship between the uniqueness of individuality and the commonality of the human (species and society) without reduction? Can generalization be made moral – es-chewing stereotypes in society – and can it be made authentic – enacting a human science which treats the individual as a thing-in-itself? Simmel’s seminal inter-vention was to see generality as a necessary kind of distortion. In contrast, this article offers rational models of the one and the whole which expect to retain the uniqueness of the one; and it suggests characteristics of human embodiment (ca-pacities, potentialities) that speak to individuality and generality at the same time. The article ends with a reconsideration of distortion as a humane artistic represen-tation, by way of the work of Stanley Spencer.

Standardized Flexibility: The Choreography of ICT in Standardization of Service Work

2020-11-10T16:15:30+01:00

This article is based on a research project that explores the proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) in public services. Furthermore, the research explores how the enhanced presence of ICT relates to efforts to increas-ingly individualise the service delivery. It can be argued that enhanced individualisation requires increased levels of discretion and flexibility. At the same time, this flexibility needs to be implemented within a standardized framework to ensure due process and to meet demands for efficiency. As local-level work practices in the public services are increasingly being enabled through ICT, the information systems can thus be seen to offer ’standardized flexibility’. Hence, the information systems work as both enablers of flexibility and as controllers of the same.

This research explores how this duality manifests empirically at the local-level of the Norwegian employment and welfare services (NAV). It focuses on the in-terface of the information systems and local-level employees. In this article, I portray the role of the information system, Arena, with regard to how the front-line employees structure and organize their work. This portrayal reveals that the information system reflects an ideal world which is out of tune with local working conditions. The employees are thus facing gaps between the ideals of the system and their actual work context. The main purpose of the paper is to illustrate how the employees deal with this gap; I identify three types of responses and strategies. Moreover, I suggest that the relationship between the information systems and different kinds of local responses may be fruitfully analysed by drawing an analogy with choreography and dancing. The second purpose of this article is thus to outline how the metaphor of choreography may provide a suitable theoretical lens for analysing ICT-enabled standardization of work.

Recreating the Banana Grower: The Role of Private Certification Systems in the Windward Islands Banana Industry

2020-11-10T16:15:29+01:00

Private standards and certification schemes in agrifood networks tend to be de-scribed as neoliberal, suggesting that they share a common understanding of that which they seek to govern and the tools to be used. Although such certification systems do have many features in common, this article argues that much is to be learned by contrasting certification systems with regard to their ideational ground-ings. Through a historically grounded discussion of the adoption and implementa-tion of two certification systems – GLOBALGAP and Fairtrade – in the Wind-ward Islands banana industry, it is argued that there are important differences with regard to how the systems envision shared key concepts such as accountability, adaptability, professionalism and not least sustainability. These differences permeate the standards as well as their enforcement structures, demonstrating a flexibility in certification as governmental technology which is often overlooked. Moreover, the article explores how the certification systems’ governmental rationalities articulate with local understandings of the role of farmers and agriculture in the Windward Islands, arguing that the tension existing between the visions embedded in the systems mirrors a tension within these islands societies. This tension preceded the adoption of the certification systems and continues to influence their implementation today.

The Father on Display: The House of Jean Monnet and the Construction of European Identity

2020-11-10T16:15:28+01:00

In the 1980s, the EC engaged in trying actively to construct a European identity, primarily through a ’manufacturing of symbols’, such as a common flag, hymn and day of celebration. A lesser-known element of this symbolic construction was the elevation of the recently deceased Jean Monnet to a position as the undisputed ’founding father’ of Europe. The ’sanctification’ of Monnet culminated in the con-version of his house – purchased by the European Parliament – into a museum of his deeds and of the European project that they served. This article seeks to analyse the construction of Monnet as a founding father for Europé, first by investi-gating the context of the acquisition of his house and the establishment of the mu-seum in the 1980s, and subsequently by analysing the present exhibition in it.

Introduction: Self-care Translated into Practice

2020-11-10T16:15:36+01:00

No abstract available.

Standardising the Lay: Logics of Change in Programs of Disease Self-management

2020-11-10T16:15:36+01:00

The health political discourse on self-care is dominated by the view that the selfmanaging patient represents a more democratic and patient-centric perspective, as he or she is believed to renegotiate the terms on which patient participation in health care has hitherto taken place. The self-managing patient is intended as a challenge to traditional medical authority by introducing lay methods of knowing disease. Rather than a meeting between authoritative professionals and vulnerable patients, the self-managing patient seeks to open up new spaces for a meeting between experts. The present paper questions these assumptions through an ethnographic exploration of a patient-led self-management program called the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program. The program is concerned with what its developers call the social and mental aspects of living with a chronic disease and uses trained patients as role models and program leaders. Drawing inspiration from Annemarie Mol’s term ’logic’, we explore the rationale of ’situations of selfmanagement’ and identify what we call a ’logic of change’, which involves very specific ideas on how life with a chronic condition should be dealt with and directs attention towards particular manageable aspects of life with a chronic condition. This logic of change entails, we argue, a clash not between ’medical’ and ’lay’ forms of knowledge but between different logics or perceptions of how transformation can be achieved: through open-ended and ongoing reflection and experimentation in social settings or through standardised trajectories of change. Returning to the literature on lay forms of knowledge and illness perspectives, we question whether programs such as the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program – despite its apparent patient-centric perspective – reproduces classical hierarchical relations between lay and expert knowledge, albeit in new forms.

’I Was a Model Student’: Illness Knowledge Seeking and Self-care Among Finnish Kidney Recipients

2020-11-10T16:15:35+01:00

The customer based ideology currently in use in the Finnish welfare state, as elsewhere, has transformed health care. Responsibility for health, that used to be lodged within society, has become the responsibility of the individual. Self-care is part of this growing trend, where there is an inherent assumption that informed patients are more capable of making decisions about their medical regime, which in turn empowers them. Finnish kidney transplant recipients are, through various sources and forms of health information, encouraged to follow the moral imperative of engaging in certain types of health maintaining behaviour that safeguards the transplant kidney. Being informed and sharing illness related information with peers is a manner of showing gratitude towards the state; a way to, in some fashion, reciprocating the valuable gift of a kidney through caring. Taking my lead from Mol’s (2008) notion of care as a practice, as something that is done by all those involved in giving care, I ask how knowledge seeking and sharing on illness can be a form of self-caring. The aim of the article is, thus, to discuss what role illness-related information has in the process of caring for kidney failure. The data consists of in-depth interviews with 18 kidney transplant recipients narrating their illness trajectory, and additional information solicited on a number of central themes, two of which were the access to illness-related information and involvement in peer support activities.

Difficult Questions and Ambivalent Answers on Genetic Testing

2020-11-10T16:15:35+01:00

A qualitative pilot study on the attitudes of some citizens in southern Sweden toward predictive genetic testing – and a quantitative nation wide opinion poll targeting the same issues, was initiated by the Cultural Scientific Research Team of BAGADILICO. The latter is an international biomedical research environment on neurological disease at Lund University. The data of the two studies crystallized through analysis into themes around which the informants’ personal negotiations of opinions and emotions in relation to the topic centred: Concept of Risk,’Relations and Moral Multi-layers, Worry, Agency and Autonomy, Authority, and Rationality versus Emotion. The studies indicate that even groups of people that beforehand are non-engaged in the issue, harbour complex and ambivalent emotions and opinions toward questions like this. A certain kind of situation bound pragmatism that with difficulty could be shown by quantitative methods alone emerges. This confirms our belief that methodological consideration of combining quantitative and qualitative methods is crucial for gaining a more complex representation of attitudes, as well as for problematizing the idea of a unified public open to inquiry.

’Successful Ageing’ in Practice: Reflections on Health, Activity and Normality in Old Age in Sweden

2020-11-10T16:15:34+01:00

This article aims to contribute to the critical examination of the notions of health and activity, and to discuss how these cultural and social constructs have impact on elderly people’s lives. An ethnographic perspective gives fruitful inputs to explore how old people deal with the image of old age as one of decay and decline, while they simultaneously relate to the normative idea of so-called successful ageing. The focus is thus on how elderly people create meaning, and how they manage and make use of the contradictory cultural beliefs that are both understood as normality: old age as a passive period of life involving decline and disease, and activity as an individual responsibility in order to stay healthy. The study sample is created with two different methods, qualitative interviews and two different questionnaires, and the majority of the respondents are 65+ years old. The article demonstrates the intersection between old age and a health-promoting active lifestyle. The notion of activity includes moral values, which shape the beliefs and narratives of being old. This forms part of the concept of self-care management, which in old age is also called successful ageing. The idea that activities are health promoting is the framework in which activities are performed, but significance and meaning are rather created from practice.

Crisis and Caring for Inner Selves: Psychiatric Crisis as a Social Classification in Sweden in the 1970s

2020-11-10T16:15:34+01:00

This article aims to contribute to the understanding concerning the introduction of crisis psychotherapy in the 1970s in psychiatric clinics in Sweden. The article discusses how this psychotherapy became central in the work of the clinics in supporting patients to well-being and inner growth. The ambition was that patients in an acute crisis-situation would be offered care immediately, aiming at a short and intensive contact with the professionals to avoid hospitalization and long-term sick leave. These ideas were by no means new; in the 1960s, a Western debate had emerged in which the hospitalization in psychiatric clinics had received criticism. In Sweden, the psychiatrist Johan Cullberg was a key actor during the 1970s in the introduction of the psychiatric crisis perspectives. Here, his publication ’The psychic trauma’ from 1971 is analysed. The publication inspired psychiatric clinics to introduce crisis psychotherapy in three different pilot projects. The projects were presented in articles in the Swedish Medical Journal. These articles have also been analysed here. Self-care is highlighted through this material as a concept to be analysed. The question is discussed as to how the concept of the psychiatric crisis initiated and institutionalized a new form of social classification in which the patients were to take more responsibility for their own inner growth.

Medication as Infrastructure: Decentring Self-care

2020-11-10T16:15:33+01:00

Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), and specifically the concept of infrastructure as conceptualised by Bowker and Star (2000; Star 1999), this paper argues and empirically demonstrates that self-care may be considered a practice that is thoroughly sociotechnical, material, distributed and de-centred. Comparing the practices related to medication in the treatment of asthma, type 2 diabetes and haemophilia, we show that in practice there is no ’self’ in self-care. More specifically, the ’self’ in self-care is an actor who is highly dependent on, and intertwined with infrastructures of care, in order to be self-caring. Infrastructures of care are the more or less embedded ’tracks’ along which care may ’run’, shaping and being shaped by actors and settings along the way. Obtaining prescriptions, going to the pharmacy, bringing medication home and administering it as parts of daily life are commonplace activities embedded in the fabric of life, especially for those living with a chronic condition. However, this procurement and emplacement of medication involves the establishment and ongoing enactment of infrastructures of care, that is, the connections between various actors and locations that establish caring spaces and caring selves.

Locations and actors are included as allies in treating chronic conditions outside the clinical setting, but these infrastructures may also be ambiguous, with respect to their effects; they may simultaneously contribute to the condition’s management and neglect. Particularly precarious is management at the fringes of healthcare infrastructure, where allies, routines and general predictability are scarce. We conclude by arguing that these insights may induce a greater sensitivity to existing infrastructures and practices, when seeking to introduce new infrastructures of care, such as those promoted under the headings of ’telemedicine’ and ’healthcare IT’.

Mol, Annemarie (2008): The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, London: Routledge; Mol, Annemarie (2008): The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice, London: Routledge

2020-11-10T16:15:33+01:00

No abstract available.

For Better or for Worse: Lifeworld, System and Family Caregiving for a Chronic Genetic Disease

2020-11-10T16:15:32+01:00

Modernity has meant a cultural and social differentiation within the western society, which, according to Jürgen Habermas’ theory on communication, can be seen as a division between different forms of actions that takes place in different realms of the society. By combining Habermas’ notions of lifeworld and system with Arthur Frank’s analysis of stories as a way to experience illness, the article performs a cultural analysis of the meeting between families involved in caregiving in relation to Huntington’s disease and the Swedish welfare system. The ethnographic material shows how caregiving is given meaning through communicative action and illness stories, which are broken up by an instrumental legal discourse employed by the welfare system. This confrontation between communicative and instrumental action breeds alienation towards the state and the welfare system among the affected families. However, the families are able to empower themselves and confront the system through a hybrid form of action, which combines communicative and instrumental action. As such this hybridity, and the space that opens up on the basis of this hybridity, constitutes an important space within the modern society.

Making Place in the Media City

2020-11-10T16:15:32+01:00

The article discusses practices of placemaking through empirical fieldwork undertaken in the subculture of urban exploration in Copenhagen. The making and experience of place is discussed, firstly, in relation to methodology and academic representation and secondly, in relation to urban space and media. The article begins by suggesting that the ethnographic research process should be grasped as the making of an ’ethnographic place’ (Pink 2010), which invites readers/audiences to imagine themselves into the places represented. Based on findings from the fieldwork, the article moves on to the methodologies associated with the examination of urban exploration and its academic representation. The article points to a ’multi-sited’ (Marcus 1995) and mobile ethnography (Lee & Ingold 2006) that acknowledges the ethnographer as ’emplaced’ (Howes 2005) in the research setting. Finally, urban exploration and the placemaking practices involved are positioned in a wider theoretical framework focusing on social media and urban space. The urban explorers use different social media platforms to share information and pictures, which is said to accelerate ’a mediatised sense of place’ (Jansson & Falkheimer 2006). Urban exploration is seen as a practice tied to the late modern ’media city’ (Fornäs 2006; McQuire 2010), where spatial experience is transformed due to the increased convergence of mobile and pervasive media with urban space.

Culturalisation at an Australian–Swedish Crossroads

2020-11-10T16:15:39+01:00

No abstract available.

Whose Canon? Culturalization versus Democratization

2020-11-10T16:15:39+01:00

Current accounts – and particularly the critique – of canon formation are primarily based on some form of identity politics. In the 20^th century a representational model of social identities replaced cultivation as the primary means to democratize the canons of the fine arts. In a parallel development, the discourse on canons has shifted its focus from processes of inclusion to those of exclusion. This shift corresponds, on the one hand, to the construction of so-called alternative canons or counter-canons, and, on the other hand, to attempts to restore the authority of canons considered to be in a state of crisis or decaying. Regardless of the democratic stance of these efforts, the construction of alternatives or the reestablishment of decaying canons does not seem to achieve their aims, since they break with the explicit and implicit rules of canon formation. Politically motivated attempts to revise or restore a specific canon make the workings of canon formation too visible, transparent and calculated, thereby breaking the spell of its imaginary character. Retracing the history of the canonization of the fine arts reveals that it was originally tied to the disembedding of artists and artworks from social and worldly affairs, whereas debates about canons of the fine arts since the end of the 20^th century are heavily dependent on their social, cultural and historical reembedding. The latter has the character of disenchantment, but has also fettered the canon debate in notions of “our” versus “their” culture. However, by emphasizing the dedifferentiation of contemporary processes of culturalization, the advancing canonization of popular culture seems to be able to break with identity politics that foster notions of “our” culture in the present thinking on canons, and push it in a more transgressive, syncretic or hybrid direction.

History in Popular Magazines: Negotiating Masculinities, the Low of the Popular and the High of History

2020-11-10T16:15:39+01:00

This article explores how the low of the popular and the high of history intersect to negotiate masculinities in the nexus of politics and war in a Swedish history magazine. It investigates the content of the magazine’s form and argues that it produces a kaleidoscopic take on the past which begs the reader to go along with the ads to buy another book, travel to one more historical site, buy a DVD or go to the movies, to turn the page, or to buy another issue of the magazine. Two articles, biographical in their outset, provide the basis for an analysis on how masculinities are negotiated by displaying political and military leaders in contradictory ways and enabling multiple entrance points for the contemporary reader and spectator. Articles on great men produce cultural imaginaries of warlords and political leaders by drawing on layers of historically contingent ways for men to act in public and private spheres and connecting late modern visual celebrity culture to the cults of fame in earlier centuries.

"Chinesenesses" Outside Mainland China: Macao and Taiwan through Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema

2020-11-10T16:15:38+01:00

By examining the filmic representation of Macao and Taiwan in Hong Kong films, mostly released after the 1997 sovereignty transfer, this paper will address the notion of Chineseness in its plural form as associated with different Chinese societies. The purpose is to bring attention to the cosmopolitan side of Chineseness in Hong Kong cinema rather than the mere influence from the Mainland (PRC). I will argue that it is this pluralised, composite Chineseness reflected in Hong Kong cinema that has reinforced its very “Hong Kong-ness” against the impact from the “orthodox” Chineseness of the Mainland. Through a combination of textual and contextual analyses of selected Hong Kong diaspora films respectively set in Macao and Taiwan, this paper aims to provide a general understanding of the imbrications of various Chinese societies within Greater China and, most importantly, the changing role and position of Hong Kong (cinema) within this conceptual China as “one country” before and after it became a special part of the PRC.

Database Documentary: From Authorship to Authoring in Remediated/Remixed Documentary

2020-11-10T16:15:38+01:00

The engagement with documentary from its inception as a film form is frequently a set of references to documentary auteurs. The names of Flaherty, Grierson, Vertov and later Ivens, Leacock and Rouch are immediate signifiers of whole documentary film practices. These practices have given rise to histories and criticism that have dominated discussion of documentary and provided the foundation for more nuanced thinking about problems of the genre. One of the seminal texts in the field, Documentary by Erik Barnouw (1974) celebrates the auteur as the structuring principle for his historical review of documentary. It may be a reflection of the influence of this book, that so much of documentary criticism reflects the auteur approach as a starting point for analysis.

The shift towards a new documentary format, the Database Documentary, challenges the concept of an auteur in its presentation of documentary materials. This format relies on a remediation technique that recalibrates documentary media within new distributive networks supported by the web and enhanced by converged and designed visual and sonic interfaces. The reception modalities are necessarily removed from the familiar forms of projection and presentation of documentary film and television.

The research focus for this paper is how the concept of authorship (the “auteur”) is transformed by the emergence of the relatively new screen format of the database documentary.

The paper reviews some of the more recent examples of Database Documentary, the contexts for their production and the literature on new conceptions of documentary knowledge that may be drawn from these examples. An analysis of the authoring program, Korsakow and the documentaries that have been made using its software will demonstrate the route documentary has travelled from authorship to authoring in contemporary media production.

Fear and Nostalgia in Times of Crisis: The Paradoxes of Globalization in Oliver Stone’s Money Never Sleeps (2010)

2020-11-10T16:15:37+01:00

The intense interconnectedness of 21st century globalization has provoked continuous re-definitions of the political, cultural, economic and social frontiers. The imminent consequence of these constant changes is an increasing feeling of instability and uncertainty in the postmodern individual, ultimately leading to vulnerability and fear. This anxiety has provoked a nostalgic search for the shelter of a community, symbolically represented by the ’home’: the place where human bonds could make up for the unpredictable border-crossing forces of globalization. The question that remains is whether this ’home’ is real or just a reflection of memories of imagined past securities.

After a brief analysis of the contemporary processes of globalization in the light of the 2008 economic crisis, my aim in this paper is to study how the crossborder movements, which had optimistically facilitated the liberalization of global economies, have now become a source of threat and fear for U.S. American individuals. More concretely, I propose to focus on Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps (2010), as I believe that both this cinematographic production reflects and questions the anxieties and social contradictions that the crossing of political, cultural and economic frontiers has provoked in the context of the contemporary financial crisis.

What we Talk about when we Talk about Sailor Culture: Understanding Danish Fisheries Inspection through a Cult Movie

2020-11-10T16:15:37+01:00

As a concept, culture can easily appear quite diffuse and it is often contested. This ambiguity begs the question of what it means to invoke the concept in particular situations. This paper is an analytic experiment, which was kick-started when I asked informants about sailor culture during fieldwork onboard the Danish fisheries inspection vessel The West Coast. In response, fisheries inspectors, surprisingly, suggested watching the Danish cult movie Martha (1967). I describe this incident as a small ethnographic moment leading me to conduct the present experiment. This involves using Martha as an analytic device to investigate sailor culture. More specifically, I use a preliminary analysis of the movie as an entry point to understand five matters of concern, which I encountered during fieldwork. With point of departure in an analytic attitude I call empirical philosophy I propose the term inter-reflexivity to characterize this mode of lateral cultural analysis. Inter-reflexivity emphasizes a double movement emerging from an ethnographic moment in the field and the creative translation of that moment into an analytic device. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of using a popular cultural artefact encountered in the field as such a device for articulating some complex, current stakes in fisheries inspection and ’inventing’ a particular version of sailor culture.

Ambiguous Imitations: DIY Hijacking the ’Danish Mother Seeking’ Stealth Marketing Campaign on YouTube

2020-11-10T16:15:36+01:00

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of imitation as a key dimension of online DIY and participatory cultures on YouTube. The empirical point of departure is the viral stealth marketing YouTube video entitled ’Danish Mother Seeking’, produced by the official national tourist organisation (Visit Denmark), and selected extracts of the online responses to this video. Framed by the notion of participatory culture (Jenkins 2006; Burgess & Green 2009) and the concept of imitation (Tarde 1895/1903), we analyse how marketing initiatives buy into and borrow energy from engaged networked produsers, but also how these produsers can criticise marketing initiatives by ’re-imitating’ them. Following this, we argue that the case represents an interesting and fascinating example of consumer re-sistance and bottom-up voices insisting on being heard, rather than a simple example of the breakdown of a brand strategy. Looking at the response videos they furthermore reveal that imitation can be a rather ambiguous social strategy as it is used both to transfer energy from the imitated object and to deconstruct it. As part of this argument we replace the classical concept of ’mimicry’ (Bhabha 1994) with the notion of ’ambiguous imitation’ to be able to describe online imitation as both an act of critical voicing and energy transmission.

The Uses of Art: Contemporary Changes in Cultural Consumption and the Function of Art

2020-11-10T16:15:40+01:00

In recent years aesthetics and cosmopolitanism have been linked in new ways. On the one hand, contemporary research in the sociology of art indicates an increasing openness and a potential cosmopolitanism in aesthetic taste and consumption. On the other hand, aesthetic concepts and ideals play an important but often implicit role in some of the theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism that inform cultural studies. By examining the interaction between these two tendencies and relating it to sociological and aesthetic theories, I will discuss the characteristics and the possible social implications of the apparent new openness. Does it indicate an increasing tolerance and commonality? Or does it rather point towards a new and more individualized understanding of the social function and legitimacy of art?

Miss(ed) Generation: Douglas Coupland’s Miss Wyoming

2020-11-10T16:15:40+01:00

This article presents a reading of Douglas Coupland’s 2000 novel Miss Wyoming. Long before this novel was published Coupland had denounced the Generation X phenomena he had started in the early nineties, and this article examines Miss Wyoming’s intertextual references to Jack Kerouac as a representative of the Beat generation, which was the previous self-labeled literary generation in North America before the Generation X of the 1990s. Taking this relationship as a point of departure, the article also explores the novel’s relationship with the Bildungsroman, and it is suggested that the novel portrays communicative and emotional immaturity especially in relation to ideas of postmodernism and irony.

Europe, Blurred: Migration, Margins and the Museum

2020-11-10T16:15:43+01:00

More and more museums all over Europe are discovering migration as a topic for exhibitions. These exhibitions on migration question notions of objectivity or of European universalism. This article looks at a broad range of recent exhibitions and museums that address the topic of migration. Taking into consideration their varying scope and institutional context, this text argues that exhibitions on migration tell several stories at once: Firstly, they present stories of migration in a certain city, region or nation, and within a particular period of time. For this purpose, curators make extensive use of maps – with the peculiar effect that these maps blur what seems to be the clear-cut entity of reference of the museum itself or the exhibition. To a stronger degree than other phenomena that turn into museal topics, ’migration’ unveils the constructed character of geographic or political entities such as the nation or the European Union. It shows how, hidden below the norm of settledness, mobilities are and have always been omnipresent in and fundamental for European societies. Secondly and related to this, exhibitions on migration add a new chapter to the meta-narrative of museums: implicitly, they challenge the relevance of the nation - specifically, of both the historical idea that initiated the invention of the public museum (cf. e.g. Bennett 1999) and the political fundament of European integration today. They provoke questions of settledness, citizenship, or contemporary globalisation phenomena that are equally implicitly put on display. The consequent effect is a blurring of the concept of the nationstate. Finally, migration as a museal topic conveys a view on how the institution of the ’museum’ relates to such a fuzzy thing as mobility, thus provoking questions for further research.

Routes of Industrial Heritage: On the Animation of Sedentary Objects

2020-11-10T16:15:45+01:00

In this article, the recent proliferation of cultural heritage routes and networks will be analyzed as an attempt to animate and revitalize idle artefacts and landscapes. With a specific focus on the sedentary, immobile sites of former industrial production, it will be claimed that the route is an appropriate and understandable way of dealing with industrial sites that have lost their stable place in a sequence of productions. If the operational production site is understood as a place of where, above all, function and efficiency guide the systematic interaction between labour, raw material and technology, then the absence of this order is what makes an abandoned factory seem so isolated and out of place. It becomes disconnected from the web of production of which it was part and from which it gained its meaning and stability. In this regard, it makes sense to think of industrial heritage routes as an effort to bring the isolated site back into place. Following Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, we have come to think of cultural heritage as an opportunity that is granted to artifacts, lifestyles and places of a ’second life’. Industrial heritage routes occasion such a reanimation of former industrial sites according to the principles cultural tourism, place production, professional networking and best practice learning. As a mode of operation, the route has some potential advantages over the bounded, site-specific approach. It extends the historic context of the site in question beyond the isolated, geographical location. Orchestrating sites in a wider heritage network is a way of emphasizing a notion of culture that stresses interaction, movement and encounters with that which lies beyond the local. It may also grant heritage professionals an opportunity to work in closer relation to what goes on elsewhere.

The Digital Dimension of European Cultural Politics: Index, Intellectual Property and Internet Governance

2020-11-10T16:15:44+01:00

The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have become dominant fields for European Union (EU) politics. What used to be at the outer fringes of the EU policies has now taken centre stage. The transnational and dialogical structure of the Internet has hardwired it for international cultural politics, yet the very same structure also works to erode the very territorial foundation of traditional cultural politics. Given the delicate and complex terrain cultural politics traverse in international politics, and the trailblazing progression of the Internet, it seems on-line cultural politics is not just the application of existing cultural politics to cyberspace but a new field to be explored, analyzed and taught. The present article maps a constituent European cultural boundary on the WWW as the EU has circumscribed it and places this cultural node within a wider array of Europeanization and globalization processes.

From Great Men to Ordinary Citizens? The Biographical Approach to Narrating European Integration in Museums

2020-11-10T16:15:42+01:00

The history of European integration is not easy to tell – in books or, for that matter, in museums. Most importantly, it appears to lack drama. This lack of drama creates a dilemma for museum practitioners who wish to tell stories about the contemporary history of Europé as shared history. In these circumstances, one prominent way of telling stories about European integration history in museums, and the focus of this article, is the biographical approach. Drawing upon research in all of the museums mentioned in this article and many more, and some 60 interviews with museum practitioners from across Europé, this article first discusses three biographical approaches to narrating European integration history in museums. It proceeds to draw out general conclusions about the prospects of mainstreaming European integration in history museums, and about the particular opportunities and pitfalls of the biographical approach and its different varieties.

Thingifying Neda: The Construction of Commemorative and Affective Thingifications of Neda Agda Soltan

2020-11-10T16:15:41+01:00

The article investigates how the participatory creation of global interest in the shooting of Neda Agda Soltan was not only influenced by the online dissemination of texts and images, but also by the construction of things or “image-objects”. By analyzing three specific cases that turn images of Neda into material objects I argue that the cultural role of these “thingifications” is to enable 1) the opening of the present towards a specific historic event, 2) the sharing of affect and 3) the articulation of specific political interpretations of Neda and the Iranian regime. The objects are thus oriented both towards the past by pointing at the importance of the shooting, but also aim to facilitate relationships in the present and future that may use the event to build more just and politically righteous communities.

How does Modernity Taste? Tomatoes in the Societal Change from Modernity to Late Modernity

2020-11-10T16:15:41+01:00

The aim of this article is to discuss how changes in tomato food regulation, production and consumption, can be seen as part of a broader societal change from Modernity to Late Modernity. Based on evidence from the Swedish and European food systems we demonstrate how a system, which has been successfully managing development in food production for several decades by stressing rationality, homogeneity and standardization, is being challenged by a system that has adapted to, and also exploited, consumer preferences such as heterogeneity, diversity and authenticity. The article shows how tomato growers develop differentiation strategies, adapting to and cultivating this new consumer interest, and how authorities responsible for regulations of trade and quality struggle to adapt to the new situation. As the products become more diversified, taste becomes an important issue and is associated with a view that traditional and natural are superior to standardized and homogeneous products. The analytical approaches for the discussion come from two study areas: ethnological, and marketing and policy perspective, thus showing a multidimensional picture of a changing food system.

Is This Us? The Construction of European Woman/Man in the Exhibition It’s Our History!

2020-11-10T16:15:43+01:00

On the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the non-profit organisation Musée de l’Europe staged the exhibition It’s our history!. The subject of It’s our history! was the history of European integration from 1945 to today. The exhibition was intended to make European citizens aware that – as the exhibition’s manifesto stated: ’The History, with a capital H, of European construction is inextricable from our own personal history, that of each European citizen. It is not the reserve of those that govern us. We all shape it, as it shapes us, sometimes unbeknown to us. It’s our history!’ One of the means that the Musée de l’Europe chose as an illustration of this supposed interrelation of History and history are video testimonies in which 27 European citizens (one from each European member state) tell their own life stories. The present article explores this use of autobiographical accounts as didactic means in It’s our history!. The article argues that through the 27 Europeans, an image of European woman/man and European integration is advanced that glosses over internal conflicts in Europe’s recent history, leads to the construction of a model European citizen and serves as a symbol for the slogan ’unity in diversity’ in which Europe appears as more united than diverse.

Harmonized Spaces, Dissonant Objects, Inventing Europe? Mobilizing Digital Heritage

2020-11-10T16:15:44+01:00

Technology, particularly digitization and the online availability of cultural heritage collections, provides new possibilities for creating new forms of ’European cultural heritage’. This essay analyzes the emerging sphere of European digital heritage as a project of technological harmonization. Drawing on Andrew Barry’s concepts of technological zones, it examines the various ways in which agency and European citizenship are being reconfigured around cultural heritage. It explores the “Europeanization” of digital heritage in three areas. In the first section, it analyzes the recent agenda for digital heritage of the European Union as a harmonizing project to create a smooth space of cultural heritage. In the next sections, the development of a harmonized virtual exhibit on the history of technology in Europe forms a case study to explore processes of harmonization at the level of the web platform, and in the aesthetics of digitized objects. It argues that rather than seeking to elide the points of unevenness and ’dissonance’ that emerge in harmonization processes, we should instead look for ways to embrace them as points of dialogue and discovery.

Fame Factory: Performing Gender and Sexuality in Talent Reality Television

2020-11-10T16:15:42+01:00

This article discusses how gender and sexuality are performed in a highly feminised cultural symbolic context. The object of study is a reality show where the contestants compete in mainstream popular music. Fame Factory is a Swedish talent-hunt television series with many similarities to Pop Idol. The audience may follow the struggle of the young artists off stage in the ’Fame School’ in addition to seeing and voting on their feats on stage. In the Fame School they learn to sing, perform and dance, but also to perform masculinity, femininity and sexuality, even if this is not explicit. Through an analysis of some key episodes of this reality show, the article discusses how gender and sexuality are produced and reproduced within this music television context. It is shown how the performances rest on highly traditional conceptions of these categories, but there are also certain transgressions, especially concerning sexuality, which undermine hegemonic structures.

Exhibiting Europe The Development of European Narratives in Museums, Collections, and Exhibitions

2020-11-10T16:15:45+01:00

No abstract available.

Croatia – Exhibiting Memory and History at the "Shores of Europe"

2020-11-10T16:15:43+01:00

Even though the self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criteria for joining the European union, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Holocaust-conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generatedinformal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust during the process called “Europeanization of the Holocaust”. This is indicated by the fact that the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest opened almost empty only weeks before Hungary joined the European Union although the permanent exhibition had not been ready yet. The Croatian case, especially the new exhibition that opened at the KZ-memorial Jasenovac in 2006, will serve in order to examine how the “Europeanization of the Holocaust” impacts on a candidate state. The memorial museum resembles Holocaust Memorial Museums in Washington, Budapest etc., but, although it is in situ, at the site of the former KZ, the focus clearly lies on individual victim stories and their belongings, while the perpetrators and the daily “routine” at the KZ are hardly mentioned. Another problem influenced by the international trend to focus on (Jewish) individuals and moral lessons rather than on the historical circumstances is that the focus on the Shoa blanks the fact that Serbs had been the foremost largest victim group. The third field, where the influence of “European standards” on the Croatian politics of the past will be examined, is the equalization of “red and black totalitarianism” at the annual commemorations in Jasenovac. While this was already done during the revisions era of President Franjo Tudman during the 1990, today it perfectly matches EU-politics, as the introduction of the 23rd of August, the anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin-pact, as a Memorial day for both victims of Nazism and Stalinism shows.

International Film Festivals: For the Benefit of Whom?

2020-11-10T16:15:49+01:00

Film festivals have become a widespread phenomenon over the last fifty years and are leading events establishing the reputation of film professionals and constitute a well-established field in itself. Studying the cities of Copenhagen and Rome the authors are asking why the public authorities of these cities establish their own film festivals in an lready saturated field of international film festivals? The focus is on the strategic responses and work made by two late adopters of film festivals – Copenhagen and Rome and their international film festivals, CIFF and ’Festa del Cinema di Roma’ (FCR). The comparative case study is based on qualitative data and methods. It investigates how the two festivals establish, legitimate and position themselves within the existing, institutionalised field of international film festivals. Combining the classical work on early and late adopters in the diffusion of ideas and practices (Tolbert & Zucker 1983) with forms of legitimacy (Suchman 1995) and institutional work (Lawrence & Suddaby 2006), it is demonstrated how different and sometimes conflicting demands from various stakeholders, like public authorities and the film industry, have shaped the frames used to position and legitimize the film festivals.

Fixed Links and Vague Discourses: About Culture and the Making of Cross-border Regions

2020-11-10T16:15:47+01:00

It has been en vogue for official bodies to focus on ’culture’ as a strategic factor for the development of spatial entities such as cross-border regions in the making. This focus places high expectations and a strong belief in the power of ’culture’. In this paper I will argue that in region building processes the focus on ’culture’ is often due to an overriding wish to develop an economic well-functioning region. Moreover, it seems like ’culture’ is used as a tool to distract people from a critique of bigger infrastructure projects that such developments entail. In order to strengthen these arguments, the paper will focus on two examples from Northern Europe, the existing Danish-Swedish Øresund link as well as the planned link between Denmark and Germany across the Femernbelt. In the course of the paper, focus will be on central bodies or actors that are taking up the issue of culture within a regional context. Hence, the concept of governance, particularly that of networked governance structures as well co-governance will be briefly discussed. All in all, the paper shows the ’fragmented complexity of agency and the multitude of actors related to region building’ (Paasi 2010:2300).

Subjugated in the Creative Industries: The Fine Arts in Singapore

2020-11-10T16:15:49+01:00

The arts and culture are considered core in a creative industries strategy. But the promotion of the creative industries brings about revised notions of creativity. These revised notions are being applied to the arts. Creativity is now seen to be largely manageable. All individuals are made to believe that they can be creative. Not only that, creativity is seen to be a money spinner. Workers should tap into their creativity and bring about innovations in the work place. Pupils are taught to tap into their creativity and to think outside the box. Such views on creativity galvanize the public and enthuse many people into the creative industries. Such notions of creativity contrast against the fine arts. Regardless, as this paper examines the situation in Singapore, shows that fine artists in the city-state are finding themselves internalizing a market logic and have tied their art practices to economic value. Fine arts practices will not be as lucrative or popular as their counterparts in the other creative businesses; they will remain poor cousins in the creative industries. Essentially, the fine arts are being subjugated in the creative industries and the Singaporean art world is being changed.

Creating the Creative Post-political Citizen?: The Showroom as an Arena for Creativity

2020-11-10T16:15:48+01:00

The aim of this article is to give a tentative illustration of how a creative, postpolitical citizen is imagined and encouraged to unfold within the frame of a city renewal project. As a starting point, the article outlines an exploratory framework structured through the analytical concept of postpolis. Postpolis is a term that offers an illustration of the distinguishing qualities of contemporary urbanity in a principal and schematic way. Postpolis here has three cornerstones: the idea of post-politics (the thesis that today politics is out-defined and replaced by governmental practices that leave little space for public influence and participation), the notion of biopolitics and the claim that planning is a governmental practice that is substantially influenced by business management approaches. The illustrative section of the article gives an overview of the empirical illustration H+ and SHIP. H+ is an urban regeneration project in the city of Helsingborg, in southern Sweden. As the largest urban regeneration project in Sweden to date, it will run for 30 years and affect about a third of the total area of the city. The showroom SHIP, which has been constructed in connection with this urban project, presents both what can be done and what is encouraged in tandem with an investigation of the functions, tasks and design of this showroom. The article thus initiates an ethnographic study of the showroom as a planning servicescape, in which the future citizen of Helsingborg is superimposed on the bodies of the visitors.

Re-scaling Governance in Berlin’s Creative Economy

2020-11-10T16:15:48+01:00

The paper aims at discussing the issue of governance in respect to creative scenes, a central structural element of the creative economy, exemplifying the case of Berlin. Berlin has a fast growing creative industry that has become the object of the city’s development policies and place marketing. The core question is: What are the spatial-organizational driving forces of creativity in Berlin - can they be steered by public administration? I am using Berlin as a reference case to articulate the gap between ’stateled planning’ on the one hand and the organisational practices of self-governed creative scenes on the other. I attempt to demonstrate why a perspective change in terms of re-scaling is necessary, in order to respond to the particular practices of emerging industries and their societal form ’scenes’. By re-scaling I mean the conceptualization of governance in different nonhierarchical organisational as well as spatial scales, based on the observation that scenes are considered to be a central element of the functionality of creative industries.

Translating Fashion into Danish

2020-11-10T16:15:47+01:00

With their association to enterprise and innovation, creative industries have emerged as a legitimate concern in national cultural and economical policy in many countries across the world. In Denmark, the fashion business, in particular, has been hailed as a model for successful (post)industrial transformation. In this paper, we explore the birth of Danish fashion from the ashes of the country’s clothing manufacturing industry, suggesting that the very notion of Danish fashion is indicative of – and enabled by – a development towards a polycentric fashion system. The intriguing idea that fashion could emanate from Denmark and secure growth, jobs and exports even outside the fashion business has taken hold among policymakers, and compelled the government to embrace fashion as a national project. In investigating the emergence and rising stature of Danish fashion, particular at home, we first establish a theoretical frame for understanding the cultural economic policy and the motives, principles and strategies behind it. Then – drawing inspiration from Michel Callon’s “sociology of translation” with its moments of translation: problematization, interessement, enrolment and mobilization – we identify the actors and analyze their strategic roles and interrelationship through various phases of the development of Danish fashion. Callon’s actor network theory (ANT) is based on the principle of “generalized symmetry” – originally using a single repertoire to analyze both society and nature. We adapt this principle to study the realms of market, culture and politics within a common analytical framework. In our analysis, the state responds to industry transformation, interprets it and develops its own agenda. But it can hardly be said to develop policies for the industry. On the contrary, we suggest, fashion is mobilized to lend its luster to the nation, its institutions and politicians.

Creativity Unbound - Policies, Government and the Creative Industries

2020-11-10T16:15:50+01:00

No abstract available.

Meaningful-Experience Creation and Event Management: A Post-Event Analysis of Copenhagen Carnival 2009

2020-11-10T16:15:46+01:00

A carnival is a cultural event within the experience economy, and can be considered an activity of added value to a city when creating place-awareness for tourists and residents. ’Culture’ is used as a way to regenerate post-industrial and run down places, when studying EU – as well as Nordic – cultural policy reports. This might be too much to expect from the cultural sector though.

Amongst other external factors, cultural policy ideals co-create and affect the experiential content of an event in various ways. Thus studying a carnival one has to include external and internal factors in order to evaluate their meaningfulness in the total experience of the event.

One way to investigate what a meaningful experience is can be to apply a cultural consumer perspective. How different consumer segments directly and indirectly inform the event organisation and how the consumer’s cultural preconceptions judge the event is vital when an event organisation designs and improves its experience concepts and experience setting. Thus, the way the carnival’s venue and activities are culturally received is closely linked to the management of the organisation’s external and internal resources. The goal of an event organisation is to produce meaningful and appealing experience concepts and perform them in real time. But how is this organised in practice?

This article evaluates the production of the Copenhagen Carnival 2009 and is based on ethnographic material. Through a model of Value Framework for Experience Production by the Dutch experience economists Albert Boswijk, Thomas Thijssen & Ed Peelen (2007) I analyse how the practical organisation, technical solutions and cultural assumptions of a carnival are part of an event organisation’s work-process when creating a spectacle. Furthermore, the organisation of voluntary professional culture workers and the navigation in a metropolitan, political and institutional context is examined through the management concepts of routine, creativity and co-creation.

Costume Cinema and Materiality: Telling the Story of Marie Antoinette through Dress

2020-11-10T16:15:51+01:00

In ’Costume Cinema and Materiality: Telling the Story of Marie Antoinette through Dress’ a materiality-based approach for analysing film narratives through costumes is examined. Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (2006) serves as the empirical starting point and the theme of dressing and redressing is pursued throughout the film, crystallizing costume as a significant feature for reading the movie. The article argues that costumes, on a symbolic level, work as agents. It thus focuses on the interdependence between costume and interpretations of the screenplay’s main character. A theoretical notion of costumes and materiality is explored, and the idea is further developed in relation to stylistics constituted as emotions materialised in costume. As costumes are the main object for analysis, the discussion immediately centres on costumes produced by professional costume designers for the two-dimensional format of the film frame. In other words, costumes made for the moment: for a specific narrative and aesthetic expression.

As Fast as Possible Rather Than Well Protected: Experiences of Football Clothes

2020-11-10T16:15:51+01:00

With Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological view that human beings ’take in’ the world and experience themselves as subjects through their bodies as a starting point, players in both men’s and women’s teams, kit men, purchasing managers, sporting directors, and a coach from Swedish football clubs have been interviewed about their perceptions and experiences of football clothing. Since the body is both a feeling and knowing entity, clothes are seen as components of body techniques, facilitating or restricting body movements in a material way, but also as creators of senses, like lightness and security; in both ways, influencing the knowledge in action that playing football is. In this article, the content of the interviews is discussed in relation to health. When clothes are primarily related to a biomedical view that health means no injuries and illnesses, warm pants and shin guards are mentioned by players, who are rather ambivalent to both, since these garments counteract a feeling of lightness that is connected to the perception of speed. Players want to be fast rather than well protected. If clothes, instead, are interpreted as related to a broad conception of health, including mental, social, and physical components, the relation body–space-in-between–clothes seems to be an important aspect of clothing. Dressed in a sports uniform, unable to choose individual details, the feeling of subjectivity is related to wearing ’the right-size’ clothes. Also new textile technology, like injury-preventing and speed-increasing tight compression underwear, is perceived by players based on feelings that they are human subjects striving for both bodily and psychological well-being.

Culture Unbound Vol. 3 Editorial

2020-11-10T16:15:55+01:00

No abstract available.

Acknowledgements

2020-11-10T16:15:55+01:00

No abstract available.

Fashion, Market and Materiality Along the Seams of Clothing

2020-11-10T16:15:54+01:00

No abstract available.

Retail and Fashion – A Happy Marriage?: The Making of a Fashion Industry Research Design

2020-11-10T16:15:53+01:00

Fashion and retail ought to be a happy marriage. Yet several entrepreneurs in the field of fashion speak of a climate that is difficult to penetrate because of economic and cultural factors. For example, the chain store concept is an expression of the specific and current fashion situation in Sweden: democratic fashion that is cheap and accessible. At the same time, customers now demand personal, unique and ethical fashions. However, there are few possibilities in this climate for low cost development in progressive Swedish design. This article addresses the questions of how special trade conditions are reflected in the relationship between fashion and retail, and how different interests and values are expressed in the culture of Swedish fashion. To gain a deeper understanding of diverse working conditions and strategies, this article analyzes the culture of the Swedish fashion business as a narrative of different social and cultural processes. A conclusion drawn is that a cultural perspective on the oppositions between different practices and logics in the fashion business may contribute to mapping and managing these oppositions.

The Fastskin Revolution: From Human Fish to Swimming Androids

2020-11-10T16:15:52+01:00

The story of fastskin swimsuits reflects some of the challenges facing the impact of technology in postmodern culture. Introduced in 1999 and ratified for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, fastskin swimsuits were touted as revolutionising competitive swimming. Ten years later, they were banned by the world’s swimming regulatory body FINA (the Fédération Internationale de Natation), with the ban taking effect from January 2010 (Shipley 2009). The reason was the controversy caused by the large number of world records that were broken by competitors wearing polyurethane swimsuits, the next generation of the original fast skin suits. These suits were deemed to be providing an artificial advantage by increasing buoyancy and reducing drag. This had been an issue ever since they were introduced, yet FINA had approved the suits and, thereby, unleashed an unstoppable technological revolution of the sport of competitive swimming. Underlying this was the issue about its implications of the transformation of a sport based on the movement of the human body through water without the aid of artificial devices or apparatus. This article argues that the advent of the fastskin has not only transformed the art of swimming but has created a new image of the swimmer as a virtual android rather than a human fish. In turn, the image of the sport of swimming has been re-mapped as a technical artefact and sci-fi spectacle based on a radically transformed concept of the swimming body as a material object that has implications for the ideal of the fashionable body.

Materialised Ideals: Sizes and Beauty

2020-11-10T16:15:54+01:00

Today’s clothing industry is based on a system where clothes are made in ready-to-wear sizes and meant to fit most people. Studies have pointed out that consumers are discontent with the use of these systems: size designations are not accurate enough to find clothing that fits, and different sizes are poorly available. This article discusses in depth who these consumers are, and which consumer groups are the most dissatisfied with today’s sizing systems. Results are based on a web survey where 2834 Nordic consumers responded, complemented with eight in-depth interviews, market analysis on clothing sizes and instore trouser size measurements. Results indicate that higher shares of the consumers who have a body out of touch with the existing beauty ideals express discontentment with the sizing systems and the poor selection available. In particular, large women, very large men, and thin, short men are those who experience less priority in clothing stores and have more difficulties in finding clothes that fit. Consumers tend to blame themselves when the clothes do not fit their bodies, while our study points out that the industry is to blame as they do not produce clothing for all customers.

Catwalking the Nation: Challenges and Possibilities in the Case of the Danish Fashion Industry

2020-11-10T16:15:52+01:00

This article discusses the mobilization of the nation for fashion, based on how the relationship between fashion and nation unfolds in the case of fashion design practice and the fashion industry in Denmark. The otherwise globalized fashion industry is equally involved in what I term “catwalking the nation,” both as a way to construct a cosmopolitan nationalist discourse for the post-industrial nation and as a strategy for local fashion industries to promote collective identity in order to strengthen potential market share, which is the focus of this article. What may at first appear in the Danish case as an absurd and non-productive relationship is actually significant, I would argue, despite its complexity. It has the potential to stimulate critical fashion design practice and give fashion designers a voice, allowing them to take an active part in contemporary public debates on important issues such as nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization.

Production, Creative Firms and Urban Space in Shanghai

2020-11-10T16:15:57+01:00

This paper examines the firms in Shanghai’s official “Creative Industry Clusters (CICs)”. It aims to contribute to the creative city debate by unveiling the relationships between the production of new economy firms and the reconstruction of urban space in the Chinese context. Based on questionnaire surveys conducted in 2009, the paper finds that Shanghai’s creative firms are new, small and flexible and this image conforms to the prototypical “creative firms” described in widely cited Western literature. The paper argues that Shanghai’s CICs represent a market- oriented, fluid, and risk-taking production culture that is a break from the city’s socialist past. However, Shanghai’s new economy spaces in the making are faced with many constraints and contradictions. On the one hand, although market and neoliberalized urban spaces are providing critical resources for firms to grow at a time of state retreat, they also imposes risks, such as career instability, confusion for creative talents and cost pressure for new firms. On the other hand, the state’s ideological control reinforces the market’s homogenizing effect on cultural production. Therefore, Shanghai’s trajectory toward greater innovation and creativity are far from guaranteed despite fast proliferation of creative clusters in the city in the past decade.

(Re-)Reading Shanghai’s Futures in Ruins: Through the Legend of an (Extra-)Ordinary Woman in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai

2020-11-10T16:15:56+01:00

This essay is an allegorical reading of Shanghai futures through a fictive woman, Wang Qiyao, in Wang Anyi’s novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (1996). The novel is about her life in China from the 1940s to the 1980s. Using Benjamin’s critique of 19^th century Paris in relation to Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s (“the Paris of the Orient”) the essay examines questions of phantasmagoria, nostalgia, memory and awakening and relates these to the possible Shanghai futures to come.

Yueju – The Formation of a Legitimate Culture in Contemporary Shanghai

2020-11-10T16:15:56+01:00

This article presents a case study of the development of a local cultural form – Shanghai Yueju – caught up in the rapid urban redevelopment of post-socialist China. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ’habitus’ and ’distinction’, it analyses the processes of the reformation of taste and class in a Chinese city. It explores the following question: can high levels of financial investment revive Yueju and allow it to gain market success and cultural distinction? The question is examined in the context of Shanghai’s swift urbanisation process, throughout which the government has reinforced its control over not only economic but also social and cultural capital. It suggests that ignoring Yueju’s rootedness in a local habitus of long history and focusing only on its economic organisation has had a damaging effect on the vibrancy and viability of this cultural form. This case study of Yueju in Shanghai suggests that economically driven cultural development could lead to the erosion of local culture and restricting its social and cultural innovation.

The Art of Re-Industrialisation in Shanghai

2020-11-10T16:15:57+01:00

This paper deals with the development of ’art clusters’ and their relocation in the city of Shanghai. It first looks at the revival of the city’s old inner city industrial area (along banks of Suzhou River) through ’organic’ or ’alternative’ artist-led cultural production; second, it describes the impact on these activities of the industrial restructuring of the wider city, reliant on large-scale real estate development, business services and global finance; and finally, outlines the relocation of these arts (and related) cultural industries to dispersed CBD locations as a result of those spatial, industrial and policy changes.

Celebrating the International, Disremembering Shanghai: The Curious Case of the Shanghai International Film Festival

2020-11-10T16:15:58+01:00

The state-sanctioned Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) is the only film festival accredited by the Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films (FIAPF) in the Greater China region. This paper intends to explore the perceived paradoxes of the SIFF by approaching its vaguely defined vision of “being international/internationalization” (or guojihua). The vision of guojihua has, at best, fuelled the persistent efforts of the SIFF to emulate the globally standardized festival framework and redirect the global capital flow into its newly installed film market. On the other hand, the SIFF has been reluctant to use one of its most precious cultural legacies – the cosmopolitanism of the Republican era – as a branding resource. The main argument is that the weakened connection between the SIFF and its locality/cultural memory is not only a result of the superficial understanding of guojihua, but also of the fact that the central and the local government often hold conflicting ideas regarding the social engineering of Shanghai’s image.

The Invisible Turn to the Future: Commemorative Culture in Contemporary Shanghai

2020-11-10T16:15:58+01:00

After decades of fierce political struggles in the Mao era, the People’s Republic of China has strived economically under the open-door policy since the end of the 1970s. However, the still firm national monuments that weathered the social vicissitudes are left open to the question of how they could be incorporated into the new national ideology. In comparison to Beijing, Shanghai’s overwhelmingly predominant image centers on its role as the economic dragonhead of China. This article argues that Shanghai, exactly because of this ostensibly apolitical profile, provides a rarely discussed but highly meaningful approach to examining the dynamics between contemporary Chinese commemorative culture and the postsocialist urban spatial order. Unlike the East European cases, the “critical juncture” of ideology in China is invisible in the official narratives of the monuments. In some circumstances, the renovation of old memorials seem to fulfill the task of glorifying a certain past but in effect, it leaves the place a self-enclosed venue that sheds the rest of the city from the ideological burden. In other cases, some monuments of the seemingly core nationalistic narratives are marginalized. What’s more, new attentions are now drawn to the memorials for the history of “others” in the name of cosmopolitanism. The invisibility of the commemorative narratives speaks directly to the perplexity of assuming national identity in contemporary China. In the light of Prasenjit Duara’s idea of “bifurcated history”, national memory culture in Shanghai suggests the multiple possibilities of deciphering the city’s past and its future.

Queering/Querying Cosmopolitanism: Queer Spaces in Shanghai

2020-11-10T16:15:59+01:00

This article examines different types of queer spaces in contemporary Shanghai together with the various same-sex subjects that inhabit these spaces. In doing so, it discusses the impact of transnational capitalism, the nation state and local histories on the construction of urban spaces and identities. Combining queer studies and urban ethnography, this article points to the increasing social inequalities hidden behind the notion of urban cosmopolitanism created by the deterritorializing and meanwhile territorializing forces of transnational capital and the state. It also sheds light on how these various identities and spaces are lived and experienced by ordinary people, as well as possible ways of resistance to the dominant narratives.

The Power of Spectacle

2020-11-10T16:16:00+01:00

When people say Shanghai looks like the future the setting is almost always the same. Evening descends and the skyscrapers clustered on the eastern shore of the Huangpu light up. Super towers are transformed into giant screens. The spectacular skyline, all neon and lasers and LED, looms as a science fiction backdrop. Staring out from the Bund, across to Pudong, one senses the reemergence of what JG Ballard once described as an “electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world.” The high-speed development of Pudong – in particular the financial district of Lujiazui – is the symbol of contemporary Shanghai and of China’s miraculous rise.

Yet, Pudong is also taken as a sign of much that is wrong with China’s new urbanism. To critics the sci-fi skyline is an emblem of the city’s shallowness, which focuses all attention on its glossy facade. Many share the sentiment of free market economist Milton Friedman who, when visiting Pudong famously derided the brand new spectacle as a giant Potemkin village. Nothing but “the statist monument for a dead pharaoh,” he is quoted as saying.

This article explores Pudong in order to investigate the way spectacle functions in China’s most dynamic metropolis. It argues that the skeptical hostility towards spectacle is rooted in the particularities of a Western philosophical tradition that insists on penetrating the surface, associating falsity with darkness and truth with light.

In contrast, China has long recognized the power of spectacle (most famously inventing gunpowder but using it only for fireworks). Alongside this comes an acceptance of a shadowy world that belongs to the dark. This acknowledgment of both darkness and light found in traditional Chinese culture (expressed by the constant revolutions of the yin/yang symbol) may provide an alternative method for thinking about the tension between the spectacular visions of planners and the unexpected and shadowy disruptions from the street.

The Hyperstationary State: Five Walks in Search of the Future in Shanghai

2020-11-10T16:16:00+01:00

Shanghai is invariably used in film sets and popular discourse as an image of the future. But what sort of future can be found here? Is it a qualitative or quantitative advance? Is there any trace in the landscape of China’s officially still-Communist ideology? Has the city become so contradictory as to be all-but unreadable? Contemporary Shanghai is often read as a purely capitalist spectacle, with the interruption between the colonial metropolis of the interwar years and the commercial megalopolis of today barely thought about. A sort of super-NEP has now visibly created one of the world’s most visually capitalist cities, at least in its neon-lit night-time appearance and its skyline of competing pinnacles. Yet this seeming contradiction is invariably effaced, smoothed over in the reigning notion of the ’harmonious society’.

This essay is a series of beginners’ impressions of the city’s architecture, so it is deeply tentative, but it finds hints of various non-capitalist built forms – particularly a concomitance with Soviet Socialist Realist architecture of the 1950s. It finds at the same time a dramatic cityscape of primitive accumulation, with extreme juxtapositions between the pre-1990s city and the present. Finally, in an excursion to the 2010 Shanghai Expo, we find two attempts to revive the language of a more egalitarian urban politics; in the Venezuelan Pavilion, an unashamed exercise in ’21st century socialism’; and in the ’Future Cities Pavilion’, which balances a wildly contradictory series of possible futures, alternately fossil fuel-driven and ecological, egalitarian and neoliberal, as if they could all happen at the same time.

Shanghai Modern: Replaying Futures Past

2020-11-10T16:16:01+01:00

This article discusses different accounts of Shanghai Modern, the period between 1920s and 1940s in which the city occupied a unique position within China and the world. It places discussions of this period in the context of the resurgence of urban led modernization in China, led by Shanghai. It looks in particular at Leo Ou-Fan Lee’s attempt to link the cosmopolitanism of Shanghai modern with prospects for this new post-reform China. I then discuss Ackbas Abbas’ response to this book and use this as a way of reflecting on the progress of Shanghai urban development and its divergence/ convergence with similar processes in the West. The article then looks at the other significant moment of the Cultural Revolution as a way of opening up discussions of Chinese and Shanghainese modernity beyond that of simply an absorption into Western capitalist modernity. It concludes by briefly introducing this volume.

Introducing Shanghai Modern: The Future in Microcosm?

2020-11-10T16:16:02+01:00

No abstract available.

Culture Unbound Vol. 4 Editorial

2020-11-10T16:16:02+01:00

No abstract available.

Dressed in a Present from the Past: The Transfers and Transformations of a Swedish Bridal Crown in the United States

2020-11-10T16:16:07+01:00

Ever since the emigration from the Nordic countries the Old world and the New world have maintained an exchange of ideas, customs, and material culture. This cultural heritage consists of more than remnants of the past. Drawing on theories of material culture and performance this article highlights the role of gifts in materializing relationships between individuals, families and organizations in the wake of migration. First, I build on a suggested coinage of the term heritage gifts as a way of materializing relationships. Thereafter, I map out the numerous roles which a Swedish bridal crown play in the United States: as museum object, object of display and loaned to families for wedding ceremonies in America. The transfers and transformations of the bridal crown enhances a drama of a migration heritage. This dynamic drama brings together kin in Sweden and America and maps specific locations into a flexible space via the trajectory of crown-clad female bodies.

Soviet Lithuanians, Amber and the "New Balts": Historical Narratives of National and Regional Identities in Lithuanian Museums, 1940–2009

2020-11-10T16:16:08+01:00

In the twentieth century Lithuania emerged from the crumbling Russian Empire as a post-colonial nationalising state. Its short-lived independence (1918–1940) featured attempts to assemble the material foundations for an imagined community of Lithuanians, however in 1940 this nationalist project was disrupted by Soviet occupation. However, this article argues that regardless of the measures taken against political nationalism by the Soviets, the material work of assembling the Lithuanians as a historical and ethnic nation was not abandoned. The study analyses the ways in which Northern and Baltic categories were used to regionally situate the ethnic identification of the Lithuanian population in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuanian museums. The cases of the Historical-Ethnographic Museum and the Museum of Amber reveal that Northern and Baltic dimensions had to be reconciled with the Soviet version of the Lithuanian past. The resulting assemblage of Lithuania as a synchronic and diachronic community of inhabitants who defined themselves through shared Baltic ancestors and centuries-old uses of amber was transmitted to the post-Soviet museums. The most salient post-Soviet changes were, first, the rewriting of the relations between Lithuanians and the Nordic countries in positive terms and in this way reversing the Soviet narrative of Lithuania as a victim of aggression from the North. Second, the Soviet construction of amber as a material mediator which enabled Lithuanians to connect with each other as a synchronic and diachronic imagined community was somewhat pushed aside in favour of the understanding of amber as a medium of social and cultural distinction for the ancient Balts and contemporary Lithuanian elites.

Swedish Military Bases of the Cold War: The Making of a New Cultural Heritage

2020-11-10T16:16:08+01:00

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union completely transformed the military-political situation in the Nordic countries. The movement from invasion defence to input defence in Sweden has made many of the subterranean modern fortresses and permanent defence systems of the Cold War unnecessary. The current problem is what the administration authorities will do with the superfluous military buildings: let them fall into decay, preserve or reuse them – and for what purpose?

The aim of this article is to describe and analyze the cultural as well as spatial foundation of a new genre of heritage industry in Sweden – the cultural heritage of the Cold War – whose value is negotiated through a range of processes by the different stakeholders involved – emotional, social and cultural processes as well as legal and economic processes. The subterranean fortresses of Hemsö and Aspö are used as empirical case studies in the article. They both describe the making of a cultural heritage and illustrate the problems related to the ambitions of converting cultural heritage into tourist attractions.

One of the conclusions is that the previous making of the industrial cultural heritage in the 1980s and 1990s has many things in common with the one of the Cold War. The “post-military” landscape of bunkers and rusting barbed wires is regarded with the same romanticism and with similar preservation ideologies and economic interests as the post-industrial landscape was earlier. Similar negotiation issues appear, and these negotiations are carried out by similar stakeholders. The difference is that the military culture heritage of the Cold War was developed through a deeply centralized selection process directed by administration authorities, but was also influenced by certain persuasion campaigns and preservation actions made by local stakeholders such as retired officers and municipality administrations.

Acceptance and Conformity: Merging Modernity with Nationalism in the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930

2020-11-10T16:16:09+01:00

This article takes a closer look at how interwar supporters of modernism sought to overcome the opposition they had to face. It does so by looking at the usage of history and Swedishness at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930 and contrasting this experience with a brief excursus on the image of progress and Americanism as presented at the A Century of Progress International Exposition, held in Chicago in 1933–1934. The backers of both these exhibitions – functionalist architects and progressive businessmen, respectively – consciously sought to find ways in which to savor the propagandistic value of this “the shock of the new” while retaining a reassuring continuity between well-known and widespread self-identifications with “the idyll of the past.” They did so by forging “national” forms of modernity, attempting to bypass the political conflicts and ideological polarizations which characterized the interwar years. As such, it is argued, they also exemplify how the logic of the exhibition could be used for harnessing technology, science, and funkis (functionalism) as tools for re-identifying the nation with modernity and simultaneously de-politicizing modernism.

Norden, Reframed

2020-11-10T16:16:10+01:00

This paper calls for Norden to be understood as a metaframe. Related formulations like “Nordic art” or “Nordic welfare” function as mesoframes. These trigger multiple framing devices. A cache of related framing devices constitutes a framing archive. Framing devices work best when operating unobtrusively such that inclusions, exclusions and inconsistencies are condoned or naturalised. Their artifice, however, becomes apparent whenever a frame is questioned. Questioning or criticising a frame gives rise to a framing dispute.

The theoretical justification for these typologies is provided at the outset. This schema is then applied to a select range of empirical examples drawn largely from the disciplinary frames (Ernst 1996) of art history and museum studies. Despite this specificity it is envisaged that the general principles set out below can and will be used to address a variety of devices, disputes and archives in Norden and beyond.

Uses of the Past; Nordic Historical Cultures in a Comparative Perspective

2020-11-10T16:16:11+01:00

No abstract available.

Contested Boundaries: Nation, People and Cultural History Museums in Sweden and Norway 1862–1909

2020-11-10T16:16:10+01:00

It has become commonplace to assert that museums embody, perform and negotiate national identities. Many researches in museum history have stressed a close relationship between nation building and the origin and formation of the modern public museum. Museums, it is argued, contributes to the construction and representation of the ethnical and historical distinctiveness of the nation’s self’. This article explores the ambiguities of the concept when applied to the establishment of cultural history museums in Sweden and Norway during the latter half of the 19th century. It shows that the relation between nation building and early museum building in the Scandinavian context was more intricate than earlier has been assumed. Museum founders like Artur Hazelius, who opened the Scandinavian-Ethnographic Collection in 1873 (renamed Nordiska museet 1880), was deeply influenced by Scandinavianism, a strong cultural and political force during the 19th century. Union politics played an important role for museum politics, as did the transitions of the concepts of “ethnography” and “nation”. At the very end of the 19th century the original concept of “nation” meaning people and culture gradually was subordinated to the concept of “nation” as state and political territory. In early 20th century museum ideology cultural history museums were strongly connected with “nations” in the modern sense. Consequently, efforts to “nationalise” the folk-culture museum were made both in Norway and Sweden. A contributory force was, naturally, the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union in 1905.

Captives of Narrative: Scandinavian Museum Exhibits and Polar Ambitions

2020-11-10T16:16:06+01:00

This article compares the histories of two museums of polar exploration, both founded in the 1930s but based on well-known expeditions dating back to the decades around 1900. The first is the Fram Museum in Oslo, centered around the famous Norwegian polar ship, the second is the Andrée Museum in Gränna, combining accounts of the ill-fated balloon expedition with a polar centre reflecting more recent polar research activities.

The aim of the article is to analyze the relationship between museum and narrative. Museums are shapers of narrative but at the same time shaped by the narratives they relate. The article explores the symbolic and medialized dimensions of polar research, expressed in museums, as well as the way in which museums interrelate with national identities and self-images.

What does it mean to be a modern polar nation? And how is such an identity expressed in cultural terms? In which ways can museum institutions and exhibitions be used as means for such expressions? And how do “the grand narratives” of Sweden and Norway relate to the epic representations of polar activities, presented by the museums?

Orange Houses and Tape Babies: Temporary and Nebulous Art in Urban Spaces

2020-11-10T16:16:03+01:00

This essay argues that the disruption of the routine ways we engage with our cities is necessary for democratic activity and public participation. Building on research that examines the relationship between public spaces and democratic action, I explore temporary forms of creative street installation as interrupting the marketing pleas that have become the only authorized forms of visual art in our cities. I argue that tactics in urban spaces that are temporary and provide nebulous meanings are necessary to grab our attention and make us linger. I propose that these forms of engagement act in the same way as people performing or playing in public spaces. I specifically employ Yi-Fu Tuan’s theoretical notions of space and movement and Margaret Kohn’s discussion of the significance of presence in public spaces to examine the creative ways we engage with and experience our cities. I examine two activist/artist projects: Mark Jenkins’ tape installations and Detroit Demolition. My analysis of these two sites demonstrates the importance of citizens engaging in their urban spaces. By creating temporary artwork that is nebulous in meaning, activists/artists are interrupting the routine ways we experience our cities.

Using Different Pasts in a Similar Way: Museum Representations of National History in Norway and China

2020-11-10T16:16:06+01:00

This article explores how national histories are constructed in the museums of Norway. It does so through a comparative perspective, whereby museum displays of national past in Norway are being compared to museum displays of national past in the People’s Republic of China. This will involve comparing narratives, museological approaches, rationale and purposes of museum displays in the two countries.

Fieldwork research in museums in Norway and China suggests that if national pasts are obviously unique to the historical trajectories of each country, their museum renditions are structured in an intriguingly similar way. Museum displays of national pasts in Norway develop around a set of themes including myths of ancestry and descent; epics of resistance leading the embryonic nation through a dark era and towards a “Golden Age”; a core of moral and aesthetic values; notions of national modernity; and selective amnesia. I will show how similar topics can be found in museum displays of the past in Chinese museums.

The comparative perspective of the analysis enables me to assess the uniqueness of museum representations of the past in Norway and at the same time to explore analogies in the museum construction of national narratives beyond the European context, through the case study of China. This will lead me to put forward the hypothesis of the coagulation, at international level, of a canon for the museum representation of national history.

Whose Raoul Wallenberg is it?: The Man and the Myth: Between Memory, History and Popularity

2020-11-10T16:16:05+01:00

Raoul Wallenberg is widely remembered for his humanitarian activity on behalf of the Hungarian Jews in Budapest at the end of World War II, and is known as the Swedish diplomat who disappeared into the Soviet Gulag in 1945. While he successfully combated Nazi racial extermination politics, he fell victim to Stalinist communism – yet another barbaric, totalitarian regime of the 20th century.

Given Wallenberg’s biography, his mission and his unresolved fate it is no wonder that Wallenberg became a figure of mythic dimensions. It is the mixture of heroics and victimhood, as well as the seemingly endless potential of possible adaptations that secures this historic figure and his mythic after-narratives its longevity. While it is without doubt the man behind the myth who deserves credit – first the man’s realness gives the myth credibility – it is the myth that secures the man’s popularity. The man and his myth depend on each other.

In this article, I will give an overview of how Wallenberg was perceived and described by survivors, in popular scholarly literature, how he has been researched by historians, and how he has been presented in different media. It will become apparent that the narrators have sought to satisfy different needs, e.g. psychological, political, and commercial ones. The narrators’ intention and attitude towards the historic person and the myth which surrounds him is of primary importance. I will show how different approaches to, and uses of, the myth exist side by side and nourish one another. And yet they can all simultaneously claim existence in their own right. By providing examples from different times and places, I like to illustrate that the popular images of Wallenberg are far less one-sided, stereotypical and homogeneous than they are often portrayed and hope to draw attention to the great potential that the Wallenberg narrative has today, as his 100th anniversary approaches in 2012.

Foodscapes and Children’s Bodies

2020-11-10T16:16:04+01:00

This article addresses children, food and body, and introduces a Deleuzian and Childhood Studies-inspired use of the concept of foodscape. The data draws on a transdisciplinary project on children as co-researchers of foodscapes. In this article we do not discuss the method or the children’s research results, which we have done elsewhere. Instead, our aim is to present a theoretically inspired analysis of our own fieldwork observations during this project in order to discuss the performance of children’s bodies, food and eating. Departing from the concept of foodscape, we present an analysis of some food events that illustrate the complexity of children’s foodscapes concerning the interaction between spaces, bodies, foodstuffs, values and rules.

In encountering food and eating at various places, different child becomings emerge. We distinguish three powerful performances of what Stuart Aitken (2008) calls “I-dos”: First, the seemingly obedient pupil, who pretends to do what he or she is told, but who more or less imperceptibly escapes from adult supervision. Second, the child who makes use of the stereotyped and possibly cute “food monster” designation, and turns it into a threatening subject, who disturbs the order and challenges adults’ power. Third, the knowledgeable scientist who, with the help of a research project, adult experts, nutritional calculation programs and ingredients, seizes the definition of the body as a site for growing stronger, healthier and more capable. The foodscapes we met held many “striated spaces” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987), where the children had few alternatives to adhering to the adults’ designated “I-ams”. But we also entered smooth spots where children had the opportunity to experiment with “I-dos” that would not have occurred to us had we not followed them, and there are certainly many more that appear in the children’s everyday encounters with food.

Half the Right People: Network Density and Creativity

2020-11-10T16:16:04+01:00

Social scientists investigating the attributes associated with creativity have for the most part confined their research to the study only of creative people. This research attempts to compare creativity with non-creativity by comparing creative with non-creative periods in the lives of three famously isolated creators (Emily Dickinson, Paul Gauguin, and Charlotte Brontë) to argue that the social networks of the individuals are different during creative periods than during non-creative periods. By using the correspondence of each of the artists to construct social networks, it is possible to analyze the artist’s relationships with regard to density and betweenness and to compare those across creative and non-creative time periods. The average network density of the first order zone network around each of the artists was 0.475 during periods of creativity. There was no correlation with a particular betweenness score.

The Literature Curriculum in Russia: Cultural Nationalism vs. The Cultural Turn

2020-11-10T16:16:13+01:00

In Western educational systems, the question “Why study literature in school?” has been raised in connection with the theoretical development often summarized as “the cultural turn.” The author strives to contribute to this discussion by examining the development of educational discourse in Russia. During the Soviet period, literature was – together with history – the subject most heavily influenced by the dogmas of Soviet state ideology. As such, literature enjoyed great prestige and was a compulsory and separate subject from the fifth to the eleventh school years. Since 1991, the educational system has undergone radical reform, but the number of hours devoted to literature has not changed significantly. This would suggest that literature still is perceived as an important means of incorporating children into the national and political community. The target of this study is to identify authorities’ specific aims in devoting so much time to literature in school, as well as to elucidate in what way literature is to achieve these aims. Russian guidelines for the development of literature curricula published in the years 1991–2010 are examined to see just how literature is legitimated as a secondary school subject. Based on this material, the author draws conclusions about the rhetorical practices and ideological development of curricular discourse, its relationship to Soviet educational thought and the extent to which the cultural turn has influenced this sphere.

Why ABC Matters: Lexicography and Literary History

2020-11-10T16:16:12+01:00

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I wish to discuss the origins of The Swedish Academy Dictionary against the backdrop of the social and cultural history of lexicography in 18th and 19th century Europe. Second, to consider material aspects of lexicography – the dictionary as interface – in light of German media scientist Friedrich Kittler’s “media materialism”. Ultimately, both purposes intend to describe how letters and writing have been constructed and arranged through-out the course of history. In Kittler’s view, “the intimization of literature”, that took place during second half of the 18th century, brought about a fundamental change in the way language and text were perceived. However, parallel to this development an institutionalization and disciplining of language and literature took place. The rise of modern society, the nation state, print capitalism and modern science in 18th century Europe necessitated (and were furthered by) a disciplining of language and literature. This era was for these reasons a golden age for lexicographers and scholars whose work focused on the vernacular. In this article the rise of the alphabetically ordered dictionary and the corresponding downfall of the topical dictionary that occurred around 1700 is regarded as a technological threshold. This development is interesting not only within the field of history of lexicography, but arguably also, since information and thought are connected to the basic principles of mediality, this development has bearings on the epistemo-logical revolution of the 18th century witnessed in, among other things, Enlightenment thought and literature.

An Amateur’s Raid in a World of Specialists?: The Swedish Essay in Contemporary Public Debate

2020-11-10T16:16:14+01:00

The point of departure of this paper is a lecture by Edward Said, in which he claimed it necessary for today’s intellectuals to respond to modern specialization by assuming an attitude of amateurism in public life. It can be argued that there is a historical connection between the public role of the learned amateur and the essay as a form of expression and communication. Among recent advocates of the essay, the decline of this genre in modernity has sometimes been explained by the increasing public confidence in experts and specialists. According to this view, the development of modern society has made it less legitimate for essayists to serve as generalist commentators on society and culture. However, the growing tension between amateurism and professionalism goes back at least to the nineteenth century, and it has marked the ambiguous relation of the essay and the essayist to academia and institutional discourse ever since.

This paper discusses what has become of this public role of essayists in late modernity. Some examples of essayists and essayistic writing of later decades, chiefly from Sweden, serve as illustrations of a general line of argument, even though there are also comparisons between the essay in Sweden and in other countries. Among the examples of Swedish essayists put forward here are Kerstin Ekman and Peter Nilson. The reception of these writers suggests that the essayist, adopting the role as amateur, driven by devotion and interest for the larger picture, might still be a vital part of public culture today. However, it is also clear that writers like Ekman and Nilson have gained at least part of their authority from being acknowledged in other fields or genres – Ekman as a distinguished novelist and Nilson as a trained astronomer.

Participation, Representation and Media System: Habermasian Paths to the Past

2020-11-10T16:16:15+01:00

Drawing from Swedish press history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the present article argues for further historical investigation into three aspects of Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere. The first concerns actual media participation, the second the representative features of media institutions, and the third media systems. These routes of analysis can and should be combined, and historical specificity is key. When we focus on concrete situations and places, the neat grand-scale chronologies (Habermas’ and others’) fall short. There is no simple development from a “representative publicness” to a participatory public sphere, and back again. And the media have always been interconnected in a system-like way. However, historical specificity does not exclude contemporary developments. The present conclusion is that if we are to gain any true understanding of contemporary phenomena, a historical perspective is crucial, and aspects of Habermas’ theory can serve as heuristic tools.

Introduction: Literary Public Spheres

2020-11-10T16:16:15+01:00

No abstract available.

The Author on Stage: Björn Ranelid as Performance Artist

2020-11-10T16:16:11+01:00

Media development has profoundly affected the literary public sphere. Authors as well as politicians may feel obliged to follow “the law of compulsory visibility” (John B. Thompson). All contemporary writers, be it bestselling authors or exclusive, high brow poets, must in one way or another reflect on their marketing and media strategies. Meeting and communicating with the audience, the potential readers, is of critical importance. In the article “The Author on Stage”, the authors consider how different literary performances by Swedish novelist Björn Ranelid (b. 1949) help establish his “brand name” on the literary market place.

Personal Readings and Public Texts: Book Blogs and Online Writing about Literature

2020-11-10T16:16:13+01:00

The blogging culture has become an important and integrated part of the book trade and has influenced the publishing, marketing and distribution of literature in North America and in many European countries. However, it is unclear how this potential agency among bloggers operates, and thus far most research has concerned politics, media systems and larger social structures. The present article is a study of the Swedish book blogs during the autumn of 2009 and an attempt to address a small, but significant, part of the Internet influence. The relationship between books and digital technology is complicated and manifold, but it is clear that the Internet has changed how people access books, how they read and how they communicate with others about their reading. Here, the position of the amateur is one that will be discussed in detail in terms of professionalism, strategies and hierarchies. Another issue that will be addressed is the connections between the book bloggers and the book trade, especially the publishers and their marketing departments. The book bloggers operate in a social realm, despite the fact that their writing is personal, and have to be understood in their social, economic and literary context. The Swedish book blogs will be analysed with the help of readerresponse theory, sociology of literature and a book historical perspective on the dissemination of literature.

Bed, Breakfast and Friendship: Intimacy and Distance in Small-Scale Hospitality Businesses

2020-11-10T16:16:18+01:00

Through an analysis of the narrative of a Bed and Breakfast (B & B) and art gallery owner, the emergence of intimacy as a commercial value in the hospitality industry is illustrated. This is a formation of economic value where economic rationality as a motive for commercial activity is rejected. Simultaneously though, a different set of market attitudes are performed by hospitality practitioners in the course of everyday interactions with customers, and a tension between emotional, spatial and temporal intimacy and distance is uncovered and discussed. It is concluded that commercial friendship is a more complex issue than what has been acknowledged so far in the hospitality literature. A continued discussion of intimacy in hospitality will therefore affect the cultural understanding of emotions, identity and lifestyle values on the one hand, and business strategy, value creation and markets on the other.

Service Workers: Governmentality and Emotion Management

2020-11-10T16:16:20+01:00

That all may be quiet on the shop floor could be a result of governmentality projects. But what lies beneath an appearance of professionalism? I undertook an empirical field study of workers in the service industry to examine contradictory and competing interests of employees and their employers and observed the dynamic constitution of subjectivity in situations of conflict. Based on a study of 56 service workers, this study first looks at the consensual orientation of workers towards their employment, then discusses a number of common demands required of workers in the service sector and investigates how workers deal with these management demands. My investigation of service workers disclose the internalised struggles experienced in their commitment to a prescribed, official image while attempting to maintain, at the same time, an integrous sense of self. By collecting stories of actual situations, I am able to show how patterns of emotion management, effectiveness of governmentality project, and agency work together to shape social behaviour in working life.

Branding on the Shop Floor

2020-11-10T16:16:19+01:00

Service branding is a particular form of emotional management, where employees are regarded as adaptable media, who can be trained to convey corporate values while interacting with customers. This paper examines the identity work of butchers during the brand revitalisation campaign of Kvickly, a Danish supermarket chain. During the implementation of the “Best Butcher in Town”-project, Kvickly’s shop floor becomes an engineered servicescape where the norms of good salesmanship must be performed. By documenting the disloyal behaviour of butchers, we demonstrate that the affective commitment towards corporate brand values is closely related with self-enactment opportunities of occupational communities. Total service-orientation threatens butchers’ perception of autonomy and may therefore result in the emergence of resistant subcultures.

Culture, Work and Emotion

2020-11-10T16:16:21+01:00

No abstract available.

Cacophony of Voices and Emotions: Dialogic of Buying and Selling art

2020-11-10T16:16:19+01:00

The importance of galleries as go-betweens for artists and art buyers is acknowledged in art world research. Using a Bakhtinian dialogic approach, this article examines social encounters of three artists, two art buyers and one gallery sales executive in Singapore. Specifically, it looks into the social interactional dynamics of artists and art buyers when they trade directly. Situational ambiguities and emotional ambivalence arise during such meetings from the different expectations and demands that are imposed, which have the effect of placing the parties involved in conflicting social contexts. For instance, when art connoisseurs and artists discuss aesthetics, monetary value is not of primary concern, nonetheless when they want to trade, commercial concerns become central; this can lead to discomfort between the parties. Similarly, art buyers may want to go behind the scenes to know more about the artist and the art practice; getting away from the glitter of the commercial gallery and into the modest art studio for an authentic experience may reveal too much for visitors; such experiences may break their illusion of the glamorous artist. This article looks at the microscopic interaction between artists and art buyers and shows how the ambiguities and ambivalence that can be generated by their encounters become constraining factors in encouraging artists and art buyers to trade directly, by-passing commercial art galleries and dealers.

Effective Emotions: The Enactment of a Work Ethic in the Swedish Meeting Industry

2020-11-10T16:16:17+01:00

The meeting industry – an encompassing term for services related to various kinds of professional meetings, from mega-conventions to the ordinary work meetings – is increasingly consolidated and legitimated as a specific sector in the service industry. New professions such as meeting designers, meeting facilitators and meeting consultants are emerging, promoting new knowledge in this field. By focussing on processes and social interaction, and highlighting emotional dimensions of meetings, these professions pave the way for new modes of conceptualising and practising professional relationships. The intangible, emotional and playful dimensions of social interactions are promoted as effective means to achieve economic goals, thus highlighting a professional ideal that is here called “effective emotions”. The aim of this article is to show how the work ethic promoted by the meeting industry encourages new intersections, and tensions, between the idealisation of the tangible/measurable/rational on the one hand and the intangible/emotional/magical on the other hand, and between working life and intimate spheres. Through a discourse analysis of a Swedish corporate meeting magazine, it is shown how the distinction between work and leisure is dissolved in this specific work culture, and by this, it is discussed how the meeting profession acts as a normative regulator by reinforcing ideal ways of being and interacting with others. Creativity, personal growth, reflexivity and flexibility are enacted as idealised personal assets as well as moral imperatives in the discourse of the meeting profession and through the practices of various meeting techniques, thus reinforcing not merely a professional ethic but cultural ideals of being as a person as well. It is also suggested that this reinforcement may, under certain circumstances, turn into its opposite and undermine the promoted ideals, thus pointing at the importance to pinpoint the dynamic and situated tension between economic rationality and emotional intensity.

Digital Exhibitionism: The Age of Exposure

2020-11-10T16:16:17+01:00

Web 2.0 has expanded the possibilities of digital creative production by individuals and enabled the digitalisation of private life experiences. This study analyses how social media contributes to the making of personal biographies and discusses the shift towards a culture of digital exposure. This study uses netnography and a constructive approach to examine online communities and social networks. The findings illustrate that these new technological platforms are mediating in the construction of late modern biographies, which are expanding the complexity of today’s socio-technical systems. The paper discusses the power of these technologies as agents of socio-cultural change and suggests that, besides providing individual realisation and mediated pleasure, these technologies encourage exhibitionistic and voyeuristic behaviour, elude reflexivity, and display authoritative tendencies and new possibilities for social control.

Epilogue: Towards an Experience Ecology of Relational Emotions

2020-11-10T16:16:16+01:00

No abstract available.

Rural Media Spaces: Communication Geography on New Terrain

2020-11-10T16:16:27+01:00

No abstract available.

Imagining Rural Audiences in Remote Western Australia

2020-11-10T16:16:26+01:00

In 1979, Australia’s then-Communication Minister Tony Staley commented that the introduction of satellite communications to the bush would “dispel the distance – mental as well as geographical – between urban and regional dwellers, between the haves and the have-nots in a communication society” (Staley 1979: 2225, 2228-9). In saying this, Staley imagined a marginalised and disadvantaged audience of “have-nots”, paying for their isolation in terms of their mental distance from the networked communications of the core.

This paper uses ethnographic audience studies surveys and interviews (1986-9) to examine the validity of Staley’s imaginations in terms of four communication technologies: the telephone, broadcast radio, 2-way radio and the satellite. The notion of a mental difference is highly problematic for the remote audience. Inso-far as a perception of lack and of difference is accepted, it is taken to reflect the perspective and the product of the urban policy-maker.

Far from accepting the “distance” promulgated from the core, remote audiences see such statements as indicating an ignorance of the complexity and sophistication of communications in an environment where the stakes are higher and the options fewer. This is not to say that remote people were not keen to acquire satellite services – they were – it is to say that when they imagined such services it was in terms of equity and interconnections, rather than the “dispelling of distance”.

Super Network on the Prairie: The Discursive Framing of Broadband Connectivity by Policy Planners and Rural Residents in Alberta, Canada

2020-11-10T16:16:25+01:00

This paper focuses on the case of the SuperNet, an infrastructure project designed and sponsored by the provincial government of Alberta, Canada with the objective of providing broadband connectivity to public facilities, businesses and residences in rural communities. The data were collected through individual interviews, focus groups, and town hall meetings in the course of a collaborative research initiative (The SuperNet Research Alliance) that investigated the social construction of the broadband network from multiple perspectives. The objective of the paper is to examine in parallel the discourses in which the concept of broadband connectivity acquired meaning and substance at the levels of 1) provincial government and industry policy planners and 2) the residents of the rural communities who were the intended beneficiaries of the SuperNet. Using actor-network theory as a departure point, this analysis takes stock of the framing devices employed in the two sets of discourses and of the distinctive worldviews that generated them. It looks for the meeting points and the disjunctions between the grand visions and the grounded projections underlying the positions taken by the two respective categories of actors. Differences in the interpretation and appropriation of broadband among rural Albertans themselves are discerned and related to social factors characterizing different situations within rural areas. Rural broadband connectivity thus emerges not so much as a one-dimensional access equalizer for rural people, but as a complex mediator of opportunity, participation and identity.

Mediatization, Spatial Coherence and Social Sustainability: The Role of Digital Media Networks in a Swedish Countryside Community

2020-11-10T16:16:25+01:00

What does the implementation of new communication networks mean for the spatial coherence and social sustainability of rural communities? This paper takes its key from Wittel’s discussion of network sociality, understood as the opposite of Gemeinschaft. Wittel’s argument may inform our understanding of how communicative patterns in rural communities are partly reembedded through ongoing media transitions. But it must also be problematized. Relating Wittel’s discussion to Halfacree’s model of spatial coherence and Urry’s notion of network capital, as well as to findings from an ethnographic study in a Swedish countryside community, a more complex view is presented. It is argued that global communication networks under rural conditions contribute to the integration and sustainability of the community, as much as to processes of expansion and differentiation. The results show that network sociality and community constitute interdependent concepts. Through their capacity of linking people to external realms of interest, while simultaneously reinforcing their sense of belonging in the local community, online media promote ontological security at the individual level, thus operating as a social stabilizer.

Reporting an Unsettled Countryside: The News Media and Rural Protests in Britain

2020-11-10T16:16:23+01:00

Most analyses of the role of the media in shaping and reproducing popular discourses of rurality have focused on film, television drama and literature. Comparatively little attention has been directed towards the role of the news media in framing perceptions of contemporary rural issues through reportage and commentary. This paper examines the engagement of the news media with a series of rural protests that developed in Britain between 1997 and 2007 around issues such as hunting and farm incomes. The news media had been complicit in maintaining the previous discursive construct of the countryside as a settled and almost apolitical space, but the emergence of major rural protests forced a shift in the representation of rural life. News coverage of rural issues and rural protests increased with the adoption of a new discourse of the “unsettled countryside”. In adjusting to shifting news values, the news media initially bought and reproduced the frames promoted by the major rural campaign group, the Countryside Alliance, including tropes of the “countryside in crisis”, the “countryside comes to town” and the “countryside speaks out for liberty”. Over time, however, a more complex web of representations developed as the perspectives adopted by different media outlets diverged, informed by political ideology. As such, it is argued that the news media played a key role not in only in mediating public reception of rural protests, and thus modulating their political significance, but also in framing the rural protests for participants within the rural community, and as such contributing to the mobilisation of a politicised rural identity and an active rural citizenship.

Reading Rural Consumption Practices for Difference: Bolt-holes, Castles and Life-rafts

2020-11-10T16:16:22+01:00

Based mostly on evidence from the UK, this paper challenges the rural’s usual association with predominantly conservative politics and practices. It advocates showing awareness of ambiguity in how representations, and specifically in this paper rural representations, and their numerous associated consumption practices are interpreted. A focus is given on the possibility of interpreting these practiced rural representations in the context of responses to the negative features within everyday life identified by writers such as Lefebvre. Drawing specifically on the “postmodern Marxism” of Gibson-Graham (2006), and particularly beginning to deploy what they term “reading for difference rather than dominance”, the paper introduces three “styles” of consuming the rural. These are expressed via the metaphors of bolt-hole, castle and life-raft, and it is argued that they can be read as expressing critique of urban everyday life. In the concluding section, the lessons learned from reading rural consumption practices for difference in this way are brought together to suggest that not only can the rural today be regarded as an active “heterotopia” but that this alternative status could be used to underpin an urban-focused social movement for reclamation of what Lefebvre termed “every-day life”.

Commercialization of Lesbian Identities in Showtime’s The L-word

2020-11-10T16:16:22+01:00

The article discusses recent developments in media culture through one case study: The L-word, the first television series narratively centered around lesbian and bisexual characters. The business discourse surrounding the series’ production is examined together with the televised text itself and the merchandize connected to The L-word brand. The main research question is why lesbians, a target group previously deemed uninteresting by advertisers and international media conglomerates, have suddenly become demographically desirable. Media producers show increasing interest in the active audience, and encourage fans’ own creativity, for example through social web 2.0 media productions and events, and intermedia storytelling. This is made possible through the televised text’s discursive re-positioning of lesbian identities. The article argues that lesbian identity is a social construction and that it can be seen as an empty or floating signifier, which is filled with new meanings. It also analyzes the immersive online communities and various other merchandize connected to the series as an aspect of thingification, a process were the media is increasingly occupied with things and brands rather than stories and representations. The result is the branded lesbian, or the lesbian brand, which can be seen as an appropriation of lesbian identities.

Nostalgia Spaces of Consumption and Heterotopia: Ramadan Festivities in Istanbul

2020-11-10T16:16:21+01:00

Contemporary city cultures are often defined in relation to the processes of late-capitalism and commodification. Today, in various parts of the world, the previously dominant industrial cities have been replaced by cities of consumption (Urry 1995: 123). Cities are treated as sites for representation, masquerade and sociability (Featherstone and Lash 1999: 3). National and religious celebrations and culinary festivals are parts of the dynamism of city life where nostalgia becomes a marketing strategy. This article looks at the nostalgia industry in the contemporary city of Istanbul in connection to the Ramadan festivities and iftar tables as everyday spaces of spectacle and consumption. It examines the ways in which the Ramadan space is articulated in everyday practices not only as a site of spectacle formed by both global and local discourses, but also as a form of sociability that brings people together.

Provincial Globalization: The Local Struggle of Place-Making

2020-11-10T16:16:24+01:00

This paper focuses on the global presence in the local processes of place-making in a rural area in Sweden. As a result of increased competition – fueled by a reorganization of global capitalism – between places, symbolic strategies (i.e. place marketing and place branding) have become a central dimension of both urban and rural governance. As a consequent, places – while still being sites for the residents’ day-to-day life – are being turned into commodities in the market of potential investors and tourists to a great extent. Subsequently, this paper deals with how this global agenda affects a rural municipality in the Swedish countryside suffering from depopulation. The paper confirms earlier statements (Woods 2007) that globalization processes should not be considered as external forces reshaping and homogenizing rural villages; rather, globalization processes are locally negotiated. This, however, does not mean globalization has no impact on rural places. In these negotiation processes global and local virtues are intertwined but not evenly. In some municipal strategies, the impact of global discourses is more explicit, for example, policy-makers accept and incorporate strategies of place branding and policy networks while they neglect other aspects of a relatively standardized “place marketing tool kit”. Furthermore, the study shows that rural residents, also, consider the village and its global future carefully but differently from the policy-makers. The residents dislike expressions of urbanity and advocate a general small-scaleness as a strategy for the future.

Culture Unbound Vol. 2 Editorial

2020-11-10T16:16:32+01:00

No abstract available.

Surveillance: The "Digital Trail of Breadcrumbs"

2020-11-10T16:16:31+01:00

No abstract available.

Reading the Surface: Body Language and Surveillance

2020-11-10T16:16:30+01:00

This article explores the role played by body language in recent examples of popular culture and political news coverage as a means of highlighting the potentially deceptive haracter of speech and promising to bypass it altogether. It situates the promise of “visceral literacy” – the alleged ability to read inner emotions and dispositions – within emerging surveillance practices and the landscapes of risk they navigate. At the same time, it describes portrayals of body language analysis as characteristic of an emerging genre of “securitainment” that instructs viewers in monitoring techniques as it entertains and informs them. Body language ends up caught in the symbolic impasse it sought to avoid: as soon as it is portrayed as a language that can be learned and consciously “spoken” it falls prey to the potential for deceit. The article’s conclusion considers the way in which emerging technologies attempt to address this impasse, bypassing the attempt to infer underlying signification altogether.

Silhouettes of War: Technologies of U.S. Soldiering and Surveillance

2020-11-10T16:16:29+01:00

This paper forwards a theory of silhouetting in relation to technological augmentation in U.S. Military uniforms and suggests that the increasing utilization of metamaterials, nanotechnology, and surveillance technologies operates under a rhetoric of invisibility that complicates the technologies’ visible destruction. Methodologically, the paper attends to three general technological developments in the evolution of the U.S. Army uniform: the design of the new Army Combat Uniform (ACU); the technological advances in the uniform, including embedded wearables, biometric identification devices, and 3D combat enhancement systems; and the bio-networking, GPS, and digital communication arrays that physically link digital uniforms to a larger geopolitical network of U.S. military strategy and surveillance. Throughout, the work traces the aforementioned theory of silhouetting in relation to select sociopolitical consequences of linking digitally enhanced soldiers into a transnational grid of surveillance.

The Tampa “Smart CCTV” Experiment

2020-11-10T16:16:29+01:00

In June 2001, a neighborhood in Tampa, Florida called Ybor City became the first urban area in the United States to be fitted with a “Smart CCTV” system. Visionics Corporation began a project with the Tampa Police Department to incorporate the company’s facial recognition technology (FRT), called FaceIt, into an existing 36-camera CCTV system covering several blocks along two of the main avenues. However, this “smart surveillance” experiment did not go as smoothly as its planners had hoped. After a two-year free trial period, the TPD abandoned the effort to integrate facial recognition with the CCTV system in August 2003, citing its failure to identify a single wanted individual. This essay chronicles the experiment with FRT in Ybor City and argues that the project’s failure should not be viewed as solely a technical one. Most significantly, the failure of the Ybor City “Smart CCTV” experiment reveals the extent to which new surveillance technologies represent sites of struggle over the extent and limits of police power in advanced liberal democracies.

The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek

2020-11-10T16:16:28+01:00

Joan Copjec accuses orthodox film theory of misrepresenting the Lacanian gaze by assimilating it to Foucauldian panopticon (Copjec 1994: 18–19). Although Copjec is correct that orthodox film theory misrepresents the Lacanian gaze, she, in turn, misrepresents Foucault by choosing to focus exclusively upon those aspects of his work on the panopticon that have been taken up by orthodox film theory (Copjec 1994: 4). In so doing, I argue, Copjec misses key parallels between the Lacanian and Foucauldian concepts of the gaze. More than a narrow academic dispute about how to read Foucault and Lacan, this debate has wider political significance. In particular, using Slavoj Žižek’s work, I show that a correct account of the panoptic gaze leads us to rethink the question of how to oppose modern techniques of surveillance.

Tendencies of Inner Surveillance in Democratic India: Challenges of Establishing Native Ethnographer’s Identity Among Indian Muslims

2020-11-10T16:16:27+01:00

The paper analyzes how the native ethnographer’s position within his/her community becomes problematized during fieldwork conditions defined by fear of state surveillance forces. It focuses on the way state’s vigilance activities create new barriers for establishing of native ethnographer’s authority by challenging the ethnographer’s privileged access to his/her research community based on trust and cultural/religious affiliations. The apprehensions for personal safety experienced by the informants unsettle the distinctions between native and non-native ethnography. The paper argues that if anthropology is to progress as a meaningful social and cultural critique then it must elaborate the ethnographer’s experiences of navigating the shifting grounds as insider and outsider. It proposes a “thick description” of the way reticence and distrust of the informants is overcome. The aim is to create scholarship that counters political and social injustices by making explicit voids and gaps and by gleaning a wealth of information in silences.

"Quit stalling…!": Destiny and Destination on L.A.s Inner City Roads

2020-11-10T16:16:37+01:00

If driving has today really become a Western “metaphor for being” (Hutchinson), then common roadside signs proclaiming “Right lane must exit” or “Through traffic merge left”, inventions such as the automatic transmission, and the agreeable straightness of freeways can all be understood as symptoms of an ongoing socio-political struggle between the driver as democratic agent, and the state as institu-tionalized regulatory force. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the context of urban traffic, where private motorized transportation represents both the supreme (if illusory) expression of personal freedom, and official efforts to channel individualism by obliterating its sense of direction and ideological divergence. On the concrete proving grounds of the clogged inner-city freeway, “nomad science” and “state science” (Deleuze & Guattari) thus oscillate between the pseudo-liberatory expressivity of mainstream car culture and the self-effacing dromoscopic “amnesia of driving” (Baudrillard). Are a city’s multitudes of cars resistant “projectiles” (Virilio) or, rather, hegemonic “sites of containment” (Jane Jacobs)? This essay approaches the complex tensions between “untamable” democratic mobility and state-regulated transit by way of two Hollywood-produced films that focus on traffic in Los Angeles: in Collateral (2004), a cab driver comes to recognize and transcend the hopelessly directionless circularity dictated by his job; in Falling Down (1993), a frustrated civil service employee abandons his car on a rush-hour freeway and decides to walk home, forced to traverse the supposedly unwalkable city without the “masking screen of the windshield” (Virilio). As they “quit stalling”, both protagonists become dangerous variants of the defiant nomad – one a driver who remains on the road but goes “under the radar”, the other a transient pedestrian whose movement becomes viral and unpredictable. My analysis of the films’ metropolitan setting and of the incessant movement that marks both narratives links political and philosophical economies of motion, speed, and transit to a discussion of the various bandes vagabondage (Deleuze & Guattari) that are formed between city and driver, driver and car, and car and pedestrian. In this discussion, the inner-city road emerges as a primary site of conflict between civic rule and individual subject, and the flow of urban traffic comes to represent the tensions generated in spaces where movement is understood as both liberating and as a form of control.

Being-in-the-City: A Phenomenological Approach to Technological Experience

2020-11-10T16:16:38+01:00

This paper examines dynamics surrounding the negotiation and articulation of the body-technology relationship necessarily characterizing the experience of being-in-the-city. Nowhere is everyday experience more mediated by technology than in the city. Being-in-the-city involves being embodied by technology at levels ranging from micro to macro. Despite the fact that technologies are constantly evolving in city space, relations with technology tend to become quickly normalized — mundane — transparent. Given this normalization as well as the sheer pervasiveness of technology in constituting city space it is important to examine the ways in which technology comes to shape the experiential contexts of everyday life. In urban space, technologies result is new sights to be seen, sounds to be heard, smells to be smelt, textures to be felt, as well as altogether new modes of experiencing the everyday. In exploring the dynamics surrounding the ongoing, multi-layered negotiation and articulation of the body-technology relationship necessarily characterizing the experience of being-in-the-city a phenomenological perspective is adopted. Heidegger’s writing on technology, Merleau-Ponty’s writing on embodiment and perception, and Don Ihde’s writing on the body and technology contribute to a theoretical framework for a phenomenological examination of the experiential implications of being-in-the-city, a technological ecology.

Locating Intermediality: Socialization by Communication and Consumption in the Popular Cultural Third Places of the Music Club and Football Stadium

2020-11-11T16:08:08+01:00

Based on two different case studies in the realm of popular culture, my contribution will clarify the mechanisms involved in the (symbolic) production and consumption of space. The music club and the soccer stadium function much in the same way, as interfaces between producers and consumers of places, prompting “prosumption of space” (Raumprosumenten). A loss of function in such “third places” cannot be linked to the transition from informal cellar clubs to (soberly designed) regional discos outside the city – or from the national-league stadium to the World Cup arena (also outside the city). Nor can it be attributed to the mediatization of these spaces by technology. On the contrary, we find an exponentiation of what third places had always already been, spaces of “intermediality” (between work and leisure, between seriousness and play, between young people and adults). In the World Cup stadium, unique events, experiences and communicative propensities are produced in a highly consistent manner by means of communication on different levels in series. In such cases, the spectators in the stadium, just like visitors to music clubs, rarely behave as passive consumers of what is staged, yet both groups contribute by their presence and symbolic activity to the success of such productions in the stadium and the club.

The City at Stake: "Stakeholder Mapping" The City

2020-11-10T16:16:39+01:00

Studies of the city have been addressed from many different approaches such as law, political science, art history and public administration, in which the economic, political and legal status of the city have played a major role. However, a new agenda for conceptualizing the city has emerged, in which the city assumes new roles. By using stakeholder theory as a framework for conceptualizing the city, we argue that the city assumes a political-economic agenda-setting role as well as providing a stage for identity constructions and relational performances for consumers, organizations, the media, politicians and other stakeholders. Stakeholder theory allows us to conceptualize the city as being constituted by stakes and relationships between stakeholders which are approached from three analytical positions (modern, postmodern and hypermodern, respectively), thereby allowing us to grasp different stakes and types of relationships, ranging from functional and contractual relationships to individualized and emotionally driven or more non-committal and fluid forms of relationships. In order to support and illustrate the analytical potentials of our framework for conceptualizing urban living, we introduce a project which aims to turn the city of Aarhus into a CO2-neutral city by the year 2030, entitled Aarhus CO2030. We conclude that applying stakeholder theory to a hyper-complex organization such as a city opens up for a reconceptualization of the city as a web of stakes and stakeholder relations. Stakeholder theory contributes to a nuanced and elaborate understanding of the urban complexity and web of both enforced and voluntary relationships as well as the different types of relationships that characterize urban life.

Going Begging: Casino Culture and its Contrasts as Revealed in the New Macao Poetry

2021-03-19T10:17:25+01:00

Among the key themes of contemporary Macao poetry, chance and luck loom large, along with their figuration in Macao life through sites such as casinos and temples, through personae such as those of the gambler, the beggar, the prostitute. Macao as dot-on-the-map is likewise conceived as a site for all kinds of portal semiotics, as paradigm for cultural crossing and cultural shift. Macao may be regarded as a work enduring (in Brechtian terms) because it is unfinished. While this is a formula that could be notionally applied to any city, this view seems particularly apt given both the extraordinary pace of change in post-handover Macao (i.e. since 1999), and the present bubble-bursting effect of the 2008 “financial tsunami”.

Relating Augé’s conception of “non-places” to Eco’s notion of open (as opposed to closed) text, this paper observes that consciousness of place in contemporary Macao poetry appears to be dominated by two kinds of space, glossed here as “Macao space” and “anywhere space”. Macao space is uniquely of an historical moment and place, something culturally positioned; in anywhere space (e.g. inside of a casino or an airport) subjects are hailed by consumption-oriented reifications of putative universal value. The contemporary Macao poetry typically values Macao space and sees it as under threat from the “non-negotiable” space of culture that could be anywhere.

Interested in the paradoxes, ironies and hypocrisies inherent in the present-day culture, politics and international position of Macao, the new Macao poetry reveals a place-based poetics deeply concerned with Macao identity, its evolution and potentials.

Street Discourse: A Visual Essay on Urban Signification

2020-11-10T16:16:41+01:00

No abstract available

Urban Signs/Signs of the Urban: Of Scenes and Streetscapes

2020-11-10T16:16:41+01:00

No abstract available.

City of Epitaphs

2020-11-10T16:16:34+01:00

The pavement lies like a ledger-stone on a tomb. Buried underneath are the remains of fertile landscapes and the life they once supported. Inscribed on its upper side are epitaphic writings. Whatever their ostensible purpose, memorial plaques and public artworks embedded in the pavement are ultimately expressions of civic bereavement and guilt. The pavement’s role as both witness and accomplice to fatality is confirmed by private individuals who publicize their grief with death notices graffitied on the asphalt. To walk the city is to engage in a dialogue about death.

City Under Siege: Narrating Mumbai Through NonStop Capture

2020-11-10T16:16:36+01:00

When Mumbai became the target of terror in the 26/11 attack in 2008, the events in that city, like other tragic global events in recent years, were narrated through new media platforms. The increasing convergence of technologies and mobile telephony enabled new forms of gaze and the ability to bear witness through these new media technologies. The non-stop capture of events through recording equipment embedded in mobile phones and their connectivity to the World Wide Web constructed Mumbai through civilian narratives and images, and this phenomenon was described as the “coming of age of Twitter”. Conversely the event raised fundamental questions about the role of broadcasting and protocols in live telecasts of terrorist attacks which have consequences for national security. In narrating the city through the civilian gaze and traditional media the spectacle of suffering in postmodernity becomes an open-ended exercise where the city is both a canvas for showcasing the risks of modernity and new forms of visibilities which emerge from social media and the “act of sharing” content on global platforms.

Exploring Urban Screens

2020-11-10T16:16:35+01:00

There is a tautological tendency in the widespread claims that urban space is ’mediated’. Never before has the citizen, it is argued, been confronted with such an unprecedented array of signage. I depart from the rhetoric of ’biggest-ever-saturation’ as not necessarily untrue, but as insufficient in exploring the diverse spatial operations of urban screens. I examine some contemporary cases of animated architectural surfaces, informational panels, and advertising billboards, with reference to much longer standing cultural practices of spatial management in modern cities, such as illumination, to suggest that the contemporary display media do not mediate the city anew but re-invent urban space as a field of ubiquitous mediation. From that standpoint I suggest exploring urban screens as a) both singular visual agents and indivisible items in plural structural assemblages, b) complementary forces of public illumination, and c) complex perceptual platforms in visual play of scale and distance.

Disposable and Usable Pasts in Central European Cities

2020-11-10T16:16:35+01:00

In Central European cities memories and material histories of socialist regimes remain particularly difficult to address and incorporate into the new democratic present. After 1989, city authorities in the region have chosen to emphasize some pasts and neglect others and, thus, (re)write their own versions of (urban) history and (re)shape their (urban) identities. In my paper I inquire into how post-1989 Central European urbanities are shaped by and communicated through various designations including signs and symbols on city streets, monuments, and buildings. Predictably, many material remnants of the socialist regimes have been destroyed or hidden from the public eye – my interest lies not only in which various designations on buildings and which monuments had to go, but also in why and how they disappeared. I discuss the most popular methods of hiding and/or effacing the remnants of socialism that range from subtle (surrounding of communist landmarks with tall buildings) through the obvious (renaming of streets, squares, metro stations; giving old communist buildings new names and functions) to the irreversible and, thus, most controversial (the razing of socialist architecture and monuments). The disappearance of the material capital of the socialist past has been accompanied by intense commemoration practices verging on memorial obsessions. New monuments, plaques, street names, and museums appeared almost as quickly as the old “disposable” ones were forced out from the urban landscape. The complexity of an urban identity as communicated through city streets, monuments, and buildings not only invites, but necessitates an interdisciplinary approach and, thus, my analysis includes elements from such diverse areas of knowledge as aesthetics, architecture, communication studies, comparative cultural studies, economics, history, and political science.

Bloomsday: James Joyces Ulysses Celebrated as Theatrical Event

2020-11-10T16:16:33+01:00

James Joyce had decided that 16 June 1904 should be the one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, about which he wrote his 800 page novel Ulysses. In his book, Joyce actually followed Mr Bloom that entire day, from his getting up and having the nowadays famous kidney breakfast, to the late evening, when he had to break into his own house on 7 Eccle Street to have a drink with Stephen Dedalus, the other main figure of the novel. The centenary of that very day took, accordingly, place in 2004. I have borrowed the identity of Mr Bloom to describe some street scenes from the centennial celebrations of Bloomsday in Dublin. After this introductory presentation, part two of this article will attempt to analyse Bloomsday in terms of a Theatrical Event, embedded in an unusual and striking playing culture. In a third part, Mr Bloom will once more be allowed to make some concluding comments.

Radical Hope or the Moral Imperative of Images in the Work of Susan Sontag Jean-Luc Godard

2020-11-10T16:16:32+01:00

In the films For Ever Mozart, In Praise of Love and I Salute You Sarajevo, Go-dard’s images introduce radical hope to the world. I will demonstrate that this hope represents an ethical posture in the world; it is identical to goodness. Radical hope is grounded in the victim’s witnessing, internalizing and remembering catastrophe, while at the same time holding onto the belief that a variation of the self will survive the disaster.

In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida argues that choosing to belong to the disaster is equivalent to giving the pure gift, or to goodness itself, and that it suggests a new form of responsibility for one’s life, as well as a new form of death. For Derrida, internalizing catastrophe is identical to death—a death that surpasses one’s means of giving. Such death can be reciprocated only by reinstating goodness or the law in the victim’s or the giver’s existence.

The relation of survival to the gift of death—also a gift of life—challenges us to rethink our understanding of the act of witnessing. This relation also adds nuance to our appreciation of the intellectual, emotional and mental affects of the survival of the victim and the testimony and silence of the witness, all of which are important in my analysis of radical hope. On the one hand, the (future) testimony of the witness inhabits the victim or the ravaged self (now), on the other hand, testimony is not contemporaneous with the shattered ego. This means that testimony is anterior to the self or that the self that survives the disaster has yet to come into existence through making testimony material. Testimony thus exists before and beyond disaster merely as an ethical posture—a “putting-oneself-to-death or offering-one’s-death, that is, one’s life, in the ethical dimension of sacrifice,” in the words of Derrida. The witness is identical to the victim whose survival will include an unknown, surprising testimony or an event of witnessing. The testimony discloses the birth or revelation of a new self. And yet this new self survives through assuming the position of the witness even while s/he is purely the victim of catastrophe, being put to death owning the “kiss of death.”

Svante Beckman and Sten Månsson (ed.)

2020-11-10T16:16:42+01:00

According to recent European statistics, Swedish cultural policy has succeeded remarkably well in achieving its original objective: to promote popular interest in the Arts. Sweden (closely followed by our Nordic neighbors) tops the list when it comes to participation in cultural activities. The figures are included in a body of statistics that, together with commentary by Sten Månsson of the Swedish Cultural Council, make up the greater part of Kultursverige 2009.

Convergence, Creative Industries and Civil Society: Towards a New Agenda for Cultural Policy and Cultural Studies

2020-11-10T16:16:45+01:00

In this article I start with a personal experience “cameo” from 1996 in Australia and extrapolate from that some issues that remain relevant in the sometimes troubled relationship between cultural studies and cultural policy. These are encapsulated in the three “cs” of convergence, creative industries and civil society which provide a new context for both new research and new policy settings. The argument is developed and situated in historical terms by examining the “cultural technologies”, especially the newspaper, and subsequently print media in the 19th century, electronic media in the 20th century and digital media in the 21st century which provide the content, the technologies and the rituals for “imagining” our sense of place and belonging. This is then linked to ways of understanding culture and cultural technologies in the context of governmentality and the emergence of culture as a strategic object of policy with the aim of citizen- and population formation and management. This argument is then linked to four contemporary “testbeds” – cultural mapping and planning, cultural statistics and indicators, cultural citizenship and identity, and research of and for cultural policy – and priorities for cultural policy where cultural studies work has been extremely enabling and productive. The article concludes with an argument, derived from the early 20th century work of Patrick Geddes of the necessity of linking, researching, understanding and operationalising the three key elements and disciplines of Folk (anthropology), Work (economics), and Place (geography) in order to properly situate cultural policy, mapping and planning and their relationship to cultural studies and other disciplines.

Digital Media and the Order of Ethnography: On Modes of Digitization in the Museum of World Culture

2020-11-10T16:16:44+01:00

The article applies and elaborates an Actor-Network Theory approach to digitization. Defining digitization as the determining of relations between new digital media and old materials within local networks, the article attempts to investigate locally engendered ambiguities of such processes.

The model is applied in a case study of the Swedish Museum of World Culture and its attempt at renewing old ethnographic objects through the use of digital media. The study is comprised of several interviews, observations and extensive document analysis.

The article concludes by underlining the contingency and ambiguity involved in introducing digital media into the networks of old objects. It also addresses the cohesive and stabilizing roles played by computer programs and museum objects respectively.

Cultural Research and Intangible Heritage

2020-11-10T16:16:44+01:00

Intangible heritage deemed worthy of preservation is often regarded as traditional culture that reflects the identity of a particular nation or group. Traditional cultures are distinct from commercial forms, which are transmitted and promoted via businesses, commercial establishments, and media. Research on culture reveals the way that a large part of the world’s intangible heritage includes practices that interweave tradition and commodification as well as blur the boundaries between nations. As these practices do not fit into the clear categories of “traditional” or “national”, they may not be considered for preservation in official project documents such as the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Many of these practices are being, nonetheless, stored today through the unofficial archiving of moving images on the Internet, facilitated by Web 2.0. Through the case studies of various Caribbean performing arts, this paper illustrates how cultural research can provide a comprehensive understanding of intangible culture in both its lived and digital contexts, knowledge that in turn challenges the process of categorization and the measures of preservation of intangible heritage proposed by UNESCO.

Anne Scott Sørensen, Ole Martin Høystad, Erling Bjurström and Halvard Vike: Nye kulturstudier - En innføring, Oslo: Spartacus Forlag AS/Scandinavian Academic Press, 2008

2020-11-10T16:16:43+01:00

Nye kulturstudier [New Cultural Studies] is the first introduction to cultural studies in Scandinavia and an impressive presentation of the subject. The book aims to explain how cultural studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field in humanities and social sciences. Other introductions to cultural research in ethnology and anthropology have been produced – but this one is different, since it is more comprehensive and ambitious.

Nye kulturstudier is the result of interdisciplinary collaboration between four colleagues from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Senior lecturer Anne Scott Sørensen and Professor Ole Martin Høystad are affiliated to the Institute for Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. Professor Erling Bjurström belongs to Tema Q at Linköping University, and Professor Halvard Vike works at the Institute for Social Anthropology at Oslo University. The authors comment that they are oriented towards different subjects and educational programmes at their respective universities.

The book begins with a background to the theories and scientific traditions. This is followed by Cultural Analysis and Methodology, a chapter on Identity, Globalisation and Multiculturalism, one on Taste, Lifestyle and Consumption and, finally, by Nature, Body and Experience Landscapes.

What’s the Use of Culture?

2020-11-13T16:09:10+01:00

Like it or not, cultural theorists are increasingly finding themselves challenged to answer a very short but profound question: What’s the use of cultural research? Within the academy the question of the usefulness of cultural research has provoked a wide array of responses, ranging from feelings of resentment or the fear of losing one’s intellectual freedom to those of approval (often reinforced by a sense that one can in some way help society, or those less empowered) – and an endless number of positions in between. This article places the question of the usefulness of cultural research in relation to issues of the historical and cultural context in which it has appeared over the better part of the past century. Its point of departure rises from the author’s own academic background in American cultural anthropology and Swedish ethnology, as well as the work the author has conducted on tourism and the experience economy in Sweden.

The article begins by briefly discussing the different roles applied anthropology has previously played in both Britain and the United States. This section emphasizes a need to understand the question of “usefulness” as being contextually bound. The text then moves on to consider the role culture is playing in contemporary economic life (exemplified here by the field of tourism) and to reflect upon some of the consequences the cultural economy is having in everyday life. Following this the text concludes with a section focusing upon the research challenges and needs coming from the tourism industry. This final section of the paper works to both illuminate and problematize the need which exists at present for the development of different forms of cultural research.

Spaces and Places of Cultural Studies

2020-11-10T16:16:49+01:00

As cultural studies has sought for a foothold in universities, it has faced pressures of modern disciplinarity it aims at to challenge and alter. In the conjuncture of neo-liberal university policies new weight is given to multidisciplinarity as an instrument for reshaping universities in favour of cost-effectiveness and quick-fix applications. In this new situation cultural studies has to defend purposeful and enduring diversity in and of universities. In order to be able to do this it has to think of itself not only as a critical space but also as such place where universities could critically reflect themselves and their place in the world.

The Future of the European University: Liberal Democracy or Authoritarian Capitalism?

2020-11-11T16:08:31+01:00

This paper examines the prevalent notion that that the production of knowledge, academic research and teaching can and ought to be audited and assessed in the same manner as the production of other goods and services. The emphasis on similarities between industry and the academy leads to a neglect of fundamental differences in their aims and, as a consequence, a tendency to evaluate scientific research in terms of patents and product development and colleges and universities in terms of the labour market. The article examines the idea of the free academy, on the one hand, and compares and contrasts it to the idea of free enterprise, on the other. It is argued that the view of the university as a supplier of specific solutions for pre-determined, non-scientific needs (a workforce with skills currently in demand, innovations for commercial partners, justifications for political decisions, etc) undermines the public legitimacy of university science and weakens the fabric of scientific training and practice. The article proposes that the university’s main purpose must be to provide a recognized neutral, autonomous agency of rigorous, disinterested investigation and scientific education, which constitutes a necessary condition for an enlightened liberal democracy: an informed, capable and critical citizenry.

Schoenberg and the Radical Economies of Harmonielehre

2020-11-10T16:16:47+01:00

This article examines Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre as a text shaped by the influence of Central European science and politics. In accord with a severely economical approach to his subject, Schoenberg’s critique of figured bass and chorale harmonization is compared with Ernst Mach’s writings on scientific method. In support of this comparison, the article addresses the role played in Schoenberg’s political development by the Leftist editor and organizer, David J. Bach, one of Schoenberg’s closest childhood friends and a student of Mach. The comparison between Schoenberg and Mach, then, is drawn not only in terms of scientific method but also in light of the radical politics of the Austrian Left at the time, a politics for which both Mach and Schoenberg held sympathies. It should not be overlooked that later, however, they ceased to acknowledge these sympathies explicitly, and Schoenberg would appear to have abandoned them entirely.

The First Swede in Space: The Making of a Public Science Hero

2020-11-10T16:16:47+01:00

The first Swede in space, Christer Fuglesang, has become an iconic figure for the popularisation of science in Sweden. Named as Sweden’s first astronaut in 1992, Fuglesang remained a relatively anonymous and somewhat derisory figure prior to his space launch in 2006. After his space mission, however, Fuglesang has become the very personification of science in Swedish society. In this paper, the transformation of Fuglesang’s public persona and his construction as a Swedish public science hero is analysed in detail. It is discussed how after 2006, Fuglesang can be seen as providing confirmation, both of the existence of a cultural gap separating science from society, and of the ability of certain heroic individuals to bridge this gap in a way that renders it more appreciable to a larger public.

In the main part of the paper, three aspects of Fuglesang’s elevation into a Swedish public science hero are discussed: First, the cyborg metaphor is used to analyse the fearlessness Fuglesang expresses towards yielding to, and entering into close communion with science and technology. Second, the transcendence of earthly perspective aspired to by science for so long, and apparently realized through space travel, is discussed in relation to Fuglesang’s personal experiences of space. Third, the inseparability of Fuglesang’s nationality from his heroism is discussed. It was only through the repeated flagging of his Swedishness that Fuglesang’s routine space mission gained any particular significance enabling it to be communicated as a major scientific event.

Finally, closer attention is paid to the scientific message Fuglesang is delivering to Swedish society. It is argued that he acts to promote renewed faith and confidence in the ability of science to open up new horizons for the future. The task of the public science hero is to help enable these new horizons to colonize the public imagination.

"Cultural Policy": Towards a Global Survey

2020-11-12T16:08:20+01:00

The field of “cultural policy” has acquired sufficient purchase internationally to warrant a comparative global survey. This article examines questions that arise preliminary to such an endeavour. It looks first at the problems posed by the divided nature of “cultural policy” research: on the one hand policy advisory work that is essentially pragmatic, and on the other so-called “theoretical” analysis which has little or no purchase on policy-making. In both cases, key elements are missed. A way out of the quandary would be to privilege a line of inquiry that analyzes the “arts and heritage” both in relation to the institutional terms and objectives of these fields but also as components of a broader “cultural system” whose dynamics can only be properly grasped in terms of the social science or “ways of life” paradigm. Such a line of inquiry would address: the ways in which subsidized cultural practice interacts with or is impacted by social, economic and political forces; the domains of public intervention where the cultural in the broader social science sense elicits policy stances and policy action; the nature of public intervention in both categories; whether and how the objects and practices of intervention are conceptualised in a holistic way. A second set of interrogations concerns axes for the comparison of “cultural policy” trans-nationally. One possible axis is provided by different state stances with respect to Raymond Williams’ categories of national aggrandizement, economic reductionism, public patronage of the arts, media regulation and the negotiated construction of cultural identity. Another avenue would be to unpack interpretations of two leading current agendas, namely “cultural diversity” and the “cultural and/or creative industries”.

Ethnography in the Marketplace

2020-11-10T16:16:51+01:00

What happens when cultural analysis enters the world of applied research and academics become consultants working with corporations and public institutions? The divide between academic research and commercial ethnography has often hampered communication and critical exchanges between these two worlds.

In this paper we look at the experiences of consultants, drawing on Danish and Swedish examples. What can we learn from them when it comes to organizing research under time pressure, communicating results and making people understand the potentials of cultural analysis? And how could consultants “out there” benefit from a continuing dialogue with their colleagues in Academia?

What’s the Use of Cultural Research? Editorial theme introduction

2020-11-15T16:10:31+01:00

Abstract not Available.

Culture Unbound Vol. 1 Editorial

2020-11-11T16:09:12+01:00

No abstract available.

The Divergence Hypothesis in Modernization Theory Across Three European Countries: the UK, Sweden and Greece

2020-11-10T16:16:46+01:00

Following a comparative approach it is argued that the modernizing trajectories of three European countries, i.e., the UK, Sweden and Greece were different, as the cultural heritages of the three countries under study, formed by specific historical, political and religious events have acted as a filter of their modernization processes and left an imprint on the prevailing values. England followed a type of modernization associated with “bourgeois revolutions”, Sweden was highly influenced by the popular belief system of solidarity of the political culture of Scandinavian nations and Greece, although increasingly modern, can be associated with a more traditional, top to bottom, version of modernization, highly influenced by the Greek Orthodox Church. Secondary data and empirical research show that the different modernizing paths in the three countries have formed their main cultural characteristics; the UK is portrayed as an individualistic culture,Sweden as an amalgamation of both individualism and collectivism, and Greece as a traditional and more collectivist one. As culture, in the Parsonian approach, acts as the binder of the social world it has functioned as a mediating mechanism, shaping the personality traits and social relationships among British, Swedish and Greek citizens in the direction of an individualistic and/or a collectivist ethos. Whilst the thesis of the article does not support the bipolarity of the “divergence” and “convergence” hypotheses it provides some evidence to the former suggesting that modernization does not always take a simple linear path providing no room for variations.