Why the Popular Matters

While chiefly a site of popular pleasure and merriment, popular culture also offers a profound sense of meaning-making, where it functions as a site and source through which identities are inhabited, brokered and contested. As a significant domain within contemporary society, popular culture is both shaped by and has the capacity to shape developments occurring at the wider social, cultural and political levels of human life. Taking popular culture seriously – as an arena of everyday life that has merit in its own right – the contributors to this wide-ranging collection of essays offer unique insight into various elements of contemporary popular culture. Drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as the performing arts and creative industries, this volume offers theoretical reflections on the significance of particular elements of popular culture: from the performative effects of interactive and immersive theatre, through developments in the shifting cultural landscape of a post-television age, to contemporary popular literature of various sorts and its basis for identity and fandom. Above all else, what these essays demonstrate is the radically porous nature of popular culture, and the ways in which it continually defies attempts at neat categorisation by transcending traditional boundaries and genres

The show of childhood. Agamben and Cavell on education and transformation.

We begin this paper with a scene taken from a 1950’s musical. Fred Astaire, playing an aging musical star in search for a second career, enters a shopping-mall, called ‘Arcade’. He stumbles over the feet of a shoeshine ‘boy’, a black adult person who is portrayed in a very stereotypical way: shabby, goofy and cack-handed. Their gazes meet and Astaire starts a song, apparently forgetting the nagging doubts he had concerning his future career. While getting his shoes polished – Astaire sitting comfortably in a high chair and the black man kneeling in front of him – the big star continues singing, demonstrating his skills as one of the world’s best tap-dancers. All this causes an atmosphere of cheerfulness. As the scene develops this particular mood only increases, as Astaire seems to become literally overpowered by an urge to move about the place, tapping heel and toe to the floor in an ever increasing frenzy, which – so it seems – is unstoppable. The fast and syncopating rhythm of his over-excited moves is echoed by the words he sings: the song, which started as a mere poetical comment on a very banal event (‘When there is a shine on your shoes, there is a melody in your heart. What a wonderful way to start the day’), becomes itself prone to a rhythmical frenzy. Astaire isn't able to stop the flow of his words, which at a certain moment consists in nothing but the endless repetition of the same words: ‘shoeshine, shoeshine’. And so the scene comes to a climax where Astaire drags along the shoeshine boy in a shared dance. When their dance is over the black servant is sitting on his knees again, left to stay in the Arcade, whilst the star of the movie, still standing upright, leaves the Arcade, brightly smiling. In this paper we will defend that this scene, taken from Minnelli’s film The Band Wagon (1953), deserves the attention of philosophers of education because it exemplifies an educational moment par excellence. We are prompted to this reading by some ideas of Stanley Cavell which we will develop further here in dialogue with another philosopher, Giorgio Agamben . The ideas we develop here go against the grain of much educational thought on this kind of outright western-centered and racist cinema. Nonetheless, we will argue for a view that takes this scene in and of itself as educational: without wanting to deny what is plainly and painfully visible – a reaffirmation of the white man’s superiority and a legitimization of a structural form of injustice –, we argue that the way in which words and movements in this scene function are expressive of an event that can be read as a (temporary) liberation from existing power structures. With Agamben and Cavell, we will describe this scene through the figure of the child and conceive of what happens here as a new beginning

'Boom to bust: corporate perspectives on Ireland’s local newspaper industry since 2000', in O'Donnell, James and Kenneally, Ian (eds) The Irish regional press, 1892-2012: changing media in a changing country. Four Courts Press (Dublin) (In Press, 2017)

This chapter examines the financial performance and restructuring of the Irish local press since 2000. This period coincided with the Celtic Tiger boom in the Irish economy, to about 2007, and the country's financial crisis from 2008

Missa Brevis For SATB solo voices Ian Percy (2017)

As the title suggests, this is a short Mass in four settings (movements) composed for four solo voices (SATB): I. Kyrie II. Gloria III. Sanctus IV. Agnus Dei The score evolved from a pedagogical study through which it was demonstrated to student composers how one could follow conventions of plainchant within a tonal stasis (without accidentals or modulations), yet still sound contemporary in nature, hopefully producing music that sounds timeless instead of being overtly modernistic or retrospective. The opening plainchant (Kyrie) is written in Phrygian mode and the subtle presence of a sung grace note contemporises the rhythmic and harmonic flavour of the phrase. The simple use of a compound interval for the bass in the first chorus also helps to contemporise the soundworld along with the use of fourth-based harmony and the linear use of whole-tones

International Dance Conference Our Dance Democracy 2

Building on the success of Our Dance Democracy in 2018, this conference will further the debate, extending the dialogue of how artists and academics interrogate the function of dance in the 21st Century. Our Dance Democracy 2 will consider the notion of our world as an ever-challenging and changing global society, in which social media facilitates the circulation of opinions and prejudices rooted in intuitive, and frequently unexamined narratives of contemporary societies. These are increasingly taken up, legitimised, and recycled as common-sense master-narratives across the discursive circuits of established media and political debate. A real expansion of inclusive public space is one outcome of this and introspection another. These tendencies expose boundaries in human relations, always constituted – contradictorily – as zones of exclusion which are always also points of contact. The UK as a bounded and bordered territory, demonstrates that perceptions of (in)visibility, identity and belonging have real-world significance, and the importance of interrogating assumptions underpinning them cannot be over-stated. Artists and cultural workers perform a critical public role in exposing inherited and novel ideas and practices to examination and re-examination. Our Dance Democracy 2 sets out to explore the proposition that, because dance lives by contact across boundaries, borders, and frontiers, it has proven capacity to enable critical understanding of the human and historical contingency of even the ‘hardest’ borders, erected in the name of immutable, non-negotiable, traditions, beliefs, and value systems. Dance as a ritualistic act can perform difference as historical defiance, our art form is also practised in creative ways that can name – and, therefore, resist – complex contemporary forms of oppression, not least by promoting and supporting social and political activism. Dance and dancers can model, rehearse, and embody ways of living together for mutual flourishing, thus reinvigorating democratic concepts, practices, and structures for a fractured twenty-first century. In Our Dance Democracy 2 we propose dance and dancing, pedagogy and performance making, writing and critical discourses, as dynamic sites for critical thinking, progressive social intervention, civic engagement, ethics and activism – both established and emergent. We announce a space for ethical action, beyond borders imposed on our creative worlds: a platform for artists to make visible, and test the viability of, ideas of equity and embodied principles of collective endeavour. Karen Gallagher & Associates Our Dance Democracy 2 will be a two-day conference, dedicated to deliberating on the role of dance artists and scholars in ways including, but not limited to • Dance as cultural identity • Dance as protest/resistance/conflict/celebration • Movement of peoples: Belonging/displacement/segregation • Cultural forms as political legacies • Dance as peace-building • Cultural amnesia • Colonialism/Post-colonialism • Borders, boundaries, frontiers: contacts, exclusions, histories and futures • Dancing uncertainty, landscapes and re-mapping • Dancing Communities: social justice, civic responsibility and ethics • Internal Borderspaces: dancing the maternal in mind and body Abstracts excepted for 20 minute papers, experimental formats including performative lectures, workshop/seminars and provocation world-café style. The organisers are exploring a peer-reviewed collection of articles based on conference contributions and invited essays, and delegates may be invited to contribute to thi

'Tragedy and Injustice'

This chapter examines the relationship between tragedy and injustice. It does so by drawing attention to social factors that may precipitate tragedy and injustice, as well as to social factors that may also be key in promoting recovery and resilience thereafter. Whether the personal calamity of sudden and unexpected bereavement limited in its effects to the individual and their immediate family, or the widespread loss of life following public disaster, both are tragedies that invoke a sense of injustice. Such injustice may well stem from the perceived randomness of tragedy itself. It may also stem from circumstances in which tragedy was preventable; and be further aggravated – in ways that complicate the grieving process – by a failure to hold those responsible to account for negligence or wrongdoing. Social injustice of this sort may thus, paradoxically, serve as a spur to activism and campaigning, while simultaneously serving to hamper healing by disenfranchising the grief of those involved. Sharing the burden of grief by providing social support following tragedy of various kinds, this chapter suggests, can facilitate resilience by demonstrating to those affected – often in very powerful ways – that they are not alone and that other people care

Food and Drink at the 1939 World's Fair' in A Taste of Progress: Food at International and World exhibitions in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Food and its political role at the international exposition in New York in 193