Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

The Development of the Post-Classical Hollywood Sports Business Film Trend: A Socio-Historic Approach

This dissertation examines the development of an emerging trend in contemporary sports film production identified as the post-classical Hollywood sports business film. Post-classical Hollywood sports business films stand in contrast to their classical Hollywood sports film predecessors based on some distinguishing characteristics relating to different points of narrative emphasis, themes, and character types. Initially, post-classical sports business film narratives focus primarily on the business side of professional team sports rather than themes devoted to athletes achieving on the field of play in the world of sports. As a result, much of the filmic action in post-classical Hollywood sports business films occurs in business setting such as offices and board rooms rather than in sports stadiums, arenas, or playing fields typical of classical era sports films. Finally, non-athlete sports film protagonists (NASP) in post-classical Hollywood sports business films have supplanted athlete protagonists as the main characters in this new sports film trend, with athlete characters occupying supporting roles in the overall narratives. The focus of this study concentrates on two stages of development in the post-classical Hollywood sports business film. After providing a brief history classical sports films, the first stage of development in this new trend is identified as taking place starting from the late 1960s and continuing to the mid 1990s. During this time period, an increasing number of Hollywood sports business films featured matters of sports economics and other off-the-field matters related to professional team sports as significant components of the narrative. In addition, athlete protagonists, in contrast to their classical era predecessors, began to show greater concern for their personal careers rather than helping their teams win championships. The second stage of development initiated with the film Jerry Maguire in the mid 1990s, which signaled the appearance of the non-athlete sports film protagonist (NASP) as one of the most distinguishing traits of the post-classical Hollywood sports business film trend that continues into the 21st century. Moreover, Jerry Maguire (1996) exists as the prototypical sports business film, and marks a crucial turning point in Hollywood production leading to the development of the ensuing trend and potential sports film sub-genre. This study takes a socio-historic approach drawing on Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery’s historiographical methods from Film History: Theory and Practice (1985) in examining a range of contemporaneous economic, political, and social generative mechanisms is facilitating the rise of the post-classical Hollywood sports business film trend. Using discursive textual analysis of certain post-classical Hollywood sports business films, this study positions the spread of neoliberalism and free market principles as significant generative mechanisms in the appearance of distinctive representations, themes, and narrative elements evident in post-classical Hollywood sports business film trend. Film such as Bang the Drum Slowly (John D. Hancock, 1973), North Dallas Forty (Ted Kotcheff, 1979), Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe, 1996), and Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011) among others, are examined as examples of post-classical Hollywood sports business films exhibiting these new themes and narrative patterns

Venice Biennale: Staging Nations

https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1000/thumbnail.jp

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

City Poems And Urban Crisis, 1945 - Present

City Poems proposes that twentieth-century American city poets hold important concerns, commitments, and strategies in common with urban theorists and city planners. The study situates canonical and lesser-read city poetry, including work by William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, George Oppen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Wanda Coleman, among others, in relation to discourses of urban crisis. Following Raymond Williams, Henri Lefebvre, and James Scully, it approaches city poetry as a form of social action that holds particular value for practitioners of progressive city planning. Because poetic representations of cities influence public perceptions, City Poems suggests, they have the potential to shape private and government actions. The relationship between poetry and public life has become an increasingly urgent topic for American poets, in particular since the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant political order in the 1980s. Applying insights from critical urban theory and reader-response criticism, City Poems suggests that poets and planners have shifted their responses to urban crisis in the wake of neoliberalism\u27s emergence from articulating comprehensive theories of the city to observing and responding to everyday practices in communities. Following through on this insight, the study analyzes the efforts of city poets and progressive planners to expand the range of knowledge that counts in defining the social and physical dimensions of cities and argues that experiential knowledge and affective engagement have proven to be crucial components in their visions of a more just and equitable urban future. The study\u27s main contributions are the commonalities it identifies in the practices of city poets, urban theorists, and city planners and the methodology it demonstrates of reading city poetry as a mode of insurgent urban practice

Traditionally Contemporary? Understanding Urban Fijian Masi

This research investigates how the contemporary use and significance of Fijian barkcloth (masi) in Suva, the capital of Fiji, has been adapted from its traditional use and practices and how this urban environment has created new ways of distributing, displaying and presenting it. I aim to explore the notion that contemporary masi practices, while superficially divergent from those historically, still reflect and pay homage to the traditional customs and codes that made masi culturally significant in the past. Masi is made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree (Broussonetia papyrifera). A laborious process, the bark is beaten to produce sheets of cloth of varying thicknesses and sizes and then decorated using one (or a combination of three) technique, depending on the type of masi being made. Historically one of the most pervasive exchange objects in Fiji, masi is a female iyau (valuable) and still plays an integral role in Fijian cultural practice. In particular, this research looks to the dynamic and fast-moving urban scene in Fiji and its many global diasporas, especially in terms of urban contemporary Fijian fashion and the presence of ‘masi couture’, and examines masi’s increasingly modified modes of display. The term ‘Urban-Fiji’ will be introduced and speaks to masi’s twenty-first century creative adaptability. Perhaps the first study in which urban Fijian masi is understood in terms of its adaptation and transformation, specific ‘Urban-Fiji’ (diasporic) case studies assist in exploring ‘non-traditional’ uses and resulting artistic practices

The 'work' of visually impaired people: emplotting the self in order to transform others

This thesis outlines how blind and partially sighted people in an English metropolis therapeutically emplot, i.e. narratively reframe their lives in the face of sight loss, whether adventitious or congenital. It shows how such emplotment, which often leads them to incorporate their disability into their lives, requires multiple forms of narrative ‘work’: joining the visually impaired community, finding a new meaning in one’s life and, importantly, in one’s professional life are all consuming but ultimately rewarding activities in the transformational journeys of people with sight loss. I argue that my participants’ therapeutic emplotment, which is always precarious, is strengthened by the fact that it can function as a model for other people’s emplotment and that it is co-constructed. By demonstrating what they have achieved in their lives in spite of, or even thanks to, their sensory loss, visually impaired people can spread to others the same wish for self-improvement. Crucially, seeing the positive repercussions their spoken or unspoken narratives have on others reinforces the newly recrafted personal stories by which they orient their lives. This thesis offers an alternative voice to the medical anthropology literature that couples disability with reduced employability and distress. It also develops the concept of therapeutic emplotment by suggesting that it can be co-constructed and that it can have an influence on other people’s narrativization of their own lives

The Biopolitics of Species and Race in the Post-Civil War United States

Human relationships with animals typically fall under the purview of scientists, ethicists, lawyers, and philosophers. The narrative has a relatively consistent historiography that involves tracking direct human contact with or advocacy for animals in various ways. What that narrative often ignores is the American historical and cultural context that emphasizes less idealistic questions and more pragmatic incidents of how humans in the United States have the notion of human superiority and speciesism reinforced for them, reinforcements that appear in economics, semiotics, literature, language, and news. Those incidents often interact with the other dominant form of American dispossession, that of racial bigotry, in surprising ways. “The Biopolitics of Species and Race in the Post-Civil War United States” tracks the assumption of human supremacy in the development of United States culture from the post-Reconstruction period to the present, emphasizing in particular its intersection with and reinforcement by white supremacy. It argues that both supremacy assumptions are unfounded and survive through a series of interactions and cultural constructions designed to validate, on one hand, anything human, and, on the other, anything white, always to the detriment of those who do not fit such categorizations. It describes such relationships in terms of biopower, the Foucauldian term describing an effort to control and order populations in decidedly human forms for decidedly human ends. The biopolitics that results from such orderings uses biological frameworks to keep certain groups of humans, the ones doing the ordering, in power, while a variety of dispossessed human groups face subjugation. Those human groups, then, are placed above nonhuman animals in a descending order of concern. As Cary Wolfe has explained, “you can’t talk about biopolitics without talking about race, and you can’t talk about race without talking about species, simply because both categories—as history well shows—are so notoriously pliable and unstable, constantly bleeding into and out of each other.” This thesis is an analysis of that bleeding

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality