Animating the Archive: The trial and testimony of a Sufi saint

In 1895 the colonial administration of Senegal sentenced Sheikh Amadu Bamba to exile for stirring anti-colonial disobedience. At his trial, Bamba allegedly recited a prayer in defiance of the French authorities. Although there is no archival record to prove that the prayer was recited, since the 1970s Bamba's disciples have flocked to the former seat of colonial power to commemorate his act of resistance; their testimony has displaced the authority of the colonial archive and imagines a decolonial utopia in archival absence. This article examines how their prayer subverts the colonial archive, while it remains entangled in its substrate

Cultural-historical geographies of the archive: fragments, objects and ghosts

This article reviews the increasingly diverse ways in which geographers are engaging with archives. Although traditionally associated with historical geography, cultural-historical geographers have recently 'animated' the archive and its collections of fragments, objects and ghosts. Through this article, I provide an overview of the central characteristics of work in this field, as well as considering the discipline's wider relationship with archival material. Overall, I reflect on the key challenges for geographers in animating and 'bringing to life' the archive - and by extension - the past

Brass Art: A house within a house within a house within a house

Performances from Brass Art (Lewis, Mojsiewicz, Pettican), captured at the Freud Museum, London, using Kinect laser scanning and Processing, reveal an intimate response to spaces and technologies. ‘A house within a house within a house within a house’ links historical and cultural representations of the double, the unconscious and the uncanny to this artistic practice. The new moving-image and sonic works form part of a larger project to inhabit the writing rooms of influential authors, entitled ‘Shadow Worlds | Writers’ Rooms’

Intuition and concrete particularity in Kant's transcendental aesthetic

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about particular works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant’s view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant’s view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects

Justice Arts: Making the Arts Accessible to People in the Juvenile and Adult Criminal Justice System - A Feasibility Study for the Creation of a National Network Summary Report June 2016

In June 2015, more than 220 people from 22 states gathered at the University of San Francisco to participate in a four day conference to share stories, best practices and work they were doing in adult and juvenile prisons and correctional facilities throughout the United States and in England. This conference, "Arts in Corrections: Opportunities for Justice and Rehabilitation," was presented by California Lawyers for the Arts and the William James Association with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, as well as the University of San Francisco and several private foundations.During the conference, a group of approximately 40 persons met in two facilitated sessions to discuss the possibility of creating a national network. A smaller group volunteered to participate in an informal steering committee to investigate the needs and benefits of such an organization. In the fall of 2015 the steering committee designed an electronic survey to receive feedback about this concept from a larger number of practitioners around the country. They received 205 responses, with 94% saying that they would support or join such an organization--a strong mandate to explore next steps to create a national network that will help artists and programs

New frontiers in QLR: definition, design and display

Research that is attentive to temporal processes and durational phenomena is an important tradition within the social sciences internationally with distinct disciplinary trajectories. Qualitative longitudinal research emerged as a distinct methodological paradigm around the turn of the millennium, named within the UK through journal special issues, literature reviews and funding commitments. In 2012-3 the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods funded a network for methodological innovation to map ’New frontiers of QLR’, bringing together a group of scholars who have been actively involved in establishing QLR as a methodological field. The network provided an opportunity to consolidate the learning that has developed in QLR over a sustained period of investment and to engage critically with what QLR might mean in new times. This paper documents the series of discussions staged by the network involving the definition of QLR, the kinds of relationships and practices it involves and the consequences of these in a changing landscape for social research. The series was deliberately interdisciplinary ensuring that we engaged with the temporal perspectives and norms of different academic and practice traditions and this has both enriched and complicated the picture that has emerged from our deliberations. In this paper we argue that QLR is a methodological paradigm that by definition moves with the times, and is an ongoing site of innovation and experiment. Key issues identified for future development in QLR include: intervening in debates of ‘big data’ with visions of deep data that involve following and connecting cases over time; the potential of longitudinal approaches to reframe the ‘sample’ exploring new ways of connecting the particular and the general; new thinking about research ethics that move us beyond anonymity to better explore the meanings of confidentiality and the co-production of research knowledge; and finally the promotion of a QLR sensibility that involves a heightened awareness of the here and now in the making of knowledge, yet which also connects research biographically over a career, enriched by a reflexive understanding of time as a resource in the making of meaning

The Ethics of Repair: Re-animating the Archive

Keywords: Oracion, Marisol Trujillo, archive, ethics, Marilyn Monroe Abstract: The found-footage short Oracion, directed by Cuban Marisol Trujillo accompanying a poem by the Nicaraguan priest and Sandinista Ernesto Cardenal, concerns the tragic life, exploitation and death of American actress Marilyn Monroe. Intercutting archive footage from the Vietnam war and US and Latin American protests with stills and movie clips from Monroe's life, the film proposes both the impossibility of anyone other than God knowing the truth of her existence. The film poses questions about the ethical obligations of the archive both to the lost soul of the actress and the materiality of the found footage in a feminist frame that opens possibilities for reconciling the debts of the past in the obligations of the present to the future