METROPOLITAN ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT. METROPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING MAP CONSTRUCTION

We can no longer interpret the contemporary metropolis as we did in the last century. The thought of civil economy regarding the contemporary Metropolis conflicts more or less radically with the merely acquisitive dimension of the behaviour of its citizens. What is needed is therefore a new capacity for imagining the economic-productive future of the city: hybrid social enterprises, economically sustainable, structured and capable of using technologies, could be a solution for producing value and distributing it fairly and inclusively. Metropolitan Urbanity is another issue to establish. Metropolis needs new spaces where inclusion can occur, and where a repository of the imagery can be recreated. What is the ontology behind the technique of metropolitan planning and management, its vision and its symbols? Competitiveness, speed, and meritocracy are political words, not technical ones. Metropolitan Urbanity is the characteristic of a polis that expresses itself in its public places. Today, however, public places are private ones that are destined for public use. The Common Good has always had a space of representation in the city, which was the public space. Today, the Green-Grey Infrastructure is the metropolitan city's monument that communicates a value for future generations and must therefore be recognised and imagined; it is the production of the metropolitan symbolic imagery, the new magic of the city

Sonic heritage: listening to the past

History is so often told through objects, images and photographs, but the potential of sounds to reveal place and space is often neglected. Our research project ‘Sonic Palimpsest’1 explores the potential of sound to evoke impressions and new understandings of the past, to embrace the sonic as a tool to understand what was, in a way that can complement and add to our predominant visual understandings. Our work includes the expansion of the Oral History archives held at Chatham Dockyard to include women’s voices and experiences, and the creation of sonic works to engage the public with their heritage. Our research highlights the social and cultural value of oral history and field recordings in the transmission of knowledge to both researchers and the public. Together these recordings document how buildings and spaces within the dockyard were used and experienced by those who worked there. We can begin to understand the social and cultural roles of these buildings within the community, both past and present

Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come

Failurists: When Things Go Awry

Failure is a popular topic of research. It has long been a source of study in fields such as sociology and anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), privacy and surveillance, cultural, feminist and media studies, art, theatre, film, and political science. When things go awry, breakdown, or rupture they can lead to valuable insights into the mundane mechanisms of social worlds. Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored within academia. In this book the authors reflect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, fieldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the field. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways. In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. Across four sections — Section I: Digitality, Archives, and Design; Section II: Care/Activism; Section III: Creative Critical Interventions; and Section IV: Play and the Senses — the contributors bring different subjectivities, relationalities, and positionalities — rhythms reflecting the numerous material, social, and digital encounters. Each subtheme is an invitation to probe certain areas of failure in all its complexity; an invitation to sit with someone’s own lived experience of failure and how it manifests in research practice and theory. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated

Coloring in the void: Absurdity and contemporary art

Boo Boo Bird is a song, or a poem perhaps, or a song and a poem, by the Scottish poet, songwriter and humorist Ivor Cutler. This wistful ballad describes the plight and flight of a mythical bird, the Boo Boo bird. What we discover through the song is that the Boo Boo bird has no defining features, in fact — it has no features at all. The Boo Boo bird is invisible and recognized only by its call: ‘boo boo, boo boo’. The repetition of the word is important, and the absurdity of the invisible bird is amplified by its childish double name; boo boo, like an infant’s first attempts at vocalization, or that informal way of referring to a failure, a mistake, a booboo. There is something haunting about the way Cutler sings to this impossible creature and it is this element which makes the work so compelling; that it can be simultaneously ridiculous and also very moving.1 It straddles a certain border between irony and sincerity. And it is this border, or rather the oscillation between the states of irony and sincerity and between falling and failing, that features in the works discussed within this chapter, tracing a line between things and what is at the outermost edge of things, namely, the void

A new global media order? : debates and policies on media and mass communication at UNESCO, 1960 to 1980

Defence date: 24 June 2019Examining Board: Professor Federico Romero, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Corinna Unger, European University Institute (Second Reader); Professor Iris Schröder, Universität Erfurt (External Advisor); Professor Sandrine Kott, Université de GenèveThe 1970s, a UNESCO report claimed, would be the “communication decade”. UNESCO had started research on new means of mass communication for development purposes in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the issue evolved into a debate on the so-called “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO) and the democratisation of global media. It led UNESCO itself into a major crisis in the 1980s. My project traces a dual trajectory that shaped this global debate on transnational media. The first follows communications from being seen as a tool and goal of national development in the 1960s, to communications seen as catalyst for recalibrated international political, cultural and economic relations. The second relates to the recurrent attempts, and eventual failure, of various actors to engage UNESCO as a platform to promote a new global order. I take UNESCO as an observation post to study national ambitions intersecting with internationalist claims to universality, changing understandings of the role of media in development and international affairs, and competing visions of world order. Looking at the modes of this debate, the project also sheds light on the evolving practices of internationalism. Located in the field of a new international history, this study relates to the recent rediscovery of the “new order”-discourses of the 1970s as well as to the increasingly diversified literature on internationalism. With its focus on international communications and attempts at regulating them, it also contributes to an international media history in the late twentieth century. The emphasis on the role of international organisations as well as on voices from the Global South will make contributions to our understanding of the historic macro-processes of decolonisation, globalisation and the Cold War

GVSU Undergraduate and Graduate Catalog, 2019-2020

Grand Valley State University 2019-2020 undergraduate and/or graduate course catalog published annually to provide students with information and guidance for enrollment.https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/course_catalogs/1094/thumbnail.jp

GVSU Undergraduate and Graduate Catalog, 2017-2018

Grand Valley State University 2017-2018 undergraduate and/or graduate course catalog published annually to provide students with information and guidance for enrollment.https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/course_catalogs/1092/thumbnail.jp