Sweet Suburbia and the Bustling City

This paper focuses on the representation of Wellington in New Zealand tourism films in the decades preceding the establishment of the National Film Unit (NFU) in 1941. While critically engaging with current discourses about early New Zealand film production, New Zealand film history, New Zealand human geography and the cinematic city, it performs the textual analysis of eight case studies also examining archival materials related to their production, circulation and reception. This article aims to demonstrate how the cinematic depiction of New Zealand’s capital city in the analysed time frame was a complex and multi-layered process driven and characterised by the coexistence and intertwining of tourism marketing, national publicity and colonial agenda

Smart Environments for Collaborative Design, Implementation, and Interpretation of Scientific Experiments

Ambient intelligence promises to enable humans to smoothly interact with their environment, mediated by computer technology. In the literature on ambient intelligence, empirical scientists are not often mentioned. Yet they form an interesting target group for this technology. In this position paper, we describe a project aimed at realising an ambient intelligence environment for face-to-face meetings of researchers with different academic backgrounds involved in molecular biology “omics” experiments. In particular, microarray experiments are a focus of attention because these experiments require multidisciplinary collaboration for their design, analysis, and interpretation. Such an environment is characterised by a high degree of complexity that has to be mitigated by ambient intelligence technology. By experimenting in a real-life setting, we will learn more about life scientists as a user group

Colonial and post-colonial African cinema : (a theoretical and critical analysis of discursive practices)

This study attempts to provide a theoretical framework for the criticism of colonial and post-colonial African cinema. Emphasis is placed on the extent to which the nature of colonial cinematic policies and practices have influenced post-colonial African cinema, especially with regards to forms of subjectivities constructed through cinematic representation. The study begins by examining some of the methodological problems in the criticism of African cinema. It relates the concept of African cinema to debates dealing with Third Cinema theories, cine-structuralism and psychoanalytic critical theories, and argues that any of these theories can be applied to the criticism of African cinema so long as it is moderated to suit the specific nature of the African condition. It also defines the nature of African cinema by relating it to the notions of national cinema, the question of African personality and identity, emergent genres and film styles, and proposes a general cinematic reading hypothesis, anchored on the concept of subjectivity, for the criticism of African cinema. With respect to the colonial period, the main argument which I pursue is that two divergent cinematic practices existed side by side in Africa. First, there was a governmental and non-governmental agencies sponsored, non-commercial cinema, which treats the medium as a vehicle for popular instruction. Throughout this study, I refer to this cinematic practice as colonial African instructional cinema, and argue that it represents Africans as knowing and knowledgeable people, able and willing to acquire modem methods of social planning and development for the benefit of their communities. Second, there was the commercial cinematic practice which chose, and still chooses, to recycle popular images of people of African descent in the European imagination, as projected through literature, history, anthropological and scientific discourses, etc., in the representation of Africans. I refer to this cinematic practice throughout this study as colonialist African cinema. The main argument which I pursue with respect to this practice is that the images of Africans projected in it have a genealogical history stretching as far back in time as the classical era. In the modem period, the contact between Europe and Africa, and the subsequent slave trade, colonialism and their popular literatures, and the nineteenth century racial theories, are some of the factors which have reinforced the canonical authority of these images. I argue that this cinematic practice represents Africans by employing various metaphors which draw associations between Africans and animals, to suggest African savagery and barbarity, and that by drawing on such associations, they devalue African humanity, legitimise the colonial enterprise and all its attendant cruelties, and absolve Europeans of any moral responsiblities over actions supposedly carried out in the name of spreading civilisation. Though post-colonial African historical texts located in the colonial period respond to the whole colonial enterprise, my argument is that they are inspired, first and foremost, by the desire to refute the images of Africans identifiable with the discursive tradition of colonialist African CInema

The Mediating Role of Cinema in Representation of Hard Power Case Study: The movie "Zero Dark Thirty"

In recent decades, critical geopolitics has worked to achieve a proper understanding of the conditions prevailing in the world by common discourse analysis along with power relations. One of the areas ­taken into consideration seriously by the critical geopolitical is the media. Media, due to its function in issues related to soft power and common discourse in geopolitics and soft power has the ability to influence the prevailing trends in public opinion through ­ influencing on audiences and conveying information. Various media ­ are widely used to enhance the influence and expansion of soft power and also strengthening the function of hard power by the states ­and especially the world major powers like the United States of America. One of the Media ­ that has been utilized seriously to present an acceptable and also influential picture of states is cinema. In critical geopolitical perspective, ­ capabilities that cinema provides to represent different real and imaginative narratives and also its entertaining and attractive nature for people lead to represent different functions than news media represent of themselves. One of the functions is to use cinema to represent the hard power in order to convince citizens and to convey the message of ­ threats to enemies. As in 2012, in movie "Zero Dark Thirty" the hard power of the United States in the fight against terrorism was represented. This study intends to use the discourse analysis of the film "Zero Dark Thirty" in responding to this question what the mediating functions of cinema are in representation of ­hard power. Keywords: Media, cinema, representation, hard power, soft powe

The Cowl - v.83 - n.6 - Oct 18, 2018

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 83 - No. 6 - October 18, 2018. 24 pages

From natural history to science: display and the transformation of American museums of science and nature

This paper explains how and why many American museums of science and nature moved away from the traditional content and methods of natural history in the period from 1930 to 1980. It explores diverse motivations for the shift from dead, stuffed displays to live, interactive exhibits, and the consequences of that shift for museums as both educational institutions and as institutions of research. Ultimately, it argues that debates over museums’ content and display strategies drew strength from and reinforced a profound transformation in the institutional history of twentieth-century American science and technology: namely, the separation of research and public education. By the late 1960s, the American museum landscape had been transformed by this development. Older natural history museums competed for visitors and resources with ‘new’ style science museums, and although both remained popular cultural institutions, neither had achieved a coherent new institutional identity because debates about the role of the museum in science continued. Thus, we suggest, in the mid-twentieth century natural history and science museums were more important in both the history of biology and the history of science’s public culture than has previously been acknowledged

Spartan Daily, February 8, 2018

Volume 150, Issue 7https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2018/1006/thumbnail.jp

Representations - practice - spectatorship : a study of haptic relations between independent cinema and market-led urbanization in contemporary China

This text attempts to describe and analyze the haptic relations between non-official, i.e. independent, cinema and market-led urbanization in contemporary China. From the theoretical context of recent scholarship on Visual Culture and film history, it's argued that motion pictures and the Visual are in fact crucial to modernization. Using the theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau the text has explored how (social) space and cinema are linked in a reciprocal visual-spatial production. Based on a fieldwork period and visual studies the cinematic-urban nexus and have been studied from the concepts of representation, practice and spectatorship. That is, the relation between independent cinema's critical and challenging representations and the spectacle of hegemonic economy. The sensory interaction and actual production of independent cinema within marketized (social) space and informal distribution's creation of new types of spectatorship. The text indicates that independent cinema have managed to develop and evolve out of relative marginality to temporally produce an alternative vision and independent space between state and market. However, nothing has indicated that this process is a part of a wider development of civility or civic responsiveness

The Santa Clara, 2019-01-17

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/tsc/1082/thumbnail.jp