The celebrity factory: new modes of fashion entrepreneurship

The aim of the paper is to analyze the contribution of celebrity culture to the re-shaping of the fashion industry, distancing from an oppositional view while embracing a systemic one, where celebrity is considered a fundamental engine of the contemporary cultural production of fashion and a global consumerist culture. The scope of our paper tries to overcome the endorsement point of view to address the relationship between celebrity and fashion as a two-way relationship which is re-wiring the fashion industry. The paper will explore the multiple manifestations of the so-called celebrity brand labels, from Kim Kardashian to Victoria Beckham

To Be Totally Free: Galina Ustvolskaya, Sofia Gubaidulina, and the Pursuit of Spiritual Freedom in the Soviet Union

As women composers in the Soviet Union, Sofia Gubaidulina and Galina Ustvolskaya occupy a unique niche in twentieth-century music history. A lack of access to the technical training required to develop compositional skills is often cited as a primary reason women composers struggled to reach the same prominence as their male colleagues. Living in an ostensibly egalitarian society, Gubaidulina and Ustvolskaya were treated as equal to their male counterparts and given greater access to education than many women in the West. This increased access to musical education represents an unprecedented experiment in classical music history. Both Gubaidulina and Ustvolskaya developed compositional styles which are neither traditional nor avant-garde, but strikingly unique. In the face of a regime which sought to limit their artistic expression, these women found freedom and independence in their music

Demystifying Cruelty: Artaudian Intention in Art and Life

This thesis paper revisits the early writings of theatre practitioner Antonin Artaud [1896-1948] while addressing two important influences in his vision for a theatre of cruelty: a) avant-garde theatrical theory during his life-time, and; b) typical experiences of schizophrenia, from which the artist suffered since adolescence. Understanding these factors, as they relate to his proposal for a mystical theatre experience, serves to clarify what was original among Artaud’s limit-exceeding intentions. This paper also briefly reviews select artists’ interpretations of Artaud’s theatrical prescriptions, where attempts have been made to translate theory into practice, arriving at both innovations and outcomes Artaud had not foreseen. While affirming his desire to mirror a collapse of all boundaries between art and life, as he had lived it, the artist’s polemic presents practical challenges that merit precaution if aspiring to emulate attributes of a theatre of cruelty. Lastly, as a point of departure for further discussion, I touch upon popular manifestations of cruel immersions and spectacles that contextualize the twenty-first century cultural conditions within which interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary artists now experiment. Where new technologies increasingly enable the magical effects Artaud imagined, I question whether cruelty is necessary, or even fruitfully disruptive, in today’s cultural milieu

Computable Rationality, NUTS, and the Nuclear Leviathan

This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: this sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions

That terrifying center : poetry, language, and embodied subjectivities.

That Terrifying Center is a creative and philosophical experiment in the transmission of corporeal experiences and socio-cultural knowledge through poetry. I am bringing together the seemingly disparate threads of my studies into one creative-theoretical project: a collection of original poems exploring the development of multiple subjectivities, the terror of self-examination, and the scrutiny of memory; it is also a collection of poems that bear witness, that simply tell stories. These are poems that talk about what it\u27s like to live in a body; they ask questions and translate answers related to becoming woman, demystifying fear, investigating genealogies of pain, and narrating family histories. As the title of the project suggests, That Terrifying Center\u27s creative synthesis is fearsome work and the discursive chapters of this project are also part of the experiment. My poems interrogate language and somatic realities, this is not just what the body says-or how it is read by outsiders- but how it interprets, interacts with space, location, and geography. I see the body as a repository of memory and possibility. Consciously, I want to cultivate a poetics of hybridity-experimentation with language and form, while keeping a narrative voice (or voices) telling the story, using absences, space, shifts in time, and memory to translate and even reproduce the sensations of being human. The creative dissertation consists of a critical introduction and two conceptual halves. The first half is a collection of original poetry, divided into the following sections: The Bottom line, Absurdity, Conjure Woman, and Sunterblooms Ik Tew. The second half of the project consists of four discursive chapters. Chapter one presents the cultural and creative framework(s) that prefigure my treatment of many-selvedness, and black women\u27s embodiment as they draw from M. NourbeSe Philip\u27s concepts s/place, dis place and bodymemory. This chapter also considers writing the body and the reconceptualization of creativity in the poetry and essays of Audre Lorde. Chapter two presents my work as an in-process, prismatic poetics (of parallels and intersection, of reflection) -of language and sounds, but also of space and embodied experimentation that uses poetry as an epistemological tool. Taking a cue from poet Barbara Henning\u27s statement that Mullen adopts a kind of verbal scat in her poetry, I consider how the vocal scat in jazz is a particularly resonant metaphor for considering improvisation, language, and the role of sound image in the discussion of poetic experimentation in work by Harryette Mullen and others. Chapter three retraces the process of locating the thematic, formal and conceptual centers of the poetry manuscript. This chapter also presents some of the challenges involved in writing critically about my own poetry. In particular, I explore my desire for a poetics of hybridity and the conflicting pull to write conventional criticism and to write creatively in the discursive parts of That Terrifying Center, while considering the genesis and overall design of the creative-theoretical project. Chapter four is a lyric essay that meditates on my personal interaction with these poems, speaking frankly about the ways in which grief, illness, and memory informed the earliest conceptions of this project, its shifts and its detours. In this final chapter, I reflect on the nature of my project: the poignancy of what it has meant to translate the language of my innermost selves, to plumb my own memories, to offer up the flesh and wonder of my own terrifying poems

An Islamic perspective: What does Islam offer to the contemporary debate?

Islam has a long and rich intellectual tradition that is embedded in its religious texts and in its history as a world religion, and which together with confessional approaches to the study of religion encompasses a diverse range of what we today understand as modern academic disciplines, including poetry and literature studies, sociology and lived religion, philosophy and liberal critiques of dogmatic theology and indeed, the physical sciences. As we shall discuss later in this chapter, Islam has made undeniable contributions in the shaping of Western academic thought, the preservation and transmission of Greek and Roman philosophy and has played a foundational role in the development of university campuses as we know them today. Yet, and despite the enduring signifi cance of its historical intellectual tradition, contemporary debates about the role of Islam in academia are mired in two antagonistic but also interconnected debates. Firstly, there is a gradual devaluing of ‘secular’ traditions from within Islamic education and an overemphasis on confessional approaches that has emanated from within diverse Muslim communities, which started around the 18 th century. Secondly, there is, the much more recent agenda of ‘preventing violent extremism’, an anti-terror ‘lens’ through which much policy discourse seeks to examine Islam in the West. In Britain, this entire discussion is further problematized by rapidly changing understandings of what the function of universities should be – are they institutions of learning that produce scholars, thinkers, conscientious citizens and loyal dissenters, or are these institutions that produce effi cient but unquestioning employees to staff global conglomerates that satisfy our collective capitalist, materialist demands

Introduction to Light Properties and Basic Principles of Spectroscopy at the High-School Level: A Pilot Study

Spectroscopy is the basis of many applications in chemistry; however, the basic principles of light, light–matter interaction, and the operation of spectrophotometers are rarely present in chemistry curricula at the high-school level, or they are only briefly introduced to students before focusing on analytical chemistry applications. In this work, we report the results of a study conducted over several years, aimed to design, optimise, and put into practice a didactic sequence on light phenomena such as reflection, refraction, interference, diffraction, and light dispersion, as well as the basic principles of ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy and spectroscopic instruments. Difficult concepts of light phenomena and related topics were deeply investigated, focusing on the best ways to teach them to high-school students in the framework of the content-specific components identified in the topic-specific pedagogical content knowledge theoretical model. Inquiry-based learning and interactive STEM laboratory activities were combined with a historical epistemological teaching method. Short introductory videos were also recorded to help students during the remote lessons in the COVID-19 pandemic period. In this paper, we report and discuss the research strategy used in order to design and implement the sequence of educational activities, leading to a final optimised didactic sequence that was tested in a pilot study. The main results were obtained from the experimentation with several classes in two high-school technical institutes with a chemistry and material sciences curriculum, along with a group of undergraduate students during the first part of an introductory course on molecular spectroscopy