The Passing of Print

This paper argues that ephemera is a key instrument of cultural memory, marking the things intended to be forgotten. This important role means that when ephemera survives, whether accidentally or deliberately, it does so despite itself. These survivals, because they evoke all those other objects that have necessarily been forgotten, can be described as uncanny. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first situates ephemera within an uncanny economy of memory and forgetting. The second focuses on ephemera at a particular historical moment, the industrialization of print in the nineteenth century. This section considers the liminal place of newspapers and periodicals in this period, positioned as both provisional media for information as well as objects of record. The third section introduces a new configuration of technologies – scanners, computers, hard disks, monitors, the various connections between them – and considers the conditions under which born-digital ephemera can linger and return. Through this analysis, the paper concludes by considering digital technologies as an apparatus of memory, setting out what is required if we are not to be doubly haunted by the printed ephemera within the digital archive

Ephemera in the art library

Art libraries acquire a large amount of ephemeral material which creates a unique resource on the history of contemporary art. Librarians have to decide what should be retained, how it should be stored, and how the material can best be accessed. Increasingly there is pressure to digitise in order to promote collections, but how effective this process is in terms of ephemeral material remains a real question. A survey of prominent collections in London and New York has helped to inform future plans for the ephemera held by the library at Chelsea College of Art & Design

Why is finance critical? A dialogue with a women's community in Sri Lanka

The busrt of the bubble has given momentum to the search of escape routes from the current transnational financial system and its underlying principles. For the past century, The transnational financial system has relied heavily on currency exchange, security backed loans, stocks and shares - all operated through banks, investment agencies, insurance brokers and stock markets. This global financial architecture centred on monetray values. It strived for financial wealth and achieved it for few out of many. This study shows that the practice of finance can create a wealth of a different - a scoial- nature. Applying an ethnographic approach to financial practices, this study tries to uncover how the sociocultural aspects of finance practiced among the poor rural women in Sri Lanka lead to the creation of social wealth beyond financial wealth. It discovers how finance is critical to such communities becauise it is creating wealth beyond financial measurement. Finance comes to Sinalhese women's everyday lives through traditional savings systems - seettu, household and group saving and it operates through frienships, kin relationships and social realtions. These community organisation develop social wealth through their thrifts, based on traditional practices of saving.Since transnational finance is driven by monetary values only, it overlays structures and that ignores local cultures, social networks and community identies necessary for the creation of social wealth. As a consequence, encounters with transnational finance inspire resistance in citizens of developing nations such as Sri Lanka. In an attempt to preserve their more tradional ways of exchange, communities find themselves workign agianst finance. Therefore in this paper I am interested in engaging in a dialogue with a rural community, to learn their ways of organising finance and the extent to which finance becomes critical to their everyday live

Struggling to 'fit in': On belonging and the ethics of sharing in project teams

This paper explores the links between belonging and ethics, which remain largely underdeveloped in project studies and are overlooked in everyday practice of managing projects. It focuses on belonging as the process articulating identity-construction of an inter-organisational project team from a global management consulting firm that was working in IS design. As the team?s experienced ?sense of place?, belonging becomes the space which highlights preferred affiliations and exposes how ? individually and collectively ? ethics are played out in the context of the management of projects. Four in situ belonging-narratives (of opposition, pragmatism, reflexivity, and the habitual narrative) represent ethics as part of lived action and of a life-world that emerge from deconstructing and reconstructing ?the team? and an ideal worker in projects. The team?s struggles to ?fit in? were experienced both when resisting and when collaborating with the dominant collective narrative of belonging. Modes of belonging are constituted in the relationship between self, others, and ?otherness?, creating a situated ethical imagination of how to ?be professional?. Implications concern the politics of belonging and call for a renewed practical ethics that engages with the social nature of ?being?, to change the current view of professional identities in projects

Myths of a Near Past: Envisioning Finance Capitalism anno 2007

This paper seeks to extend earlier work on particular features and manifestations of capitalism (De Cock et al., 2001). Our 2001 Myths of a Near Future paper offered ephemera readers a large depository of images concerning the New Economy. Eight years later our focus has shifted to Finance Capitalism. Over the course of the year 2007 we cut out and scanned 81 ads placed by financial institutions in the Financial Times. Our analysis of these aims to provide a sense of how the financial world ?showed up? in this pivotal year, whilst illustrating how its representations were interwoven with fantasy throughout. We also hope that the ensemble of images associated with the paper will be creatively reassembled by its readers and possibly provide a useful teaching aid