5,565 research outputs found
Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present
This is the final version. Available on open access from MDPI via the DOI in this recordThis is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/Manifestos Ancient Present)This volume brings together the work of practitioners, communities, artists and other researchers from multiple disciplines. Seeking to provoke a discourse around displacement within and beyond the field of Humanities, it positions historical cases and debates, some reaching into the ancient past, within diverse geo-chronological contexts and current world urgencies. In adopting an innovative dialogic structure, between practitioners on the ground - from architects and urban planners to artists - and academics working across subject areas, the volume is a proposition to: remap priorities for current research agendas; open up disciplines, critically analysing their approaches; address the socio-political responsibilities that we have as scholars and practitioners; and provide an alternative site of discourse for contemporary concerns about displacement. Ultimately, this volume aims to provoke future work and collaborations - hence, manifestos - not only in the historical and literary fields, but wider research concerned with human mobility and the challenges confronting people who are out of place of rights, protection and belonging
Articulations of inclusivity within in-game concerts: a comparative multi-case study
This research will investigate the power of in-game concerts to act as articulators of social connections and inclusivity between their attendees. Despite existing as a category of music consumption since the 2000s, with platforms such as Second Life and Lord of the Rings Online, in-game concerts have entered a new stage in their development and popularity since 2018, with more platforms and artists adhering to (and further developing) the format. This often causes thousands, or millions, of attendees to be simultaneously impacted by a same virtual event and leads to the research questions: (i) in what ways can in-game concerts affect the social experience of music consumption of their attendees and (ii) in what ways can in game concerts be more (or less) inclusive than their non-virtual counterparts? By combining elements from the theory of Liveness, with special attention to the notion of âsocial livenessâ (Auslander, 2008; Couldry, 2004), Social Inclusion Theory (Bailey, 2005; Hayday & Collison, 2020) and Social Dominance Theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Ong et al., 2021), this research will be carried out as a comparative multi-case study. Special focus will be given to the scene of independent Minecraft festivals (2018-2021) and to the concert by Norwegian singer Aurora in the MMORPG Sky: Children of the Light (2022). The investigation of each of these cases will lead to a comparative analysis, from which reflections on the social power of ingame concerts as a wider category will be drawn
Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries
This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Letâs Plays. I build on Michael Rothbergâs theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant âothersâ and, on the other, simulate oneâs own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up oneâs offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique.
This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the userâs individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention.
Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben FlĂŒchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the userâs political inaction and surveillant modes of looking.
Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmatesâ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming âoutsideâ places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the userâs supposed distance from this mode of state regulation.
Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be ânormalâ people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of oneâs individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets.
Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (JoĂ«l Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Ămilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligentâą (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance
Shaping the metaverse into reality: multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges, and future research
The term metaverse is described as the next iteration of the Internet. Metaverse is a virtual platform that uses extended reality technologies, i.e., augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, 3D graphics, and other emerging technologies to allow real-time interactions and experiences in ways that are not possible in the physical world. Companies have begun to notice the impact of the metaverse and how it may help maximize profits. The purpose of this paper is to offer perspectives on several important areas, i.e., marketing, tourism, manufacturing, operations management, education, the retailing industry, banking services, healthcare, and human resource management that are likely to be impacted by the adoption and use of a metaverse. Each includes an overview, opportunities, challenges, and a potential research agenda
The Evolution of Political Moments on Network Late Night: From Cautious Big-Tent Entertainment to Biting Narrowcast Infotainment
Late night talk shows have been an integral part of U.S. television since the 1950s, and the genre continues to thrive today in an ever changing media landscape. In my dissertation, I argue that the contemporary programs of Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! make up a category of late night talk shows that I term as satirical network late night. From a visual standpoint, these programs look almost identical to past programs like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson or the Late Show with David Letterman with their sets, house bands, monologues, sketches, desk pieces, and guest appearances. However, these satirical network late night programs produce political content that differs vastly from their predecessors. I assert that these programs are steeped in brazen partisanship, amplify the news media, and function as a sensationalized form of infotainment. This is not the big-tent and âleast objectionable programmingâ offered on past network programs like Carsonâs Tonight Show. Additionally, this is not what was offered on cable parody news programs such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that presented a veiled partisanship, served as a watchdog over the media and political spheres, and lambasted the entertainment-laden modes of modern news reporting and punditry. In less than a decade, satirical network late night has disrupted genre conventions that existed on network television for over sixty years. This research breaks down what makes these new satirical network late night programsâ political content distinct and helps to decipher why these changes took place in mid-2010s
Staging Soviet Ideals: The Birth of Soviet Ballet and its Reception 1927-1932
This project explores balletâs development as a Soviet art form through the critical reviews of three early Soviet ballets: The Golden Age (Zolotoy vek, 1930), The Bolt (Bolt, 1931), and Flames of Paris (Plamya parizha, 1932). Prior to the implementation of Socialist Realism, which set parameters for all cultural production within the Soviet Union from 1934 onward, definitions of Soviet culture were often unclear. As a result, it was often difficult for ballet makers to know what to produce and given the art formâs deep aristocratic roots, pressure to innovate in order to fit into the Soviet cultural project was multiplied tenfold. Through a close analysis of critical reviews, advertisements, and personal testimonies, such as letters and memoirs, this project explores how ballet, despite its aristocratic past, became a successful Soviet art form
2022 comprehensive permanent improvement plan for the plan years 2023-2027 statewide
This planning document tells the costs and funding sources for capital improvements of state agencies for the plan years 2023-2027. Each agency has a summary of proposed permanent improvement projects including funding source, functional group and business area
The return home : experiences of deterritorialization in post-Pinochet Chilean literature
Ph.D. University of Kansas, Spanish and Portuguese 2002In response to the experiences of exile and the return, the subsequent preoccupation with a sense of belonging, the blurring of the traditional understanding of borders triggered by a permanent sense of displacement, and the quest for assimilation within the boundaries of the restored motherland have become some of the most dominant themes of post-Pinochet Chilean literature. In chapter one, the characters in Ariel Dorfman's play La muerte y la doncella (1991) illustrate returnees, struggles to establish a sense of place so that they may recover their original imagined community and highlight the breakdown of communication due to the effects of dislocation. But when an exile experiences separation from home and lives in the context of another place, the imagined community representing the original home and the new one begin to mix and merge. Seen in Heading South, Looking North (1997), Dorfman reinterprets what this original community represents and demonstrates acceptance of an ironic conception of nostalgia that celebrates the fragmentation of a place balanced in-between. Antonio SkĂĄrmeta evokes the memory of home and exile in the second chapter as two distinct, independent locations. SkĂĄrmeta remembers the place called home in the play Ardiente paciencia (1983) and the place of exile in the novel Match Ball (1989) as home and host communities. In this manna, SkĂĄrmeta replaces nostalgia for home and the expression of national traditions with the exposition of transnational migrants, socio-political refugees, and international frontier conditions. The third chapter looks at a younger generation of post-Pinochet writers, represented by author Alberto Fuguet, who inherited the experience of exile and the return as âborrowedâ conditions, and who experienced the return to Chile not as a process of re-discovery but rather as new discovery. Fuguet's novel Mala onda (1991) and short story collection Por favor, rebobinar (1994), express the emergence of young Chileans into deterritorialized worlds where sentiments of dislocation caused by the blurring of the definitions of home and location represent a society existing in a precarious and orphaned state
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