Public Spaces/Private Money: The Triumphs and Pitfalls of Urban Park Conservancies

This study explores city park conservancies -- private organizations that utilize donations to rebuild, refurbish, and even maintain some of their most iconic parks. The study uses examples and experiences from 41 organizations across the country that have a collective experience record of nearly 750 years

Iced vovos: a one act play [Play script]

This script was developed through a collaborative process. A work of stream-of-consciousness prose reflecting on Iced VoVos, an iconic Australian confectionery, penned by Janet McDonald constitutes the heart of the script. This piece was adapted to script form by Dallas Baker, who created characters through which Janet's prose could come to life. The explorative questions that emerged when Dallas and Janet began discussing the adaptation of the text focussed on memory and embodied experience. As the collaboratively led inducement of material developed, the period of ‘handing over’ the prose for adaptation engaged ghosting that resisted what Diana Taylor calls ‘the archive’. This is a place relegated in theatre to where performative ideas take concrete form, often as a written script that can be ‘published’, and therefore maintains an emphasis on discourse to manifest creative enterprise, rather than the lived experience of the performance of the work. What emerged from the collaboration was a script that took the prose in a different, unexpected yet intriguing, direction. This research was therefore more about exploring the relational aspects of working together. In this sense the knowledge produced by this research collaboration manifests Taylor's ‘repertoire’ (rather than ‘archive’) of performance and relates to the richness of both collaborative experience and the creative outcomes arising from that experience

Stories of Community: The First Ten Years of Nike Women\u27s Advertising

This semiotic analysis of early Nike women\u27s advertising explores the evolution of the women\u27s brand from its launch in 1990 through 2000, and includes twenty-seven print campaigns. The semiotic analysis is enhanced by in-depth interviews of the creative team. The study is framed by a single research question. What symbolically ties these ten years of advertising into a cohesive whole and how? Ultimately, three distinct mediated communities emerge. The story behind these communities, expressed semiotically and orally, suggests that the power of this advertising lies in its mediated construction of community life. The resonance of these ads is rooted in the creatives\u27 ability to construct signifiers that reflect the cultural and social experiences of women, with storytelling as the single most binding force across this ten-year period

From Amateurs to Connoisseurs: Modeling the Evolution of User Expertise through Online Reviews

Recommending products to consumers means not only understanding their tastes, but also understanding their level of experience. For example, it would be a mistake to recommend the iconic film Seven Samurai simply because a user enjoys other action movies; rather, we might conclude that they will eventually enjoy it -- once they are ready. The same is true for beers, wines, gourmet foods -- or any products where users have acquired tastes: the `best' products may not be the most `accessible'. Thus our goal in this paper is to recommend products that a user will enjoy now, while acknowledging that their tastes may have changed over time, and may change again in the future. We model how tastes change due to the very act of consuming more products -- in other words, as users become more experienced. We develop a latent factor recommendation system that explicitly accounts for each user's level of experience. We find that such a model not only leads to better recommendations, but also allows us to study the role of user experience and expertise on a novel dataset of fifteen million beer, wine, food, and movie reviews.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

ISO and Social Standardisation: Uncomfortable compromises in Global Policy-Making

This paper intends to explore the involvement of ISO, the world’s most iconic standard-setting institution, in the field of social responsibility, leading to the publication of the ISO26000 standard in November, 2010. Through several aspects of this experience, an almost decade-long process, I will show how ISO developed a new political structure aimed specifically at creating global policy, originating one the most sophisticated frameworks in existence to consensualise "universal" sociopolitical principles and infuse them with the legitimacy of a "global" technocracy and liberal institutions. Moreover, I will use the latest ISO26000 experience to argue that conceptual and institutional minimalism, which favours "soft" approaches towards global policy-making, paradoxically results from combining a technocratic aim for global compatibility with more participatory decision-making arrangements involving previously excluded socio-political actors. In that sense, ISO’s upgraded participatory mechanisms solved certain deadlocks suffered by previous initiatives only to affront and spark a new round of contradictions and consequences. Thus, I will conclude commenting on the intrinsic relationship between global standards, governance and complexity, and the difficulties of politically articulating programmes with dissimilar functional differentiation

'Thinking of Spain in a flat way:' visiting Spain and Spanish cultural heritage through contemporary Japanese anime

This article contextualizes the representation of Spain and Spanish culture among Japanese cultural producers, particularly through the production of Japanese commercial animation (commonly named anime). Toward that goal, it provides a historical background of Japan-Spain relations within the context of the tourism industry, as well as some examples of the diverse forms of representation within several creative industries. Subsequently, the article reviews the ways in which popular culture has been contributed to national branding. There is special attention to the Spanish case and the proliferation of such images sometimes resulting in the (mis)representation of Spain's tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Internationally-distributed anime productions will be examined as a reflection of Spanish national branding on Japanese audiences and this global industry. Three cases among contemporary anime productions have been selected due to the combination of fictional and misrepresented Spanish cultural features in their narratives

Star Architecture as Socio-Material Assemblage

Taking inspiration from new materialism and assemblage, the chapter deals with star architects and iconic buildings as socio-material network effects that do not pre-exist action, but are enacted in practice, in the materiality of design crafting and city building. Star architects are here conceptualized as part of broader assemblages of actors and practices ‘making star architecture’ a reality, and the buildings they design are considered not just as unique and iconic objects, but dis-articulated as complex crafts mobilizing skills, technologies, materials, and forms of knowledge not necessarily ascribable to architecture. Overcoming narrow criticism focusing on the symbolic order of icons as unique creations and alienated repetitions of capitalist development, the chapter’s main aim is to widen the scope of critique by bridging culture and economy, symbolism and practicality, making star architecture available to a broad, fragmented arena of (potential) critics, unevenly equipped with critical tools and differentiated experiences

Queerying activism through the lens of the sociology of everyday life

The approaching 30th anniversary of the introduction of the 1988 Local Government Act offers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) activism in Britain. The protests against its implementation involved some of the most iconic moments of queer activism. Important though they are, these singular, totemic moments give rise to, and are sustained by small, almost unobtrusive acts which form part of LGB people’s everyday lives. This article aims to contribute to a re-thinking of queer activism where iconic activism is placed in a synergetic relationship with the quieter practices in the quotidian lives of LGB people. The authors interrogate a series of examples, drawn from three studies, to expand ideas about how activism is constituted in everyday life. They discuss the findings in relation to three themes: the need to forge social bonds often forms a prompt to action; disrupting the binary dualism between making history and making a life; and the transformative potential of everyday actions/activism. The lens of the sociology of everyday life (1) encourages a wider constituency of others to engage in politics, and (2) problematises the place of iconic activism.Peer reviewe