How to be Critical of Security Today? Life in Motion, Untimeliness and the Critique of End-Thinking

This article starts from the observation of intense political mobilisations of existential endings. One of the defining challenges for critical engagements with such mobilisations remains how to take war, environmental degradation and pandemics seriously without making existential end-times the conditions that define the present. The article proposes to move beyond critical knowledge that makes security contingent and engage with the conception of life inscribed in the mobilisations of existential endings. It puts forward a concept of life that emphasises continuous movement rather than defining it from the perspective of its inevitable end in death. This point of view challenges traditional existential notions of life and death, highlighting instead the dynamic and transformative nature of life itself

Living Infrastructure

Infrastructure is widely regarded merely as a material (lifeless) system that brings together the activities of diverse practices. In contrast to this view, we propose that when infrastructure provides a site where practices are held at once both near and apart, life under the influence of these practices is ‘lived to the full’. We call the resultant whole ‘living infrastructure’ to denote that it is both infrastructure for living and infrastructure that ‘lives’. The key idea is that a living infrastructure becomes the site where an opening between certain regions of life, that share some concern, happens. We will argue that such infrastructure is an on-going achievement of becoming, which requires nurturing and vigilance to produce and its continued productivity: otherwise it will cease to ‘live’. We present an empirical case from the German healthcare environment - the Federal Unified Medication Plan for medication therapy safety. We argue in detail that this is a nascent living infrastructure providing a site where a productive opening ‘happens’ between multiple practices involved in medication therapy safety. We analyse this ‘happening’ to establish how this opening took hold, how it was kept open, and how it was kept productive

"She must not stir out of a darkened room": The Redpath Mansion Mystery

This paper accounts for private life in a prominent Gilded-Age Montreal bourgeois household as revealed in the sudden glare of publicity generated by a violent double shooting. We show how the tragic deaths of a mother and her son re-enforced fragile class connections between propriety and wealth, family relations and family image. Drawing on diaries, photographs and newspaper accounts, as well as published novels and poetry, we argue that the family deployed architecture, both the spaces of its own home and public monumental architecture in the city, to follow the dictates of a paradoxical imperative: intimacy had to be openly displayed, family private matters enacted in public rituals. The surviving family quickly began a series of manoeuvers designed to make secret the public event, and re-inscribe the deaths within class norms of decorum and conduct. The house itself, we claim, as a material object, figures in the complex interplay of inter-connected social relationships, behaviours and narratives that produce bourgeois respectability. Résumé Cet article relate la vie privée dans une éminente maison bourgeoise de l’âge d’or de Montréal, telle qu’elle s’est révélée sous l’éclairage brutal de la publicité occasionnée par une violente fusillade. Nous y montrons comment les morts tragiques d’une mère et de son fils ont renforcé de fragiles connexions de classe entre la propriété et la richesse, les relations familiales et l’image de la famille. En se basant sur des journaux intimes, des photographies et des articles de journaux, ainsi que sur des romans et des poésies publiés, nous avançons l’idée que la famille exposait l’architecture, autant les espaces de son propre foyer que l’architecture monumentale publique de la ville, pour se plier aux diktats d’un impératif paradoxal : l’intimité devait être ouvertement montrée, les problèmes familiaux privés joués dans des rituels publics. Les survivants de la famille ont rapidement entamé une série de manœuvres pour réduire au secret l’évènement public et pour réinscrire les personnes décédées au sein de normes de classe, de décorum et de conduite. Nous avançons que la maison elle-même, en tant qu’objet matériel, est présente dans le jeu complexe des relations sociales interconnectées, des comportements et des récits qui produisent la respectabilité bourgeoise

SWEDISH SUBURBS AS HETEROTOPIAS: TOWARDS A MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE OF PLACES

Urban literary studies have become an important issue in contemporary multicultural Sweden, especially after the 70s, when the public housing project Miljonprogram (“Million Programme”) was completed (1974). Nowadays, these areas are partly regarded as a political failure since they have become places of social and even racial segregation. A central cultural consequence of multiculturalism in Sweden is the so-called Invandrarlitteratur (“immigrants’ literature”), mainly represented by second-generation authors. In this article, I will try to provide a concise but exhaustive understanding of how this kind of literature can reshape the Miljonprogram areas and define what Sweden is today. The aim is to show how these suburban spaces, through a chosen collection of three works, are narrated by immigrant authors not as sites, i.e. spaces as such, but rather as places, i.e. spaces whose meaning is provided by the (literary) subjectivities who live and act therein (Prieto 2013). Using the concept of heterotopia (Foucault 1986) and its defining criteria, I will investigate how these works perform a total reassertion of space, emphasizing the space described as rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari 2011) peripheries, i.e. the result of a sensitive relationship between self and space. This investigation is designed to reflect on how the perception of suburbs has changed from first to second-generation immigrant writers and it hopes to open a new research line in which stigmatizing dystopias can be replaced by heterotopias

Urban Acupuncture in Taipei

A number of conditions can be attributed to driving the recent revolutionary movement of urban acupuncture and locally-led interventions in cities around the world. Political, economic, and environmental uncertainty; the deindustrialization of cities that has led to an increase in vacant lots and buildings; and an increasingly mobile workforce all support the desire for more flexible and adaptable spaces and uses (Bishop and Williams, 2012). The inefficiency of institutional bureaucracy has also been identified as a contributing factor as to why citizens are taking local improvements into their own hands. These all lead to an increasing awareness that traditional planning processes are struggling in its capacity to be adaptable and resilient enough to respond to local needs. The rising sense of responsibility among citizens who actively partake in responding to local situations, separate from traditional planning processes such as attending planning consultations or sitting on community boards and commissions, reflect the discrepancy between contemporary planning processes and its adequacy in engaging stakeholders and addressing local issues. Temporary interventions have emerged as a gateway for improvements to local neighbourhoods in a more timely, efficient, and less costly and risky manner. These informal initiatives are popularly known as "urban acupuncture". In the context of Taipei, urban acupuncture is a city leading in its local transformative capacity where people-centric planning is implemented on a governmental level. Urban acupuncture is put into practice by the Taipei City Government through an apparatus called ?Urban Regeneration Station (URS)? to promote local development through the strength of local communities. URS sites are shared by all citizens - even throughout the innovative progress is public participation the main priority. Creativity, art, culture and design are integrated into the practice of urban regeneration as a catalyst of urban redevelopment. This thesis purports that urban acupuncture has a particularly important role in the future of cities and its communities because it challenges the assumption that cities can improve only through major spending and tortuous rounds of paperwork and approvals. It allows citizens and officials to test new ideas on a low-cost, low-risk model. If something works, great. If it doesn?t, well, on to the next experimental idea. Drawing upon the metaphor of therapeutic acupuncture, examples will be explored to highlight ways in which punctual interventions can activate places, asserting the importance of urban acupuncture in facilitating more holistic understandings of urban health

Everywhere is Taksim': The Politics of Public Space from Nation-building to Neoliberal Islamism and Beyond

Cataloged from PDF version of article.This article discusses the politics of public space through the particular example of Taksim Square in Istanbul. Tracing Taksim’s history since the early twentieth century, the article analyzes the instrumentalization of public space in nation-building, the socialization of politics within the context of postwar rapid urbanization, and the (re)politicization of public space under neoliberal Islamism. Finally it arrives at an assessment of the nation-wide antigovernment protests that centered on Taksim Square in May–June 2013. Throughout this historical examination, the politics of public space is discussed with reference to the work of Henri Lefebvre, in order to scrutinize the spatial aspects of the relation between state and society. Accordingly, the rise of democratic public space is defined as a result of the mutual interaction between two bottom-up impetuses; the immanent politics of the social (the political character of everyday life) and the socialization of the political (civil political action)

American Square Dance Vol. 61, No. 11 (Nov. 2006)

Monthly square dance magazine that began publication in 1945

Spatial Liminality in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Fiction

Traballo Fin de Grao en Filoloxía Inglesa. Curso 2016-2017This essay is devoted to the analysis of liminal spaces in Elizabeth Bowen‟s wartime short fiction. It pays special attention to three pieces collected in "The Demon Lover and Other Stories" (1945)in which liminal spatiality clearly determines characters and their actions.The concept of “liminality” was first coined in the field of anthropology to refer to people going through a transition from one state to another within the social structure — which is systematically arranged according to laws, customs, conventions and ceremonials — and express their ambiguous and indefinite attributes through a wide range of symbols in any given society where social and cultural transactions are ritualised the concept soon transcended the realm of anthropology and started to be used in literary criticism, among other things, for the “exploration of both temporal and spatial dimensions”Este ensaio está adicado á análise de espazos liminais na ficción curta de guerra de Elizabeth Bowen. Presta especial atención ás tres pezas recollidas en "The Demon Lover and Other Stories" (1945) nas que a espacialidade liminal determina claramente os personaxes e as súas accións. O concepto de "liminalidade" foi primeiro acuñado no campo da antropoloxía para referirse ás persoas que pasan por un a transición dun estado a outro dentro da estrutura social -que está organizada de forma sistemática segundo leis, costumes, convencións e cerimonias- e expresan os seus atributos ambiguos e indefinidos a través dunha ampla gama de símbolos en calquera sociedade en que as transaccións sociais e culturais sexan ritualizadas O concepto transcendeu pronto o ámbito da antropoloxía e comezou a utilizarse na crítica literaria, entre outras cousas, para a "exploración tanto das dimensións temporal como espacial"