The contentious performances of culture jamming : art, repertoires of contention, and social movement theory

Culture jamming is a form of contentious politics in which activists utilize ironic frames to challenge a dominant set of social relationships and institutions. Despite its contestational nature, scholars rarely apply the insights of social movement theory to explain this curious phenomenon. The main concerns of this project are to provide an empirical analysis of culture jamming organizations and to develop a theoretical approach to explaining repertoire change and tactical choice. The primary thesis mediating these empirical and theoretical concerns is that a close relation exists between the development of twentieth century art in advanced Western democracies and culture jamming. Developing this argument and addressing these concerns entails three basic tasks. First, in view of the failure of the literature to provide a robust concept, I develop a rigorous conceptualization of culture jamming as an oppositional tactic. Second, I present an approach to theory that begins to integrate the macro- and micro-levels of analysis. This task involves both a dialogue between sociologists Charles Tilly and Pierre Bourdieu and their reconciliation with collective action theory, the application of rational choice theory to social movements and protest. Although multi-faceted, this synthesis focuses on collective identities and resources as explanations of the evaluations of tactical alternatives. Third, I improve on previous efforts to study culture jamming empirically by applying the most rigorous methodological techniques available under significant data and sampling constraints. I compare and contrast the data from a sample of twelve culture jamming organizations to generate the most comprehensive empirical portrait of such groups in the literature

Noise poetics: A flow of cuts

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The motivation of this research is to explore the potential and (dis)functionality of noise in experimental language practice. In this, my task has been to expand on more highly developed noise-discourses, such as music and philosophy, and their corollaries to language – but also to seek an original conception of what noise can, and does, produce in an experimental language context; along with the political, philosophical and artistic implications arising from it. Following Charles Bernstein’s affirmation that ‘one might be able to read novels or letters or scientific treatises in terms of their poetic qualities’ (Bernstein, 1992, p. 151), I seek the implication of poetics in the works of major theorists and philosophers who inform ideas of noise, including Julia Kristeva, Fredrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. In tune with the nature of the subject, I have chosen to make some radical gestures within the formal submission, infesting the text itself with cross-references, strike-throughs, syntactic and layout glitches, which add a kind of visual and cognitive noise to the reading. The resulting thesis is an example and an interrogation of practice-as-research, making use of the tension between its formal qualities, and a non-linear imperative. Findings include a rich network arising from integral terminology, such as ambiguity, glitch and abundance which are explored for their relational productivity as part of a complex milieu around noise and poetics. In my live performance and print work, as with the thesis itself, I seek to affirm that these notions can be deployed in an affecting and original poetic – producing an active and performative document which enacts a fission of dichotomies, particularly, the flow of cuts invoked in the title

Applications of Internet of Things

This book introduces the Special Issue entitled “Applications of Internet of Things”, of ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information. Topics covered in this issue include three main parts: (I) intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), (II) location-based services (LBSs), and (III) sensing techniques and applications. Three papers on ITSs are as follows: (1) “Vehicle positioning and speed estimation based on cellular network signals for urban roads,” by Lai and Kuo; (2) “A method for traffic congestion clustering judgment based on grey relational analysis,” by Zhang et al.; and (3) “Smartphone-based pedestrian’s avoidance behavior recognition towards opportunistic road anomaly detection,” by Ishikawa and Fujinami. Three papers on LBSs are as follows: (1) “A high-efficiency method of mobile positioning based on commercial vehicle operation data,” by Chen et al.; (2) “Efficient location privacy-preserving k-anonymity method based on the credible chain,” by Wang et al.; and (3) “Proximity-based asynchronous messaging platform for location-based Internet of things service,” by Gon Jo et al. Two papers on sensing techniques and applications are as follows: (1) “Detection of electronic anklet wearers’ groupings throughout telematics monitoring,” by Machado et al.; and (2) “Camera coverage estimation based on multistage grid subdivision,” by Wang et al

Public communication as ideal and practice: Definitions of the common good in Persian-language transnational newswork

Public communication’s normative task is to support the legitimacy of collective decisions. Theoretically, two challenges in particular have proved persistent: (1) defining the purpose of public communication under conditions of pluralism, and (2) defining the composition of the public sphere as communication becomes increasingly transnational. It is argued that shared definitions of these, among actors participating in public communication, are prerequisites for the democratic legitimacy of collective decisions. Achieving this is difficult, particularly because it remains unclear how practices of public communication relate to ideals such as participation, inclusion and public reason. In part these difficulties can be attributed to a lack of congruence between the way political theory and empirical social research frame questions about the public sphere. To deepen understanding of these challenges, this study asks how purpose and composition are defined in Persian-language transnational newswork. It also asks whether communicating actors enjoy any meaningful definitional agency. The study is designed to align these empirical results with normative questions about public communication so that they speak more fully to one another. An interview-based qualitative study of the way newsworkers who engage in transnational Persian broadcasting define the public sphere provides the setting for this research. Newsworkers are examined because, it is argued, they enjoy a privileged kind of agency over processes of public communication and play an important role in the public sphere. The results show that transnational newsworkers enjoy some definitional agency, and that both purpose and composition find multiple, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes incommensurable and contradictory definitions in newswork. Newsworkers define a polymorphous public sphere characterised by a plurality of communicative purposes and constituted of a multiplicity of groups with different political allegiances. Some aspects of their definitions resonate with deliberative or agonistic conceptions of the public sphere. Despite these resonances, there are some contradictions between the requirements normative theory makes for a unified single-purpose public sphere and the multiplicity of purposes and criteria for inclusion found in practices of public communication. It is argued that these can be addressed by reducing the fact/value dichotomy and by shifting attention from compositional questions about the public sphere to a greater emphasis on the efficacy of public communication. This thesis contributes to the analysis of transnational and pluralistic public spheres. Moreover, based on both conceptual and empirical analysis, it examines how practices of public communication relate to ideals of the public sphere, an issue that is neglected in the literatur