Science on television : A representational site for mediating ideology

The emergence of a new science paradigm has been identified. It is characteristically described as structuring an organic, holistic and ecological framework for understanding the nature of reality. The modern scientific paradigm with its characteristic underlying inorganic, reductive, and mechanistic vision of reality, discursively dominates Western societies\u27 cultural sense-making with its attempts to unlock the \u27mysteries\u27 of nature. The radically different characteristics of the new paradigm science is linked to \u27rising culture\u27 articulated in the exploratory social change of alternative social movements. The holistic principles and ecological values found variously in the environment, feminist, and new age/holistic health, peace and indigenous people\u27s movements link to the new paradigm. Both factual and fictional television texts engaging discursively with science, present a representational site for different cultural expression of the preferred meanings of ideology of two radically different paradigmatic frameworks

The Right to the Soil— Food Production and Agricultural Landscapes Under Capitalism Three Nordic Examples

Productive agricultural soil is an essential ingredient in the agricultural landscape, which further exists in a dialectical relationship between ruality and the broader society. Soil destruction and industrial farming are common place in Scandinavia today, and resultantly, this essay problematises our ambivalent relationship with soil as part of our material base on one hand, and the consumer driven society as a part of capitalisms inherent need for physical expansion, on the other. Specifically, this thesis seeks to answer the question: How do we reconcile the benefits we receive today, from destroying soil and agricultural landscapes for capitalist purposes, with its costs for tomorrow? The methodology employed uses context, process, function and form to read contested landscapes and reveal ideology and values directing societal priorities and individual choices. Capitalism is identified as dominant ideology and its process and function are investigated. Following, this essay criticises capitalisms’ unquestionable position in future choices with an examination of its destructive effect on soil, community and identity. Thus, industrial food production and the commodification of food as a solution to an increasing population and environmental problems are rejected. And in answering the main question in this thesis, I posit that the role of capitalism as a development mechanism at the expense of productive soil and agricultural landscapes is questionable and as such cannot be reconciled

TogEthered at LiQa': Experiences and Sociality of Queer of Colour Asylum Seekers in Malmö

The rise of homophobia and violence related to it across the postcolonial world has incited many LGBT persons to migrate to Western Europe and North America. One of the possible ways includes seeking asylum on the ground of sexual orientation and gendered identity. In most cases they migrate alone and are compelled to negotiate their sexuality in paradoxical and contradictory ways. Fleeing from homophobia in their home countries, they inevitably face a set of other obstacles and social exclusions on their way to freedom which orient them towards identification with impossible images. This work is concerned with experiences and process of forming socialites of what I call queer of colour asylum seekers through Project LiQa’. Drawing on one-month fieldwork and interviews with queer of colour asylum seekers and activists, I argue that homophobia is linked to wider political upheavals, globalisation, cultural imperialism and neo-colonialism. I do not take sexual identities and sexual orientation to be pre-given, but rather I connect them with a series of disruptive moments instigated by misrecognition which shape sexualities of queer of colour asylum seeker. I explore the ways of thinking differently about forming sociality based on impossible positions queer of colour asylum seekers have to negotiate

Remapping Athens: an analysis of urban cosmopolitan milieus

The study makes a claim for a critical cosmopolitanism situated in daily performances and encounters of difference in Athens. In the wake of mass migration and economic crisis, the contemporary urban environment changes, creating new social spaces where identities and cultures interact. Festivals are seen as sites of creative dialogue between the Self, the Other and local communities. Festivals are examples of those new spaces where different performances of belonging give rise to alternative social imaginations. This study explores the emotional, cultural and political aspects of cosmopolitanism with the latter leading to the formation of an active civil society. As such, it seeks to evidence cosmopolitanism as an embodied, everyday practice. The research thus extends the current field by locating its empirical lens in a specific milieu. Empirical analysis of grounded cosmopolitanism anchored in behavioural repertoires redefines ubiquitous polarities of margin and centre, pointing towards social change in Athens. Fieldwork was conducted in Athens over eighteen months, comprising of building communities of participants involved in three festivals, including both artists and organisations. Research methods included observation and participation in the festivals, which were photographically documented for research visual diaries. Semi-structured interviews formed the core of the fieldwork. The approach allowed access to experiences, feelings and expressions through artworks, embodying ‘third spaces’. In the milieu of rapid social change, as urban localities transform as a result of economic and social crisis, the need for redefining politics emerges. The case studies explore how change in a celebratory moment can have a more sustainable legacy encouraging active citizenship. The analysis highlights the value of a model of cosmopolitanism in action, positing that transformation of the social and political must be local and grounded in everyday actions if it is to engage with promises of alternative futures

Discourses of Englishness in the contemporary era

This thesis undertakes a critical examination of contemporary narratives of Englishness. More specifically, dominant discursive representations and understandings of English national identity informed by a conservative ideology are investigated. This will be situated within a framework of current social, cultural and political events which are informed by a prevailing and prevalent trend of a sense of English grievance and a growing politicisation of Englishness that is articulated in the contemporary moment, but is informed through the recent past and ongoing processes. This contemporary moment, in terms of the formation of dominant discourse of Englishness, is formed through a symbiotic relationship within a specifically historicised narrative of identity which is informed by and draws from past events within the context of the present. Moreover, recent developments and ongoing processes such as Brexit, devolution and immigration can offer a useful illustration of a specific politicised narrative through which such key contemporary but also historical topics are viewed but how they in turn inform a very specific conceptualisation and discursive representation of Englishness as an increasingly politicised identity. This work will theoretically analyse the use of discourse and ideology as a means to determine and critically understand dominant narratives, perspectives and interpretations of English national identity and the forces and processes driving this within the current, or rather contemporary moment. Indeed, a range of discursive representations such as shifting identity allegiances and formation, public and social attitudes, political policy, direction and statements, dominant media representations and articulations of identity will be studied and analysed as a means to determine whether a sense of Englishness has become politicised and to what extent. This thesis will specifically outline the argument that in the current discursive environment a mediated understanding of Englishness and English national identity is dominated by a specific conservative interpolation, interpretation and narrative. This critical examination will apply existing theoretical and empirical knowledge, in particular around the areas of nationalism, national identity, multiculturalism and post-imperial identity formation, this will then be synthesised and applied within the perimeters of discursive representations of Englishness in the rapidly developing terrain of political, social and cultural flux, uncertainty and conflict as a nodal point of reference and being that England is located within. The fluidity, confusion and intersectional politics of identity within the English context requires an urgent need for critical investigation and demystification. The very crux of this research is not to try to locate some definable sense of English national identity, but instead to uncover and demystify the dominant defining characteristics and critically understand the discursive forces and symbolic positioning that define this topic area. Within the contemporary context discourses of English national identity operate within a specific sense of insecurity of identity, one that is characterised by a sense of defensive exclusivism where concepts of national identity are defined by symbolic lines of demarcation which are ideologically motivated and managed to provide a dominant sense of what England means and what Englishness represents

Changing What Infrastructure Means: Instituting critical models for curatorial-infrastructural practice, artefacts and imaginaries

What does infrastructure institute? What can be imagined through and by infrastructure? Can the curatorial figure and reconfigure the relationship between this image and form? This thesis turns to the thoroughgoing reconfiguration of the scope of the curatorial because of, and in response to, shifts in post-global and planetary imaginaries of infrastructure. It considers how infrastructure displaces the institution as both a frame of reference and site for instituting. It tests how curatorial practices can be positioned, patterned, configured and narrated at the meso-scalar intersection of material infrastructural shifts, disinvestment and the legacies, realisation and promises of organisational imaginaries emerging because of and despite those shifts. This thesis is constructed through a series of test cases that both stage and examine the problem as (and potential of) the embodying and embedding of infrastructural meaning-making and staging in the competing alignments of the curatorial in the following infrastructural scenes: cultural infrastructural provision in the Granby Four Streets area in Liverpool by Assemble and Steinbeck Studios (2013–); in tensions implicated in infrastructural patterns of evidence in the work of the research agency Forensic Architecture; in the formal potential in configuring open and closed imaginaries in the infrastructure-critical propositions of EURO-VISION by FRAUD (2021) and Danish curatorial project Primer; and in the capacity for ongoing transformation in scalable and non-scalable infrastructural futurity staged in Alliance of the Southern Triangle’s Protocols for Phase Transition (2021) and Feral Atlas: The-More-Than-Human Anthropocene (Tsing et. al., 2020). Modelling difference staged to produce recursions, frictions and tipping points in the continuity promised by the convergence of infrastructural materialisation, mediation and practice, this thesis develops a sequence of transformative threshold concepts. Concerned with how this requires an ongoing negotiation of infrastructural difference, the thesis presents through these concepts a new vocabulary and set of procedures. Here, dynamic cura-infrastructural artefacts are used to situate the curatorial across the expanded temporal scenes of anticipation, performance and repetition of infrastructure. At stake is the capacity of expanded curatorial and artistic practice to create and meaningfully affect change in the intimate and planetary worlds that infrastructure imagines

The Most Valuable Sort of Property : Constructing White Identity in American Law, 1880-1940

This Article examines the manner in which southern courts labored to instill the legal meaning of whiteness as an object of property inherent in the individual in cases involving racial defamation, miscegenation, and writs of mandamus to white-only schools during the decades following Plessy. The author starts by discussing Plessy and the argument that the reputation of being white was itself a property interest that deserved legal protection from being taken away from the individual by the community. Although this argument did not succeed in Plessy, the author goes on to discuss how a new property regime began to develop in which property got its meaning from a constellation of social relationships of rights, duties, privileges, powers, and immunities, rather than from a mere object. He then discusses the importance of reputation within a community in the context of defamation suits and the two inseparable meanings of property, honor and substance. Finally, the author discusses cases in the South in which parties had to prove or disprove “whiteness” and the tension between standards of “whiteness” based upon reputation and standards of “whiteness” based upon blood

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be