Trafficking

In cities the world over we are able to determine stability in daily existence, to identify with our social spaces, because modes of transport have become essential components of subjective autonomy. But would it not be just as accurate to say that in transit modern life puts the self in abeyance? I argue that the ways we allow ourselves to be moved around in ‘traffic space’ creates a passivity that renders almost invisible the complex mechanics of movement, which we only become alert to at the moment of breakdown, precisely when they become a threat to autonomy. Our trafficking, I conclude, has an almost narcotic effect, rendering us immobile against the continual movements that constitute urban life, one that also magnifies out of all proportion the accidents or aberrations that sometimes disturb our traffic space, making it seem as if we may easily descend into an uncontrollable chaos

Visualising Manchester: Exploring new ways to study urban environments with reference to situationist theory, the dérive and qualitative research

This paper will outline how mobile methods and documentary strategies (diaries, cameras and maps) can be used to document and reflect on the research process and to consider the political implications of urbanism and gentrification. I draw particular inspiration from the work of the Situationist International and their use of detournement and the dérive. I will refer to a long term project in Manchester city where I have used a situationist qualitative methodology. I will discuss the usefulness of the situationist tactics of the dérive and detournement for qualitative research in psychology. The wider aims of conducting this research are: to extend qualitative methods in psychology; to further politicise qualitative methods, to consider the implications of the gentrification of environments; to reflect on the social roles of the researcher as academic, activist and artist and to consider what changes are possible as a result of doing this sort of research

Empty Architecture and Empty Urbanism: the Remaking and Reframing on Contemporary Beijing

The paper discusses a collage and montage understanding of modernity and argues that Beijing offers a contemporary simulacrum of the global system of sign values that is epitomized by the new CCTV headquarters and more directly mirrored in the Beijing World Park. In reading Beijing this way, the paper suggests that the city, as well as the global audience to which its spectacle architecture is addressed, is suffering an identity crisis in which our built environment has been reduced to series of signs. It discusses the architecture of the CCTV headquarters, then Beijing World Park as the miniature of Beijing, and finally how the slogan of Beijing Olympics 2008, “One World! One Dream!”, helps to read the contemporary architecture in Beijing as a symbol of the city's – and through the city, the government's – view of itself as a new world leader. It begins by placing this argument in a particular social, political, and economic framework – the attempts of the current Chinese authorities to position the Chinese economy, and its major cities, at the heart of the contemporary capitalist economy. These attempts, it is suggested, involve a more or less literal attempt to outstrip the city which throughout the twentieth century epitomized that system, New York

Biometric Revisions of the `Body' in Airports and US Welfare Reform

This article explores how biometrics function as technologies of embodiment that both redefine and challenge Agamben's notion of 'bare life' and the state of exception. We contend that the body is transformed when the subject under scrutiny is conceived of in terms of information profiles and communication networks. Through our analysis of two examples - airports and the US welfare system - we reveal how biometrics are used to produce bare life. That is, biometrics dramatize Agamben's assertion that the state of exception becomes the rule as every body is biometrically inscribed with the potential for bare life. Our case studies demonstrate that this process is not random. Rather, biometrics reveal the unequal distribution of risk, and their usage under the aegis of regulating security and poverty reframes what life - and, particularly, 'bare life' - signifies in those spaces governed by security, regulation, marginalization and criminalization

Between Byzantium and Jerusalem? The principality of Antioch, Renaud of Châtillon, and the penance of Mamistra in 1158

In the summer of 1158, Manuel I Komnenos, emperor of Byzantium, brought a large force into Cilicia to quell Armenian resistance and to seek retribution for an attack launched on the Byzantine island of Cyprus by Renaud of Châtillon, prince of Antioch. In haste, Renaud came to the city of Mamistra, and performed a humiliating penance before agreeing to imperial overlordship. Historians have long conceived of this act as one forced on Renaud by Manuel and King Baldwin III of Jerusalem, and as marking the creation of a political condominium, which divided Antioch between these two rulers. This article seeks to challenge the established opinion by drawing attention to the diplomatic skill demonstrated by the Antiochenes, and the independence with which they pursued and secured close and favourable ties to Byzantium