I Don't Get It

"Published in conjunction with Aleesa Cohene’s exhibition I Don’t Get It at Gallery 44 (Toronto), September 8 – October 21, 2017; The Rooms (St. John’s), February 10 – April 8, 2018; and Western Front (Vancouver), May 25 – June 27, 2018. The video and sculptural work in the exhibition offered an exploration of how race is constructed in Hollywood cinema." -- Western Front's Websit

The Crisis and the Quotidian in International Human Rights Law

This chapter considers the idea that international human rights law is both produced by and dependent upon crisis. Surveying the capaciousness, ambiguity, and constructedness of the concept, we position the relative weight given to particular rights in terms of their framing as 'crises'. We focus on how the idea of crisis has been differently deployed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the division between civil and political rights and economic, cultural and social rights to argue for a critical engagement with the language of crisis in human rights law, and to ask how that language has shaped the value and meaning of rights discourse more generally

Afterword : Zhibo, existential territory, inter-media-mundia

In undertaking transversal research into the problems of contemporary Japanese urban life, we shall critically examine the production of subjectivities pertaining to live streaming. This is undertaken to conceptualize the changing nature of subjectivity and social relations in contemporary transnational and transcultural capitalism. We shall look to Félix Guattari’s semiotic theory to interpret the era of Integrated World Capitalism (IWC). For Guattari, the production of subjectivity is pivotal to explaining the functioning of contemporary capitalism. As he claimed in his lifetime, subjectivity has become the number one objective of contemporary, capitalist society. Contra the trend to exploit subjectivity for monetary gain, Guattari’s goal is to identify mutant nuclei of subjectification which may engender a change in the order of things. His work is applied to new communication technologies like live streaming (Zhibo) to account for the existential breakdowns and breakthroughs which may ensue for individuals who use these technologies. Bradley has designated this as the Zerrissenheit or torn-to-pieces-hood of subjectivity (Bradley in Tamkang Review, 44(2): 37– 62, 2014)