More-than-human politics in the new arctic landscape of youth : Atmospheric shifts at the shopping mall

Peer reviewe

Is it any wonder? On commissioning an ‘uncommissioned’ atmosphere: a reply to Hillary and Sumartojo

This article is a reply to Fiona Hillary and Shanti Sumartojo’s “Empty-Nursery Blue: On Atmosphere, Meaning and Methodology in Melbourne Street Art”, published in Public Art Dialogue in October 2014.1 Hillary and Sumartojo present a welcome addition to the literature on street art and graffiti in their sustained analytic focus on a particular work of street art and its place-based reception. However, their analysis of Adrian Doyle’s Empty Nursery Blue is compromised by their largely unacknowledged investment and involvement as commissioners and curators of the work. Further, Hillary and Sumartojo’s adoption of the concept of affective atmosphere and a positive sense of enchantment operates to discount viewers’ contradictory social-emotional responses to the work. While the authors’ attempt to incorporate authoethnographic methods appears promising, in practice this bears little in common with the critically reflexive practice of autoethnography, and is rather used as a circular rhetorical device to demonstrate the presence of the very notion of enchantment so central to the authors’ interpretation of Empty Nursery Blue. The liminal status of Empty Nursery Blue as apparently uncommissioned street art and as commissioned public art presents an unacknowledged tension at the core of this partial interpretation that may yet be ultimately productive of the very notion of wonder and enchantment. A critical expansion of the notion of enchantment to encompass a variety of affective responses and forms of material and ethical engagement is suggested

Public Space and Protest: an Analysis of Protest at Parliament House, Canberra

The \u27new\u27 Parliament House in Canberra, opened in 1988, was designed to both symbolise and house representative democracy in Australia. Both of these functions have made it an important site for protest - it is a place through which claims are made and concerns are voiced by a diverse range of political movements and individuals. But as a public space, it is not only used by protesters to articulate their position in relation to a wider, general public. Parliament House has also acted as a public space through which participants in political movements or \u27counterpublics\u27 have negotiated their relationship with each other. Public space, in other words, acts as both a space for representation, and a space for formation, when used by counterpublics engaged in protest. In this paper, I want to trace the connection between these two aspects of protest at Parliament House. I argue that this dual perspective is useful in understanding the dynamics of protest events. It offers insights for those engaged in protest, as well as those engaged in regulating it. I want to start by briefly outlining where this dual perspective on public space and protest comes from, by considering the relationship between public space and the public sphere. Next, I describe the space available for protest at Parliament House and its regulatory framework. Then the paper looks at two particular protest events - the rally organised by the ACTU at Parliament House in August 1996, and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy protest in front of Old Parliament House. The paper concludes with some more general thoughts on the relationship between protest and public space

The City versus the Media? Mapping the Mobile Geographies of Public Address

Frequently, efforts to establish the city's significance for the public sphere frame the city in opposition to the media. The city is imagined as a space of unmediated and co-present publicness, while the media is imagined as a space of mediated and distantiated publicness. This essay argues against such an opposition. In place of it, the essay outlines an approach to the urban dimensions of public address which emphasizes the interaction of urban and media spaces and the mobility of public address. This approach is illustrated through a brief consideration of contestation over the governance of urban space in Sydney during the 2007 APEC Meeting. Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation(c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Recovering the politics of the city: From the ‘post-political city’ to a ‘method of equality’ for critical urban geography

This paper uses Jacque Rancière\u27s understanding of politics to ask what makes cities political entities. We review existing urban geography debates to identify some of the defining features of urban politics and then subject them to critical questioning: are they actually political? The paper seeks to develop existing interpretations of Rancière\u27s philosophy within geography to develop his ‘method of equality’ in order to recover the politics of the city. This identifies three necessary components of critical urban scholarship in order that it transcends critique and works towards making democratic politics possible

Carnival at Crown Casino: S11 as Party and Protest

13 page(s

Contesting the 'inevitable'

9 page(s