A Mysterious Island in the Digital Age: Technology and Musical Life in Ulleungdo, South Korea

This paper contributes to the growing body of ethnomusicological research about music-making on small islands, focusing on the remote South Korean island of Ulleungdo (literally, ‘Mysterious Island’). Historically, a number of factors have conspired to present serious obstacles to the Ulleungdo islanders' musical aspirations. However, since the early 1990s, enterprising amateurs have managed to generate and maintain a variety of musical activities in spite of these obstacles: church ensembles, karaoke, saxophone clubs, and more. Paralleling other island music studies, this paper seeks to show how the condition of being an Ulleungdo islander—entailing a complex of varied experiences, values, and relationships—has informed music-making over the years. However, here, the discussion remains firmly focused upon the islanders' use of technology since an acute reliance on technology has come to permeate Ulleungdo's musical life, with certain electronic devices commonly regarded as essential facilitators of musical expression. Drawing from the islanders' own testimonies, studies of Ulleungdo's cultural history, and works addressing technology's applications within and effects upon local communities, the authors explore how and why this condition of musical techno-reliance developed, how it is manifest in the present-day, and its broader implications for the island's music culture and identity

Evidence-based activism: Patients' organisations, users' and activist's groups in knowledge

This article proposes the notion of ‘evidence-based activism’ to capture patients’ and health activists’ groups’ focus on knowledge production and knowledge mobilisation in the governance of health issues. It introduces empirical data and analysis on groups active in four countries (France, Ireland, Portugal and the United Kingdom), and in four condition-areas (rare diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and childbirth). It shows how these groups engage with, and articulate a variety of credentialed knowledge and ‘experiential knowledge’ with a view to explore concerned people’s situations, to make themselves part and parcel of the networks of expertise on their conditions in their national contexts, and to elaborate evidence on the issues they deem important to address both at an individual and at a collective level. This article argues that in contrast to health movements which contest institutions from the outside, patients’ and activists’ groups which embrace ‘evidence-based activism’ work ‘from within’ to imagine new epistemic and political appraisal of their causes and conditions. ‘Evidence-based activism’ entails a collective inquiry associating patients/activists and specialists/professionals in the conjoint fabrics of scientific statements and political claims. From a conceptual standpoint, ‘evidence-based activism’ sheds light on the ongoing co-production of matters of fact and matters of concern in contemporary technological democracies

Beyond the therapeutic: a Habermasian view of self-help groups’ place in the public sphere

Self-help groups in the United Kingdom continue to grow in number and address virtually every conceivable health condition, but they remain the subject of very little theoretical analysis. The literature to date has predominantly focused on their therapeutic effects on individual members. And yet they are widely presumed to fulfil a broader civic role and to encourage democratic citizenship. The article uses Habermas’ model of the public sphere as an analytical tool with which to reconsider the literature on self-help groups in order to increase our knowledge of their civic functions. In doing this it also aims to illustrate the continuing relevance of Habermas’ work to our understanding of issues in health and social care. We consider, within the context of current health policies and practices, the extent to which self-help groups with a range of different forms and functions operate according to the principles of communicative rationality that Habermas deemed key to democratic legitimacy. We conclude that self-help groups’ civic role is more complex than is usually presumed and that various factors including groups’ leadership, organisational structure and links with public agencies can affect their efficacy within the public sphere

The Body

Geography is concerned with the triad of economy, society and culture as spatialized, and the themes discussed above suggest that this spatialized triad must be understood through the body. The question of the geographical specificity of the body thus concerns the ways in which spaces emerge and are shaped interdependently with bodies. Geographical work in epistemology suggests that a shift towards the body and notions of positionality must be accompanied by an exploration of other forms of embodied, multi-sensuous, knowledge of spaces. Research on the body in relation to politics and economics suggests that matters of domination and exploitation, and questions of ‘overarching’ ‘global’ scales and processes, must be understood in terms of situated practices, and thus in reach of various forms of embodied attempts to resist and rescale present relations of power. Inquiries into issues of impairment and disability produce knowledge of how physical as well as discursive social constructs constrain bodies that is of relevance not only for emancipating ‘deviant’ bodies, but also for imagining possibilities beyond the everyday confines of ‘normality’. Research into senses other than vision and the related stress on non-representational, embodied ways of knowing in and through practices make the insufficiency of discursive approaches to the body-space nexus particularly clear

Contested Representations: Signification in the Built Environment

Cultural aspects of spatial restructuring as well as discussions of the impact of \u27postmodern\u27 urban structures and architecture are given more and more attention in research about local, regional and global transformations, but rarely are the signifying characteristics of spatial objects and formations discussed. In this article, a semiotic approach is developed with regard to the interdependency between spatial sign-vehicles and situated practices within the continuous process of spatial restructuring. In order to comprehend the signifying aspects of this process, the article unfolds through a theoretical explication of polysemy and resemanticization with regard to meanings and values attributed to spatial sign-vehicles