Experiments in Interfaces

Purpose: Exploring the need for ‘neutral’ public space located between the private act of voting and formal deliberative democracy, this paper examines two interfaces between everyday life and democratic politics and considers ways this territory can be a site for generative artistic practises. Approach: Many artists and architects work in the space between the individual and formal collective political processes. Speculating outward from two artworks by the author and drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, Rosalyn Deutsche, Chantal Mouffe, Bruno Latour and others, this paper maps theory to the territory and proposes a new framework for reconsidering the work of such practitioners. Findings: Three potentially fruitful avenues for exploration as artistic practice related to democratic interfaces are identified and discussed through examples. Originality and value: This exploration is part of a broader practice-led research project into models of public collaborative thinking within the context of artistic practice. Many argue that the public realm has been co-opted by neo-liberal political and economic forces, resulting in a sense of hopelessness that limits our ability to imagine anything else. This research reflects on artistic tactics that counter this sense of hopelessness. These practices often suggest alternative social structures, foster ephemeral (local) public spheres or propose spatial configurations that support these. This paper offers a useful framework for reflecting on the work of politically-engaged artists and architects as well as structuring new projects

From Communal to Independent Manhood in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, ca. 1760-1820

This article discusses understandings of manhood in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By means of the voluminous diary kept by Simeon Perkins, a man of local prominence, it explores the social responses within this rural seafaring community to how men chose strategies for gaining social status, exercising public power, and juggling private interest and public service. Across northeastern North America, capitalist ideals of independent manhood were gradually replacing moral ideals of communal manhood, which ultimately strained networks of reciprocity both within and outside the family. Yet by placing Perkins alongside Benajah Collins, another prominent Liverpudlian, this article also reveals that those who drifted too far from morally grounded communal ideals of manhood continued to find themselves ostracized within their immediate communities.Comment la masculinité était-elle comprise à Liverpool, en Nouvelle-Écosse, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et au début du XIXe siècle? Par l’entremise du volumineux journal intime tenu par Simeon Perkins, un personnage local, le présent article examine les réactions sociales au sein de cette collectivité rurale de marins à la manière dont les hommes choisissaient des stratégies pour obtenir un statut social, exercer le pouvoir public et concilier intérêt privé et service public. Dans tout le nord-est de l’Amérique du Nord, l’idéal capitaliste d’indépendance masculine a progressivement remplacé l’idéal moral de masculinité communautaire, ce qui a fini par mettre à rude épreuve les réseaux de réciprocité tant à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur de la famille. Pourtant, en traçant un parallèle entre Perkins et Benajah Collins, un autre éminent Liverpuldien, cet article révèle aussi que ceux qui se sont trop éloignés de l’idéal communautaire de masculinité basé sur la morale ont continué à se retrouver ostracisés au sein même de leur milieu immédiat

Gender differences in aggression of borderline personality disorder

Aggression is a core feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Well-replicated results from the general population indicate that men engage in aggression more frequently than women. This article addresses the question of whether gender also influences aggression in BPD, and whether the neurobiological mechanisms underlying aggressive behavior differ between male and female BPD patients. Data show that most self-reports, interviews and behavioral tasks investigating samples of BPD patients do not find enhanced aggressiveness in male patients, suggesting that BPD attenuates rather than aggravates gender differences usually present in the general population. Neurobiological studies comparing BPD patients with gender-matched healthy controls, however, reveal a number of interesting gender differences: On the one hand, there are well-replicated findings of reduced amygdala and hippocampal gray matter volumes in female BPD patients, while these findings are not shared by male patients with BPD. On the other hand, only male BPD patients exhibit reduced gray matter volume of the anterior cingulate cortex, increased gray matter volume of the putamen, reduced striatal activity during an aggression task, and a more pronounced deficit in central serotonergic responsivity. These neurobiological findings point to a particular importance of impulsivity for the aggression of male BPD patients. Limitations include the need to control for confounding influences of comorbidities, particularly as male BPD patients have been consistently found to show higher percentages of aggression-predisposing comorbid disorders, such as antisocial personality disorder, than female BPD patients. In the future, studies which include systematic comparisons between females and males are warranted in order to disentangle gender differences in aggression of BPD patients with the aim of establishing gender-sensitive treatments where needed

Thinking in public: The affordances of hopeless spaces

The position of the public realm as a common resource that is genuinely open to all appears ever more circumscribed by economic pressures and politically driven regulation. A resulting sense of ‘hopelessness’ can constrain a community’s ability to develop sustainable, mutually supportive ways to organise and inhabit space. Contemporary art practices participate in narrowing or expanding the possibilities of the public realm, whether through resistance or inadvertent or knowing collusion. My practice-led research interrogates the capacity of artistic practices to suggest fresh ways to think about and produce the physical, social and cultural structures that support everyday life. The particular focus of the practice is on frameworks for public collaborative thinking. What constitutes public collaborative thinking in an art context, what forms might it take, and what conditions are required for it to acquire agency in the world? These questions are addressed through theory, the critique of existing artworks, and the development of projects to test tactics in real situations. Theorists who worry about public space have staked claims within a shifting field, continuously opening up and closing down spaces for artistic speculation. I look carefully at key texts, concepts and techniques developed by Hannah Arendt, Claire Bishop, David Bohm, Rosalyn Deutsche, Grant Kester, Chantal Mouffe, Bruno Latour, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler and Ben Spatz to establish the conceptual site and underpinning for my practical explorations. I also look at the reception and afterlife of a few carefully chosen participatory art practices, which operate in and about the public realm, and generate public discussion about topics of concern to local communities. These art forms may be ephemeral, relational (Bourriaud, 2002), dialogic (Kester, 2004), or referred to as ‘new genre’ public art (Lacy, 1994), social practice or socially engaged art. My projects expose underlying processes that limit the scope of the public realm, exploring tactics for enabling new forms of collective imagination and action. They take place in publicly accessible sites and explore the gap between collective formal politics and the individual. These activities challenge preconceived notions of particular situations and/or places by discovering and activating affordances, using sociality, aesthetics, objects, physicality and humour

The conserving community

Thesis. 1975. B.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.Bibliography: leaves 72-73.by Carol J. Mancke.B.S

Panel #4: The Madawaska Territory and the Aftermath of Statehood

Presentations in this session include: Free Trade Before Free Trade: John Emmerson, Petit Sault Merchant, His Suppliers and Customers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Béatrice Craig Madawaska and the Convergence of Empire, Nation, and State, Elizabeth Mancke The Effect of 9/11 on a Borderlands Community: Fort Kent, Maine and Clair, New Brunswick, Lisa Lavoi

The global interests of London's commercial community, 1599-1625: investment in the East India Company

The foundation of the East India Company coincided with a dramatic expansion of England's overseas activities brought about through new trading, colonial, and exploratory ventures. This period has received considerable attention in relation to the development of the British Empire, but little is known about how merchants and other commercial actors invested in and contributed to these organizations. Using a newly developed dataset of membership and investment in overseas activities, this article reconstructs the individual portfolios of East India Company members in 1599, 1613, and 1624. This analysis reveals that investors took advantage of opportunities across the globe, and diverse portfolios were common. The implications of this are two?fold. First, this article makes clear that our current understanding of the East India Company as closely connected with the Levant Company is not sustained with evidence from investment patterns. Second, the interests of London's commercial community suggest new avenues for understanding the early British Empire as a tightly connected, globally focused set of institutions, people, and networks

West Africa in the British Atlantic: trade, violence, and empire in the 1640s

The importance of Africa and African agency in the formation of the Atlantic world is now widely acknowledged by historians, but Africa has drawn less attention than other regions in analyses of the British Atlantic. Drawing upon the nascent methodology of global microhistory, this article contributes to a scholarly rebalancing by examining two maritime lawsuits from the 1640s concerning British voyages to Senegambia and Sierra Leone, both of which resulted in conflict between British seafarers and with their African trading partners. A close study of the documents surviving from these lawsuits provides an unusually detailed glimpse of these particular moments of contact and violence across cultures. More fundamentally, such an approach illuminates the ocean-spanning networks within which these ventures took place, and reveals the ways in which British traders and sailors perceived trade in Africa within their own legal frameworks. This article argues that by the middle of the seventeenth century, as merchants and politicians in Britain began to imagine an Atlantic empire, trade in West Africa was an important part of their vision of the Atlantic world