The cultural capitalists: notes on the ongoing reconfiguration of trafficking culture in Asia

Most analysis of the international flows of the illicit art market has described a global situation in which a postcolonial legacy of acquisition and collection exploits cultural heritage by pulling it westwards towards major international trade nodes in the USA and Europe. As the locus of consumptive global economic power shifts, however, these traditional flows are pulled in other directions: notably for the present commentary, towards and within Asia

Cinemaethnographic specta(c)torship: discursive readings of what we choose to (dis)possess

This article examines critical methodological issues emerging from the interstices of applied educational research, social science research, and arts-based research, bringing criticality into the field of childhood. The author aims to question how she might w(rest)le (un)comfortably with "what is worth looking at" when studying children. Maneuvering between observations of children in classrooms and representations of children in film, the author will not only consider ways she enacts discrete performances of specta(c)torship but also how she might resist revoking one performance for another within her "practices of looking" by conjuring the menace of ambivalent narratives. Rather than falling into familiar framing devices that serve to embrace some, but prohibit other ways of seeing, she will procure notions of colonialism and restless hybridity to incite antagonistic play on the edges of ethnographic specta(c)torship, drawing on Stronach’s notion of "lean-to" concepts

Qualitative inquiry: where are the ruins?

The article interrogates the notion of “the ruins” and its cognates (rupture, loss, failure, etc.) as productively destructive figures for postfoundational methodology and wonders how much damage has actually been done. Hoping for ruins, have scholars merely produced a picturesque gloss on the same old Enlightenment edifice? The author finds some promise in Deleuze’s notion of the stutter, using this to look at what happens when the body surfaces in language. The author suggests that attention to the bodily entanglements of language, which qualitative method generally prefers to forget, can be put to work to perform a particular form of productive ruin commended by Deleuze—namely, the ruin of representation