The 1619 project as aesthetic and social practice; or, the art of the essay in the digital age

In August 2019, The New York Times launched The 1619 Project, a multimedia initiative to commemorate the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on the shore of the land that would become the United States and to reckon with the impact of slavery on U.S. culture and society. This essay seeks to examine The 1619 Project. I argue that The 1619 Project draws on the tradition of the essay - for Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno "the critical form par excellence" (1988: 166) - and adapts it to our continually evolving media environment in ways that revamp its form and reinforce its aesthetic, critical, and political potential. Assessing this claim from the perspective of the reading public, I ask: what are some of the strategic advantages of the essay form when it comes to engaging readers as publics?.</p

What Dewey Knew:The Public as Problem, Practice, and Art

This essay takes the present “post truth” threat to democratic politics as an occasion to revisit John Dewey’s view of the public as a political actor that is both indispensible for the project of modern democracy and vulnerable to self-effacement. Drawing on a recent development in democratic theory—epistemic democracy—that is in part inspired by Dewey, I trace how Dewey’s relativist understanding of truth animates his views of the public as a political actor and of democracy as a “collective exercise in practical intelligence” (Festenstein). But in linking the epistemic thrust of Dewey’s political theory with his view of communication as art, I move beyond established understandings of epistemic democracy to argue that the aesthetic is assigned with a key role in collectively exercising the practical intelligence that both sustains democracy and moves it forward—and that epistemic democrats have overlooked so far

Belonging and Narrative

Why did the novel become so popular in the past three centuries, and how did the American novel contribute to this trend? As a key provider of the narrative frames and formulas needed by modern individuals to give meaning and mooring to their lives. Drawing on phenomenological hermeneutics, human geography and social psychology, Laura Bieger contends that belonging is not a given; it is continuously produced by narrative. Against the current emphasis on metaphors of movement and destabilization, she explores the salience and significance of home. Challenging views of narrative as a mechanism of ideology, she approaches narrative as a practical component of dwelling in the world - and the novel a primary place-making agent

Ästhetik der Immersion: Raum-Erleben zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City

Die Ästhetik der Immersion ist eine Ästhetik des Eintauchens, des kalkulierten Auflösens von Distanz. Die Räume, in die diese Studie sich begibt, machen Grenzverwischungen zwischen Bild und Welt zum Gegenstand unmittelbaren körperlichen Erlebens. Sie sind ein so bedeutsamer Teil zeitgenössischer Lebenswelt, weil in ihnen kollektive Realitätsphantasien an einem 'wirklichen, wirksamen Ort' (Foucault) erfahrbar werden. Ein solcher Ort ist das 'neue' Las Vegas. In seiner jüngsten Metamorphose von der Neon- zur Themenarchitektur hat er seinen Avantgardestatus nicht verloren, sondern sich in der materiellen Rückübersetzung digitaler Bild-Räumlichkeit einmal mehr zum Vorreiter kultureller Entwicklungen aufgeschwungen

Ästhetik der Immersion

Die Ästhetik der Immersion ist eine Ästhetik des Eintauchens, des kalkulierten Auflösens von Distanz. Die Räume, in die diese Studie sich begibt, machen Grenzverwischungen zwischen Bild und Welt zum Gegenstand unmittelbaren körperlichen Erlebens. Sie sind ein so bedeutsamer Teil zeitgenössischer Lebenswelt, weil in ihnen kollektive Realitätsphantasien an einem 'wirklichen, wirksamen Ort' (Foucault) erfahrbar werden. Ein solcher Ort ist das 'neue' Las Vegas. In seiner jüngsten Metamorphose von der Neon- zur Themenarchitektur hat er seinen Avantgardestatus nicht verloren, sondern sich in der materiellen Rückübersetzung digitaler Bild-Räumlichkeit einmal mehr zum Vorreiter kultureller Entwicklungen aufgeschwungen

Disparity in the use of Alzheimer's disease treatment in Southern Brazil

Alzheimer's disease (AD) treatment is freely available in the Brazilian public health system. However, the prescription pattern and its associated factors have been poorly studied in our country. We reviewed all granted requests for AD treatment in the public health system in October 2021 in the Rio Grande do Sul (RS) state, Southern Brazil. We performed a spatial autocorrelation analysis with the population-adjusted patients receiving any AD medication as the outcome and correlated it with several socioeconomic variables. 2382 patients with AD were being treated during the period analyzed. The distribution of the outcome variable was not random (Moran's I 0.17562, P <.0001), with the most developed regions having a higher number of patients/100,000 receiving any AD medication. We show that although AD medications are available through the public health system, there is a clear disparity between regions of RS state. Factors related to socioeconomic development partly explain this finding