Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism. [Review]

Review of: Shannon Sullivan, Living across and through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001. 204 pp

Interfaith Communities: Relationships in Thirdspace

Contending with, and expanding the understanding of, diverse interfaith relationships, this project presents a nuanced awareness of interfaith action and the dialectic of lived religion with interfaith engagement. Arguing that interfaith is a type of thirdspace in which engagements have affective impacts on individuals within interfaith communities, as well as orientation towards religious communities. While there are common struggles, interpretations, and socializations that hinder the participation of women and non-binary individuals in institutional interfaith spaces, observing organic interfaith relationships as occurring in thirdspace allows for the recognition of radical inclusion and dedication to diversity

Editorial: Critical Coalitions in Play

The theme of Volume 31 of the Journal for Social Theory in Art Education – Critical Coalitions in Play – was developed at the Annual Business Meeting of the Caucus on Social Theory and Art Education, during the 2010 National Art Education Association, held in Baltimore, MD. The theme developed from casual conversations and formal discussions held throughout the conference, a process that has a longstanding history in the Caucus. This process relates to the theme itself, in a meaningful, self-reflexive manner: individuals discussed the critical nature of building coalitions within the field and between other related fields, and how these coalitions are both in play and deal with elements of play

‘It was, we felt, their country’ : childhood elsewhere in Mordecai Richler’s The Street

Since the Industrial revolution, historians and critics agree, concepts of time and space have become inappropriate to describe contemporary society: it is a shifting, moving, liquid world, and progresses in technologies only contribute to people’s feeling of being always “elsewhere”. Instantaneity and movement are the constituent referents of our post-modern era, where the loss of certainties leaves human beings with little self-confidence and beliefs. To be foreign in one’s own country is daily routine; but it can also be an incitement to produce stories of condemnation. This article seeks to show how Jewish-Canadian author Mordecai Richler uses his powerful and striking irony to denounce Jews condition in 1940s’ Montreal ghetto, and how the stories collected in The Street describe the “elsewhereness” his community was forced to experience. Nevertheless, the paper will analyse how Richler challenges stereotypes and prejudices, focusing on the spaces of otherness he had experienced in his childhood years and which have made him one of the greatest Canadian voices of 20th century.peer-reviewe

Josef Fares’ Zozo as accented cinema

In 2005, the Lebanese-Swedish filmmaker Josef Fares, who had attained recognition in Sweden through the immigrant comedies Jalla! Jalla! (2000) and Kopps (2003), presented his third feature film and first drama, Zozo, inspired by Fares’s own migration to Sweden. Set in 1987 Beirut, Zozo portrays a ten-year boy who loses his parents during the Lebanese Civil War and who journeys to reunite with his grandparents already settled in Sweden. In Sweden, Zozo is forced to learn the host country’s language quickly and to understand the unwritten rules of his new culture. Like his grandparents, he will probably always have an accent and be recognizably the “other.” The film became Sweden’s national submission to the 78th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and its nomination not only raised questions on what Sweden and Swedishness mean in a contemporary global world, but it also reexamined the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory in a borderless Europe. In this essay I argue that Zozo is an illustration of accented film, which means the film is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but a combination of both. Influenced by his deterritorialization from Lebanon and his current life in Sweden, the cinematographic stylistic choices of Josef Fares exhibit a “double consciousness” - multiple cultural identities at once. To further understand the Lebanese and Swedish elements in the film, I analyze how elements such as chronotopes (time-space), border crossing, epistolarity, and double consciousness are inscribed in the film. In addition, I use Laura U. Marks’ concept of fossils, radioactive recollection-objects. By employing Hamid Naficy’s accented cinema theory, I hope to explain how Josef Fares is neither Swedish nor Lebanese, but an individual with multicultural identities, which reflect in the elements of the narrative and cinematographic style.Germanic Studie

Augmented reality as a Thirdspace: Simultaneous experience of the physical and virtual

With the proliferation of devices that display augmented reality (AR), now is the time for scholars and practitioners to evaluate and engage critically with emerging applications of the medium. AR mediates the way users see their bodies, hear their environment and engage with places. Applied in various forms, including social media, e-commerce, gaming, enterprise and art, the medium facilitates a hybrid experience of physical and digital spaces. This article employs a model of real-and-imagined space from geographer Edward Soja to examine how the user of an AR app navigates the two intertwined spaces of physical and digital, experiencing what Soja calls a 'Third-space'. The article illustrates the potential for headset-based AR to engender such a Thirdspace through the author's practice-led research project, the installation Through the Wardrobe. This installation demonstrates how AR has the potential to shift the way that users view and interact with their world with artistic applications providing an opportunity to question assumptions of social norms, identity and uses of physical space.Comment: Preprint of chapter published in Proceedings of the 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Images and Imagination, edited by D. Villa and F. Zuccoli, 2023, Springer Nature, reproduced with permission of Springer Natur

Enhancing employability via ‘Thirdspace’ pedagogy and ethics

Although the diversity of Malaysian pluralistic sociocultural society may present itself as a challenge in the maintenance of ethnic relations, it can perhaps be transformed, nevertheless, into a critical resource for graduate employability. Formal qualifications aside, Malaysian local graduates should be asking themselves whether they have the civic capacity and universal prerequisites as ‘glocalised’ employees of the future. In this paper, we will attempt to situate the discourse of employability within an ethical-pedagogical dimension of globalisation through social semiotics. It is suggested that insight into the ways of the globalised world may be provided through a pedagogic dimension known as ‘the Thirdspace’ (Bhabha, 1994), comprising a hybridized and cutting-edge space of ‘in-betweenness’ where diverse cultures meet and engage each other. This study takes off from a research on the perceived cultural and language competencies of undergraduates undertaken by a Malaysian university. Based on the findings of this research on the benchmarks for graduate competencies for future employability painted, a profile that went beyond the communicative and linguistic capabilities into elements such as attitudes, mindset and cultural awareness. With this in mind, this paper proposed that university curriculum utilises a Thirdspace pedagogy to expose and enhance cross-cultural literacies of Malaysian university undergraduates through socioculturally resonant Malaysian cinema

Jesus’ Use of Social Power in Honour–Shame Conflicts: A Model for Male–Female Interactions

Because social power is interpersonal, it is exercised in physical space. Edward Hall distinguishes between public, social, personal, and intimate space by the distance that individuals maintain from each other in that space. Soja describes the concept of space as either a geophysical reality, a mental-symbolic reality, or a social reality. Power is a physically perceived, socially-negotiated construct based on mental perceptions of authority and value in a group. Jesus regularly exercised his power in social settings to challenge traditional group norms. One of the norms challenged was the objectification of women in male honour-shame conflicts. In this paper I will define social power as a complex and multifaceted construct exercised in “space.” I will demonstrate Jesus’ use of power to restore a woman to a position of honour in Luke 7: 36-50. Then I will suggest ways that Jesus models for us the redemptive use of power between males and females in social space