scholarly journals Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Anat Rosenberg

This article examines the role of law in shaping visual commercial culture by telling the story of the hoarding—the outdoor advertising surface for posters—in the formative decades of mass advertising in Britain, from roughly 1840 to 1914. The hoarding emerged in this period as a distinct property and a focal point of contestation over ways of seeing. Its meaning as a visual environment hinged on questions, which are still resonant today, about the interaction between economic and aesthetic categories: advertising and art, capital and beauty, commerce and culture. Historical actors—among them the organized billposting trade, the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, a civil society organization that took up the cause of protecting public spaces from advertising, governmental and local lawmakers, and citizens—enlisted private and public legal means to respond to these questions. This analysis draws on an expansive interdisciplinary archive to trace them. As it shows, legal means were engaged in cultural demarcation or what Thomas Gieryn has aptly termed boundary work. In establishing cultural boundaries, law defined the terms on which advertising became an integral element of daily visual experience, at once omnipresent and derided. The legal history of advertising thus offers deep insights for visual legal studies.

Author(s):  
Joanna Innes ◽  
Michael J. Braddick

The Introduction offers a brief overview of Paul Slack’s contribution to early modern history, distinguishing between an earlier phase concerned with social policy and the ideas which informed it, and a later phase concerned with the history of political economy, and particularly the shifting discourse of happiness which, he argued, informed it. It then explores recent interest in the history of emotions, distinguishing a variety of approaches to that subject. Reviewing three broad approaches taken by the contributors to the volume, it goes on to suggest that the history of emotions is most stimulating when seen as a focal point for different kinds of history rather than as a discrete subject of enquiry. A further implication is that a variety of forms of expertise need to be brought to bear.


Author(s):  
Derek Attridge

The question this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles, poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—has, across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson’s Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616, continuously afforded the pleasurable experience we identify with the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms. Parts I and II examine the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. Part III deals with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the importance of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. Part IV explores the achievements of the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII’s court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan period. Among the topics considered in this part are the advent of print, the experience of the solitary reader, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the presence of poet figures in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. Tracking both continuity and change, the book offers a history of what, over these twenty-five centuries, it has meant to enjoy a poem.


2021 ◽  
pp. 135918352110288
Author(s):  
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén

This article is about an everyday paper object: an envelope. However, as opposed to most other flat paper containers, the enveloppe Soleau can only be bought from L’Institut national de la propriété industrielle (INPI) in Paris. At the cost of €15 you get a perforated, double-compartment envelope allowing you to constitute proof of creation and assign a precise date to your idea or project. But the enveloppe Soleau is something much more than just a simple and cheap way by which you can prove priority in any creative domain. It is a material footprint anchored to centuries of practices associated with disclosure and secrecy, a gateway into the infrastructure of the intellectual property system and its complicated relationship to the forms of knowledge it purports to hold. The purpose of this article is to consider the making of the enveloppe Soleau as a bureaucratic document, a material device performing a particular kind of legal paperwork. In four different vignettes, the article tracks the material becoming of the enveloppe Soleau as an evidentiary receptacle, beginning by going back to early modern practices of secrecy and priority, continuing with its consolidation in two patents (from 1910 and 1911) to the inventor Eugène Soleau (1852–1929), and ending up, in 2016, dematerialized in the e-Soleau. As a bureaucratic document, the enveloppe Soleau shows just how much work a mundane paper object can perform, navigating a particular materiality (a patented double envelope); formalized processes of proof (where perforations have legal significance); the practices of double archiving (in an institution and with the individual) and strict temporal limitations (a decade). Ultimately, the enveloppe Soleau travels between the material and immaterial, between private and public, between secrecy and disclosure, but also between what we perceive of as the outside and inside of the intellectual property system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
R. J. C. Adams ◽  
Vaida Nikšaitė

Abstract The close of the First World War signalled a proliferation of newly established nation-states across Europe. However, the unilateral proclamations of these states’ independence did not guarantee their international recognition, nor did it guarantee their financial viability. This article examines the funding of two such states: the unrecognized Lithuanian (1919–23) and Irish (1919–21) republics. Both funded their wars of independence by selling ‘war bonds’ to their respective diasporas in the United States; the Lithuanians raising almost $1.9m from c. 28,000 subscribers and the Irish raising $5.8m from c. 300,000 subscribers. Communication between the organizers of these bond drives was virtually non-existent, but following the example of the US Liberty Loans they employed remarkably similar tactics. Yet, issued by self-proclaimed nation-states with neither territorial integrity nor a credible history of borrowing, the Lithuanian and Irish war bonds promised a return only when the states had received international recognition. In this sense, they were examples of what the authors term Pre-Sovereign Debt. Practically, they were a focal point for agitation for governmental recognition and rousing of American public opinion. Symbolically, they were tangible representations of the Lithuanian and Irish pretensions to statehood.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 376-397
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia

The British Library holds one of 65 existing copies of the first dated book printed in Muscovy by Ivan Fedorov and Petr Mstislavets, the Apostol (Acts and Epistles) (1564) and one of two known copies of Ivan Fedorov’s Primer (L’viv, 1574), which is considered by many to be the first Cyrillic book printed in Ukraine. The recent history of these books is linked to the name of the legendary Russian art critic and impresario Serge Diaghilev (1872–1929). Both titles belonged to his private book collection. A story of Diaghilev’s collection became part of the history of the British Library when in 1975 it acquired, among other books and manuscripts, his copy of the famous 1564 Apostol. Diaghilev’s copy of the 1574 Primer resurfaced at Harvard University Library, but its detailed descriptions and facsimile editions helped the British Library curator Christine Thomas, then in charge of the Russian collections, to identify a second copy, which is now held at the British Library. This article tells the story of how over 70 titles from Diaghilev’s collection of rare Russian books and manuscripts were acquired by the British Library, examines possible reasons for Diaghilev’s passion for books, and highlights other themes relevant for the history of private and public book collecting.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Collins

Where did the regulatory underpinnings for the global drug wars come from? This book is the first fully-focused history of the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the bedrock of the modern multilateral drug control system and the focal point of global drug regulations and prohibitions. Although far from the propagator of the drug wars, the UN enabled the creation of a uniform global legal framework to effectively legalise, or regulate, their pursuit. This book thereby answers the question of where the international legal framework for drug control came from, what state interests informed its development and how complex diplomatic negotiations resulted in the current regulatory system, binding states into an element of global policy uniformity.


Author(s):  
Alice Staveley

‘Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors.’ Woolf’s 1925 homage to the impact of the Hogarth Press on her career is well known, signifying a new sense of herself as a woman writer in command of the means of creative production. Less well known is how pervasive were her private and public negotiations with the narratological implications of the feminist materialism she cultivated as a printer and publisher. This article reviews the state of the field, re-reads her early short fiction in the context of her typesetting experiments, which resonate with the conflicted history of women in the printing trades, and argues for a revisionist understanding of Woolf’s feminist modernism as isomorphic with the Hogarth Press.


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-139
Author(s):  
Cathy Johns

What can an institutional archive tell us about the history of fashion education? The Royal College of Art's archive, in documenting the legacy of study and practice at the college, a key focal point of fashion education since 1948, illuminates in diverse ways the establishment and development of fashion design as an academic discipline. The print and digital collections in the RCA archive thus provide a rich resource that informs both contemporary practice and historical research, highlighting in addition issues raised by the increasingly digital access to this documentation for the archivist and the research community.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Ienca

In recent years, philosophical-legal studies on neuroscience (mainly in the fields of neuroethics and neurolaw) have given increasing prominence to a normative analysis of the ethical-legal challenges in the mind and brain sciences in terms of rights, freedoms, entitlements and associated obligations. This way of analyzing the ethical and legal implications of neuroscience has come to be known as “neurorights.” Neurorights can be defined as the ethical, legal, social, or natural principles of freedom or entitlement related to a person’s cerebral and mental domain; that is, the fundamental normative rules for the protection and preservation of the human brain and mind. Although reflections on neurorights have received ample coverage in the mainstream media and have rapidly become a mainstream topic in the public neuroethics discourse, the frequency of such reflections in the academic literature is still relatively scarce. While the prominence of the neurorights debate in public opinion is crucial to ensure public engagement and democratic participation in deliberative processes on this issue, its relatively sporadic presence in the academic literature poses a risk of semantic-normative ambiguity and conceptual confusion. This risk is exacerbated by the presence of multiple and not always reconcilable terminologies. Several meta-ethical, normative ethical, and legal-philosophical questions need to be solved in order to ensure that neurorights can be used as effective instruments of global neurotechnology governance and be adequately imported into international human rights law. To overcome the shortcomings above, this paper attempts to provide a comprehensive normative-ethical, historical and conceptual analysis of neurorights. In particular, it attempts to (i) reconstruct a history of neurorights and locate these rights in the broader history of idea, (ii) outline a systematic conceptual taxonomy of neurorights, (iii) summarize ongoing policy initiatives related to neurorights, (iv) proactively address some unresolved ethico-legal challenges, and (v) identify priority areas for further academic reflection and policy work in this domain.


2018 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Thai-Huy Nguyen ◽  
AndrÉs Castro Samayoa ◽  
Marybeth Gasman ◽  
Steve Mobley

Background Researchers have tended to favor scholarship that looks at institutional forms of support for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students in the context of resource centers specifically tailored to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students. Our study makes two distinct contributions to the study of gay and lesbian students of color: (1) We move away from resource centers as a focal point of support for students and attempt to explore the role of student health at 11 HBCUs; and (2) We draw attention to the ways in which health administrators challenge the influence of respectability to promote the delivery of healthcare that is attuned to the needs and experiences of sexual minorities, thereby providing evidence that pushes back against dominant narratives that reinforce HBCUs as homogenous communities of conservatism and homophobia. Research Question This study seeks to answer the following questions: (1) How do student health directors at HBCUs promote policies and practices that are attuned to the health of their gay and lesbian students? and (2) What conditions are developed to cultivate a student health center that not only addresses students’ physical health, but is also “in a position to reaffirm these students”? Participants Eleven student health directors at 4-year private and public HBCUs. Research Design The inquiry is situated within the tradition of narrative analyses. Semistructured interviews were conducted with our participants. Data Collection and Analysis We structured each interview around six broad open-ended questions that offered opportunities for us to tease out unique areas of tension during the interview and to “lead the respondent on a journey, to a frame of mind from which she will understand our ‘big’ questions.” These questions included perceptions of challenges and successes of campus inclusiveness for sexual minority students, clinical services, sensitivity training for staff, and the presence of same gender loving brochures and messaging. Findings Our data offers a narrative that illuminates the forces that shape the challenges and opportunities for student health directors (SHDs) to engender change within and outside student health centers and how that ultimately affects the provision of health services to gay and lesbian students. More importantly, it showcases how efforts are made to challenge the influence of respectability to ensure student health and well-being. The findings are organized under the following themes: (a) building trust, (b) partnerships, (c) resistance, and (d) envisioning next steps. Conclusions We provide an extensive discussion in how student health directors manage the challenges associated with dominant institutional ideologies, as well as critical implications for future research and practice.


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