The Literary Depiction of the “Public Space”: Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plain Revisited

Rural China ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-171
Author(s):  
Zhi Gao

Chen Zhongshi’s novel, White Deer Plain, is a complex text revealing the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of a community in transformation in which multiple public spaces coexist and struggle to survive. As a reinterpretation of the novel, this article examines three types of public spaces: the popular, the political, and the cultural-educational, respectively. Focusing on the forms of depiction, the inner workings of the public spaces, the overlapping between different spaces and their expansion, this article aims to delineate the trajectories of the rise and fall of such public spaces and explore their entangling and association with modernity.

Author(s):  
Guillaume Heuguet

This exploratory text starts from a doctoral-unemployed experience and was triggered by the discussions within a collective of doctoral students on this particularly ambiguous status since it is situated between student, unemployed, worker, self-entrepreneur, citizen-subject of social rights or user-commuter in offices and forms. These discussions motivated the reading and commentary of a heterogeneous set of texts on unemployment, precariousness and the functioning of the institutions of the social state. This article thus focuses on the relationship between knowledge and unemployment, as embodied in the public space, in the relationship with Pôle Emploi, and in the academic literature. It articulates a threefold problematic : what is known and said publicly about unemployment? What can we learn from the very experience of the relationship with an institution like Pôle Emploi? How can these observations contribute to an understanding of social science inquiry and the political role of knowledge fromm precariousness?


Author(s):  
Daniel Toscano López

This chapter seeks to show how the society of the digital swarm we live in has changed the way individuals behave to the point that we have become Homo digitalis. These changes occur with information privatization, meaning that not only are we passive consumers, but we are also producers and issuers of digital communication. The overarching argument of this reflection is the disappearance of the “reality principle” in the political, economic, and social spheres. This text highlights that the loss of the reality principle is the effect of microblogging as a digital practice, the uses of which can either impoverish the space of people's experience to undermine the public space or achieve the mobilization of citizens against of the censorship of the traditional means of communication by authoritarian political regimes, such as the case of the Arab Spring in 2011.


SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401882449
Author(s):  
Noor-ul-Ain Sajjad ◽  
Ayesha Perveen

The article studies art, as presented in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, as a heterotopia based on Michel Foucault’s six principles. After outlining the six principles of heterotopia as enunciated by Foucault, the study excavates heterotopia of crisis and deviation from the novel. Art as a medium of representation has cathartic potential creating heterotopia in societies dominated by public discourses against art. It provides the artist with a medium for personal and private expression, thus creating a desanctified space. The notion that art that is made public restricts such liberty for the artist is proposed and justified. In My Name Is Red, characters such as Elegant Effendi and Olive can be seen tormented by the conflict between the social and the heterotopic. True expression of their art makes both of them lose their place, albeit in different ways. This implies that if a heterotopia of deviation has to be made public, in most cases, the honesty of expression is tampered with by the artist, even if unconsciously, because of societal pressures. Heterotopia of deviation is not compatible with the public gaze and making it public will create a heterotopia of crisis for the honest artists. This is why the artist hides his real creative inspiration. If art could be accepted as a desanctified medium without any moral or hegemonic judgment, it might attain its desired impact which politicization of the medium restricts in many judgmental societies. Pamuk pens this dilemma down by taking his readers back to the 16th-century Istanbul while drawing a parallel to the present era.


IDEA JOURNAL ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 88-101
Author(s):  
Menna Agha ◽  
Els DeVos

In 1964, indigenous Nubians were displaced from their original land – the land between what is now Egypt and that of Sudan – to modernised settlements built by the Egyptian state. The Nubians dissatisfaction with the novel built environment translated into transgressive public spaces. One of the most common transgressions was the addition of an external bench called Mastaba. Since power relations between men and women have changed, the built environment now acts as a catalyst in the exclusion of women from formal public spaces such as conventional coffee shops and squares. Mastabas function as liminal spaces, spaces which blur the boundaries between public and private spheres. As these spaces do not suit the formal understanding of public spaces, we investigate these liminal spaces in order to reveal the spatial tactics of the marginal. We argue that the existence of these spaces raises issues of spatial justice and spatial resistance.    The behaviour of liminal public spaces varies; they have the ability to transform adjacent spaces. This research investigates the role of the Mastaba in opening up the public space for women, thereby giving them the ability to contribute to the writing of their social contract. We base our analysis on extensive fieldwork, consisting of auto-ethnographic observations and participation, informed by a feminist epistemology. We use tools of spatial analysis to explore an alternative public space offered by liminality. To question the binary notions of private and public space, we ask ourselves: where does that space start? As spatial professionals, we also wonder: can we contest the hegemonic definition of public space and contribute to spatial resistance? Drawing lessons from the case of the Mastaba, we propose contingencies for designing the liminal that serve the marginal.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Pasqualetto ◽  
Fabio Perocco

In Italy, over the last years in the world of social struggles asylum seekers have been in the spotlight several times, having led several episodes of mobilisations and protests. They emerged as political subjects, with their own claims and situations; parallel to the issue of reception, they expressed themselves in the public space as asylum seekers, with campaigns, pickets, and marches, with which the respect for their rights and dignity is advocated. This study analyses the causes, forms and repercussions of the struggles of asylum seekers in the last decade. After the analysis of the experience of immigrants’ struggles over the last three decades, the article examines the social roots and the features of the struggles of asylum seekers between 2011 to 2019, and considers their meaning in the political context.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (04) ◽  
pp. 221-231
Author(s):  
Youness HABBACH

This research aims at analysing the pragmatic prominent discourse in the public sphere, the digital sphere in particular, that reflects special changes in the society. The meant discourse has not been investigated adequately and sufficiently namely the social, the political and the digital virtual discourses which bear an effective semantic and pragmatic power on the public space and at the same time incorporate strong transformations in the values patterns. This study utilizes a pragmatic approach, since the pragmatics is a study of using language in communication, and works on analysing daily discourses using a journalistic editorial. So, what are the changes reflected by this discourse? And what are the values represented and expressed by the prevailing discourses in the public sphere?


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Αθανάσιος Μπαρλαγιάννης

This study is about the organization of public hygiene in the kingdom of Greece between 1833, when prince Otto of Bavaria ascends to the throne, and 1845, when the political and epidemiological frontiers of the kingdom are traced by a complete system of lazarettos and sanitary offices. We will firstly analyze the structures of sanitary prevention in the interior of the country (vaccinators, public health doctors, municipal doctors) as well as at its frontiers, and then we will focus on the measures against contagious diseases (such as the plague and smallpox) and against miasmas. We are also interested in examining the main diseases that determine the mortality of the period under scrutiny and the medical theories that explain the applicable sanitary measures. At the same time, we will review some of the aspects of the classical distinction of Erwin Ackerknecht between contagionism and miasmatic theory. Finally, we will study the difficult formation of an official group of medical professionals. The interest in public hygiene imposes the study of the biological construction of the state and, subsequently, of the state itself. Public hygiene defines the threats which it tries to prevent, and it creates and secures the collectivity. In the Police State of thecameralist king Otto, these developments are controlled by the bureaucracy, the administration, the public force and the science of medical police. Its purpose is to construct and order the public space, the space of state action, which is natural as well as social. This action of ordering imposes the centralization of health and at the same time it normalizes the natural elements and the social forces so that they can coordinate without resistance; in other words, the action of ordering pacifies. Medical police controls these processes by reconfiguring the ties that bind individuals with each other and with the geography, the nature and their diseases.


2018 ◽  
pp. 12-33
Author(s):  
Iná Elias De Castro

RESUMOEste artigo se propõe debater as condições para a transformação dos espaços públicos em espaços políticos e responder como isto ocorre. A tese defendida é a de que os espaços públicos são espaços do cotidiano social urbano e não possuem uma essência política, embora possam tornar-se espaços políticos quando invadidos por fenômenos da política que transformam temporariamente suas rotinas e seu público usual. O texto está dividido em três partes. Na primeira, a política é conceituada como um sistema institucional e operacional de resolução de conflitos de interesses, apresentando os riscos da falácia, muito comum na literatura sociológica, de considerar a política como uma esfera abstrata. Na segunda, o espaço político é apresentado como um conceito, que apesar da origem na ciência política, foi apropriado e ampliado na geografia política como espaço de ação das políticas públicas e das leis, mas também dos movimentos sociais e dos atos políticos. Na terceira, são elaborados os argumentos da tese central deste texto, respondendo à questão sobre as circunstâncias em que os espaços públicos podem se transformar em espaços políticos.Palavras-chave: Espaço político; espaço público; mobilizações políticas. ABSTRACTThis article proposes to discuss the conditions for the transformation of public spaces into political spaces and to respond how this occurs. The thesis defended is that public spaces are spaces of everyday urban social and do not have a political essence, although they may become political spaces when invaded by phenomena of politics that temporarily transform their routines and their usual public. The text is divided into three parts. In the first, politics is conceptualized as an institutional and operational system for resolving conflicts of interest, presenting the risks of the fallacy, very common in the sociological literature, of considering politics as an abstract sphere. In the second, the political space is presented as a concept, that despite the origin in political science, was appropriated and expanded in political geography as a space for action of public policies and laws, but also for social movements and political acts. In the third part, the arguments of the central thesis of this text are elaborated, answering the question about the circumstances in which the public spaces can turn into political spaces.Keywords: Political space; public space; political mobilizations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margrethe Troensegaard

What is the contemporary condition of the monument? In relation to the current issue’s discussion of immersive and discursive exhibition practices, this essay places itself at a slight remove; rather than to analyse and evaluate specific curatorial strategies it seeks to raise questions of relevance to such practices and begins by moving the discourse out of the museum and into the public space. The point of interrogation here is the monument, a form with a particular capacity to tease and expose the triad we find at the core of any curatorial discourse: the relation between institution, artwork and audience. Following an introductory reflection on how to describe and define a ‘monument’, a term so broadly used it all but loses its value, the text proceeds to examine three cases, Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, Dakar (2010), Danh Vo’s WE THE PEOPLE (DETAIL), various locations (2010-13), and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, New York (2013). The sequencing of these geographically and culturally diverse works makes way for an interrogatory piece of writing that addresses the question of permanence versus temporariness of the artwork as exhibition (and the exhibition as artwork), and that of the political agency of the artistic form. Probing the social agency of the monument, the text draws lines between the symbolising capacity once held by modern sculpture and the oscillation between immersion and discursiveness as two complimentary modes of communication. The discursive content or function of the monument (i.e. what it commemorates) is activated through the viewer’s personal, immersive encounter with its form, a form that potentially places its viewer as a participant to the construction of its message rather than as a mere receiver.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 668-678
Author(s):  
Sue Spaid

AbstractThis paper employs Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the social, which lacks location and mandates conformity, to evaluate social media’s: a) challenge to the polis, b) relationship to the social, b) influence on private space, d) impact on public space, and e) virus-like capacity to capture, mimic, and replicate the agonistic polis, where “everything [is] decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.” Using Arendt’s exact language, this paper begins by discussing how she differentiated the political, private, social, and public realms. After explaining how online activities resemble (or not) her notion of the social, I demonstrate how the rise of the social, which she characterized as dominated by behavior (not action), ruled by nobody and occurring nowhere, continues to eclipse both private and public space at an alarming pace. Finally, I discuss the ramifications of social media’s setting the stage for worldlessness to spin out of control, as the public square becomes an intangible web. Unlike an Arendtian web of worldly human relationships that fosters individuality and enables excellence to be publicly tested, social media feeds a craving for kinship and connection, however remotely. Leaving such needs unfulfilled, social media risks to trump bios politicos.


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