scholarly journals Flat Out! Dancing the city at a time of austerity

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 797-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Noxolo
Keyword(s):  
Community Arts ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
The City

This paper reflects on and challenges existing paradigms around movement and mobilisation in and with the city. This focus is provoked by a community arts project called ‘Flat Out’, in which the researcher collaborated with the Drum Intercultural Arts Centre and Birmingham Royal Ballet, on a dance project with members of the community in the Lozells and Newtown areas of the city. The paper pushes for more deeply embodied and more highly politicised versions of place ballet and urban vortex, introducing a concept of choreography that comes from dance practice, and working through decolonial and postcolonial theories. A brief auto-ethnography of the author’s Birmingham childhood illustrates that movement repertoires are diverse, historically and spatially conditioned, and, in the case of Birmingham, located within an ongoing ‘decolonial churn’.

scholarly journals Straining: Young Men Working through Waithood in Freetown, Sierra Leone

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon Finn ◽  
Sophie Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
African Cities ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Youth Bulge ◽  
The City ◽  
Informal Trading

Young men in precarious situations of persistent un(der)employment in post-civil war Freetown, Sierra Leone are depicted in popular and policy debate as “stuck” economically or “dangerous” and prone to violence. In the present paper, by contrast, we draw on young men's explanations of their work and livelihood struggles as “straining.” We explore the logic of straining, its innovations and demands, and its geography across the city, especially where acts of straining interface with the prohibition and criminalisation of informal trading. We argue that straining innovates and endures because of (not despite) young men's marginalisation and limited autonomy and power. In this context, young men build forms of provisional agency and enact dynamic forms of waithood, in their strategies to earn a living to try to support their families and to negotiate a transition from youth to manhood. Drawing on this research, we argue for a more complex understanding of young men at work in Freetown, in particular, and of the “youth bulge,” in general, in African cities.

Envisioning Urban Histories: Bristol as Palimpsest, Postcards, and Snapshots

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Crang
Keyword(s):  
Historical Geography ◽  
Working Through ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This paper is an attempt to juxtapose a variety of ways in which a city's history can be portrayed by working through various forms through which the history of Bristol has been envisioned. First, I hope to use the concept of the palimpsest from historical geography as a stage on which other ways of portraying the city can be interrogated. These other envisionings I subsequently stage are the visions bound up in touristic sights, that is in the pictures used in and created by heritage displays; and the ‘dispersed memory’ of archive pictures, principally the Reece Winstone archive of Bristol By studying the connections and disjunctures in this triptych I hope to suggest the importance and complexity of technologies used to envisage the city. I try to suggest that pictures of the city cannot be used as naive documents to illustrate the passage of time—despite how often they are used to do this. Different senses of historicity are manufactured through the space—times created by different processes of envisioning the city. I suggest the interlinkage of these technologies echoes through a specifically urban ‘picturesque’ photography that coalesces a sensitivity to the passage of time with a detailed cognisance of the city in visual depictions of Bristol.

scholarly journals Cri-de-Coeur

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 126-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine McGovern
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Work Practice ◽  
Social Work Practice ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The City ◽  
Academic Year

This essay consists of a reflection on how the pandemic has affected my social work practice as a social work professor at the City University of New York, in the Bronx. It describes my thoughts and feelings, and identifies ways I intend to move forward in the coming academic year. It focuses on working through uncertainty by blurring boundaries between traditional practice expectations and practice during extraordinary times.

scholarly journals Composing the North: A Musical Study of Identity, Transformation, and Reflection

Nordlit ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Stanovic
Keyword(s):  
Steel Production ◽  
Identity Transformation ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
The North ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
National Decline ◽  
Identity Transformations ◽  
The City

In 2015, occursus – a network of artists, researchers, and academics with an interest in space and spatialities in art – commissioned a series of musical compositions based on a small patch of land close to the centre of Sheffield, England. The land in question, which houses one of the world’s oldest cementation furnaces, has witnessed a remarkable period of transformation; initially standing among some 2,500 furnaces in the heart of the industrialised city centre, the national decline of steel production resulted in dereliction and for much of the past sixty years the furnace towered over wasteland. occursus acquired the land in 2012, and turned it into a community arts space, now known as Furnace Park. This article explains how a series of composers responded to this park through the creation of new musical works. Although most attention is directed to the author’s own work, Foundry Flux (2015), the primary focus of the article is on the collective approach to occursus’ objectives which, to the surprise of all of the commission-holders, focused their attention way beyond the tiny patch of land in the heart of Sheffield; the project became a catalyst for: 1) studying the identity of the city; 2) observing and initiating transformations of that identity; and 3) reflecting upon one’s own role within such identity transformations. In combining these three, those in the group found themselves engaged in a practical process of composing the north.

scholarly journals Austerity urbanism and Olympic counter-legacies: Gendering, defending and expanding the urban commons in East London

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 812-830 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Gillespie ◽  
Kate Hardy ◽  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Single Mothers ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Reproductive Activities ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
The City

This article reflects on an occupation led by single mothers to contest the destruction of social housing in post-Olympics East London. In the process, it argues for a more gendered theorisation of the urban commons. Drawing on auto-ethnography, participant observation and qualitative interviews, the article argues three central points: First, that the occupation demonstrates the gendered nature of the urban commons and the leadership of women in defending them from enclosure; second that the defence of an existing urban commons enabled the creation of a new temporary commons characterised by the collectivisation of gendered socially reproductive activities; and third that this commoning has had a lasting impact on housing activism at the city scale and beyond. This impact is conceptualised as an ‘Olympic counter-legacy’ that is characterised by the forging of new relationships and affinities, the strengthening of networked activism and circulation of tactics between campaign groups.

scholarly journals How Do We Work? Metacognition in Creative and Collaborative Practices

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byron Wolfe ◽  
◽  
Seher Erdoǧan Ford ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Studio Art ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
New Graduate ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
The City

constitute best practices for initiatingand maintaining sustainable collaborations?These questions arise regularly within the context of our institution, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, which is part of TempleUniversity in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school includes the departments of Architecture and Environmental Design, Art Education and Community Arts Practices, Art History, Studio Art, and Graphic and Interactive Design. It recently updated its structure and adopted a name that captures its breadth of programs to support cross-disciplinary study and reflect current understanding of creative practice and research.One of us being a professor in Studio Art with a background in Photography and the other in Architecture and EnvironmentalDesign, our collective experience and shared interests in interdisciplinary engagements motivated us to design and co-teach a new, graduate-level course focusing on collaboration and the creative process. Following preparations and planning for about a year, we taught the course titled “ Collaboration and Creativity” three times since its first iteration in the fall of 2017. Each semester varied widely in terms of the number of students enrolled, background and expectations both on the part of the students as well as us, as instructors. So far the cohort has included students from architecture, photography, ceramics, glass, painting, printmaking, sculpture and film and media programs.To facilitate research-based collaborative work, we considered place-based topics, allowing for various modes of research, which would generate connections with the local environment. Since students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and with different skill-sets enroll in the course, we deliberately selected a neutral topic of study, a locally sourced stone, in order to encourage a shared experience of discovery. Taking its name from the creek that defines the northwestern arm of the city of Philadelphia, the Wissahickon schist stone—a metamorphic rock—is widely used in historical construction in the area and well-recognized for its distinct specks of shiny mica and multi-toned layers of gray, blue, brown, and black. We decided to work with this stone as a departure point for diverse lines of inquiry into physical, historical, cultural, and social domains.

Lucan/The Word at War

Ramus ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 122-164
Author(s):  
John Henderson
Keyword(s):  
World War ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Working Through ◽  
The City ◽  
As If

there is a word — which bears a sword — can pierce an armed man it hurls its barbed syllables — and is mute again where it fell — the saved will tell — on patriotic day some epauletted brother — gave his breath away Dickinson (c. 1858) your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tarnara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts Calvino (1979) 1.1. Since ‘World War War 2’ the study of Lucan's rhetoric has made successful, if sporadic and contested, advances on many fronts; much remains to be done for his poetic. It is likely that the ‘unassuming’ exegetical form of attention traditionally represented in classical scholarship by the former has favoured its development: you may identify a crazy (ab)use of, say, metalepsis without committing yourself to a particular valuation of a text; whereas the axiomatically enthusiastic valuation embodied in the study of poetics must soon come hard up against the trench-lines of hierarchies of sensibility and taste. Just how good is Lucan — I mean, as ‘a poet’? The often unspoken gloss is nearly always the (sub)agenda (The answer is, still: ‘Quite good: Silver.’). Those who have steadied their sights have made out a poet's design, a fight to achieve a strong identity over against his inheritance, working through and against the traditional battery of schemata.

Hoops and “Education”: Latino Males, Fugitivity, and Basketball in the City

2020 ◽  
pp. 004208592096636
Author(s):  
Juan F. Carrillo
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Immigration Policies ◽  
Latino Males ◽  
Working Through ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Latinxs have a long history of participation in basketball, yet links to education scholarship are for the most part non-existent. In a context of ongoing subtractive policies around curriculum, teaching, toxic immigration policies and other sociopolitical realities, Latinxs have long used “hoops” as a space for identity formation, “education,” and refuge. Working through the aforementioned gap in education scholarship, I make connections to Latino males research, work on fugitivity, and draw implications for decolonizing forms of education/schooling.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document