In Search of National Decoration

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-154
Author(s):  
Christine I. Ho

Abstract In the late 1930s, design studies in China underwent a paradigmatic shift when the cosmopolitan idioms fashioned within treaty-port cities were rejected in favor of populist ethnonationalism, developed along the border regions of wartime China. This essay examines design compendia by Pang Xunqin and Lei Guiyuan, founding figures in modern design studies, as proposals that advocate for a reevaluation of folk and ethnic-minority traditions. Shaped by a signal moment in wartime modernism, the design proposals are located at the conjunction of two fields of knowledge that were discursively reframed by the heightened cultural nationalism of the Sino-Japanese War: the expansion of modern archaeology, and ethnographic study of minority cultures. In reclaiming folk-minority craft as a generative source of decoration, Pang Xunqin and Lei Guiyuan were also critically engaged with delimiting the design profession as a specialized realm of knowledge production.

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802612110097
Author(s):  
Magali Peyrefitte

Embracing the manifesto for a ‘live’ sociology, I included portraiture into the research design of an ethnographic study into women’s lived experiences of French suburbia and organised an exhibition entitled Habitantes d’Hier and d’Aujourd’hui: exposition sociologique et photographique. This was a personal project in the neighbourhood of my youth and was motivated by the intention to shine some light on the invisible stories of women living in lower-middle and middle-income suburbs in France. In this article, I reflect on the use of portraiture for the possibility it offers in capturing the ethnographic encounter as well as in giving saliency and offering a visual representation of the sociological analysis. I also discuss the exhibition of these portraits as a moment of conviviality grounded in the endeavour of writing differently from hegemonic modes of academic communication and dissemination allowing for a sharing and sharpening of the sociological imagination. It represents an opportunity to think beyond some of the more neoliberal imperatives that govern academia today and shape our sociological craft. I argue for the value of creating a moment of conviviality, that is a space challenging modes of dissemination, engagement and even impact to some extent, as well as modes of knowledge production: broadly opening up more possibilities for a truly public sociology to continue to exist.


Author(s):  
Helena Karasti ◽  
Andrea Botero ◽  
Joanna Saad-Sulonen ◽  
Karen S. Baker

STS scholars are engaging in collaborative research in order to study extended socio-technical phenomena. This article participates in discussions on methodography and inventive methods by reflecting on visualizations used both internally by a team of researchers and together with study participants. We describe how these devices for generating and transforming data were brought to our ethnographic inquiry into the formation of research infrastructures which we found to be unwieldy and evolving phenomena. The visualizations are partial renderings of the object of inquiry, crafted and informed by ‘configuration’ as a method of assemblage that supports ethnographic study of contemporary socio-technical phenomena. We scrutinize our interdisciplinary bringing together of visualizing devices - timelines, collages, and sketches - and position them in the STS methods toolbox for inquiry and invention. These devices are key to investigating and engaging with the dynamics of configuring infrastructures intended to support scientific knowledge production. We conclude by observing how our three kinds of visualizing devices provide flexibility, comprehension and in(ter)ventive opportunities for study of and engagement with complex phenomena in-the-making.


Author(s):  
Alireza Kharazmi-Nezhad ◽  
Nesip Ömer Erem

Architectural design, whether as a knowledge production process or as a ‘means’ for producing knowledge, has been the hot topic of theoretical debates since the late 1990s. Despite the developments, it requires more clarity as a young culture in the discipline. This research aims at deciphering the theoretical body to identify and bring the central themes into sight and provide a legible interpretation of knowledge production in architectural design. To this end, a unique methodology, adopted form content analysis, has been utilized. In this paper, a piece of the relevant literature was analysed by a computer application namely NVivo. The analysis has revealed a set of words from which the central themes are extracted. Out of thirty emphatic words, ten central themes are generated. According to the findings, ‘design and research’, ‘design process and methods’, and ‘newness and novelty’ appeared to be the key themes when knowledge production in architecture matters. The remaining seven themes are mainly included in the key themes. The findings show that knowledge production in architectural design is much more influenced by the field of design studies rather than architecture. This study remarks that the objective and generic aspect of architecture is investigated for knowledge production, however, taking architecture-specific dimensions into account could bring new insights into the discipline.Az építészeti tervezés a tudástermelés folyamataként és „eszközeként” is az elméleti viták központi témája az 1990-es évek vége óta. Bár még fejlődésben van, a tudomány fiatal területeként szükség van arra, hogy fogalmait egyértelműbbé tegyék. E kutatás célja egy elméleti törzsanyag meghatározása, hogy a tudástermelés területe jól körülhatárolható legyen, célkitűzései láthatóvá, és fogalma értelmezhetővé váljon az építészeti tervezésben is. Ennek érdekében egyedülálló módszertan, formai tartalomelemzés alkalmazására került sor. A tanulmányban a vonatkozó szakirodalom egy részét az NVivo elnevezésű számítógépes alkalmazás segítségével elemeztük. Az elemzés gyakran ismételt szóhalmazokat gyűjtött, majd ezek alapján kivonatolta a szövegekben leggyakrabban előforduló témákat. A program harminc hangsúlyos szóból tíz központi témát generált. Az építészetre vonatkozó tudástermelés vizsgálata során a leggyakoribb találatok a „tervezés és kutatás”, a „tervezési folyamat és módszerek”, valamint az „újdonság és újszerűség” voltak. A többi hét témát nagyrészt magukba foglalták ezek a kulcstémák. A további eredmények azt mutatják, hogy az építészeti tervezésben megjelenő tudástermelésre nagyobb mértékben hatnak a tervezéselméleti stúdiumok, mint az építészeti gyakorlat. Noha jelen tanulmányunk az építészet objektív és általános aspektusát vizsgálja a tudástermelés szempontjából, e tudományágban később új fejezetet nyithatnak a kifejezetten építészeti szempontú megközelítések is.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Katharina Grasskamp

During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells’ shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Anderson

Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not solely connected to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.


2013 ◽  
Vol 411-414 ◽  
pp. 2934-2937
Author(s):  
Bo Zhao ◽  
Yan Ling Liao

In China's education of information technology, State-wide standardized textbooks take little into account the local ethnic minority cultures; thus limiting the opportunities of preserving the unique ethnic traditions through education. In this paper, an ontology presented by UML (Unified Modeling Language) is constructed to describe the semantic relations among curriculum (information technology), ethnic minority cultures and the others. Furthermore, we convert the ontology into a database family in order to develop effective curriculum resources system based on ethnic minority cultures for sharing by teachers.


Author(s):  
Stef Jansen

As part of a belated interest in people's engagements with possible futures, the start of the 3rd millennium has witnessed the emergence of a burgeoning subfield around the anthropology of hope. Anthropologists investigate the objects of people's hopes and their attempts to fulfil them. They also reflect on hope as an affect and disposition, and as a method of knowledge production. Three interrelated but analytically distinguishable concerns can be discerned in the anthropology of hope. First, anthropologists are interested in the conditions of possibility of hoping. Such studies of the political economy of hope explore the circumstances in which hopefulness does or does not flourish, and the unequal distribution of intensities of hoping, and of particular hopes, amongst different categories of people. A second domain consists of anthropological research on the shapes that hoping takes. Studies in this phenomenological vein investigate how hopefulness and hopes appear in the world. How does hoping work over time in people's practices, reflections, and orientations, and with which intended and unintended effects? Third, we find a concern with the relationship between hoping as a subject matter of ethnographic study and anthropology as a form of knowledge production. How do scholarly understandings of hope inform the development of the discipline and, in particular, its engagement with political critique and its capacity to help imagine alternatives?


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sayaka Osanami Törngren ◽  
Jonathan Ngeh

In the current literature on methodology and knowledge production, there is a substantial imbalance in interracial and interethnic research: the perspective has primarily been that of the ‘white gaze’. This article reverses that gaze and attempts to initiate a methodological discussion that is missing today: what occurs when non-white researchers interview a white-majority population or persons of the same racial but different ethnic background? Based on the experiences of a female researcher with an East Asian background (Sayaka Osanami Törngren) and a male researcher with an African background (Jonathan Ngeh) who conducted interviews in Malmö, Sweden, this article analyzes incidents in which the boundaries between race, ethnicity and non-Swedishness in relation to non-whiteness are implicitly and explicitly communicated between the researcher and the researched. Our experiences reveal that the demarcation of these boundaries is not fixed but highly fluid.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document