scholarly journals Panorama as Method

Prism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yomi Braester
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Virtual Spaces ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
Architectural Models ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Abstract Diverse artifacts in contemporary Chinese visual culture—from urban screens to architectural models, art exhibits, and viral media—share a panoramic breadth. This article suggests, however, that we should regard panorama not as a preordained form but as a discursive construct that posits an imaginary vantage point. Panorama as method notes the use of scale, recording of the skyline, and mediation of the cityscape. The article asks what material conditions and ideological circumstances allow for the existence of the images at hand and what brings us to identify them as panoramic. The implications reach far beyond specific artifacts: panorama as method challenges accepted paradigms about the relationship between the modern subject and urban space, including the distinction between cartographic vision and street-level immersion. The article focuses on what may be called the panoramic imaginary in contemporary Chinese urbanism: a visual emphasis on expansive space by scaling the built environment up and down, thereby recalibrating social relations and relocating civic engagement to virtual spaces.

scholarly journals Ragpicking as Method

Prism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Hillenbrand
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Core Theme ◽  
Felt Sense ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Human Figure ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Abstract This article explores the relationship between precarity, waste, and the ragpicker in contemporary Chinese visual culture. It asks first why precarity has come so little and so late to the theoretical scene in China, a society in which precarious experience is so rife as to be almost endemic. The essay then goes on to show how some of China's leading artists now work profusely with refuse—as a core theme of the precarious present—while noting the strange anomaly that their works offer up scant if any space for the figure of the waste picker. The artist, instead, has taken over her mantle as the sifter and sorter of garbage. This missing human figure matters, in part because waste is always about people—and their absence from aesthetic space suggests that art is responding to a felt sense that personhood is coming under assault as basic life sureties fray. But this essay also argues that the garbage takeover is part of a sustained practice of appropriation, effacement, even cruelty in the artistic representation of precarity in China. China's wasteworks are art forms born at the tense interface between different class actors, and they disclose fraught fears over where brittle life experience begins and ends in a society that has tried to eliminate class as a category of political action and analysis.

John D. French and Daniel James, eds., The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. vii + 320 pp. $54.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.

2000 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 142-145
Author(s):  
Eileen Findlay
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Relationship

This is an invaluable volume, expanding Latin American women's and labor history in important thematic, methodological, and theoretical directions. The authors explore the lives, struggles, and consciousness of urban working women in Brazil, the Southern Cone, Guatemala, and Colombia. By and large, the essays develop a nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender and class in twentieth-century Latin America. They incorporate postmodern approaches to historical analysis as well as the classic concerns of labor history with material conditions, social relations, and working-class political consciousness. The contributors examine the multiple meanings of discourse and popular culture while insisting that it is indeed possible to recapture women's experience in some measure. They generally move beyond the dichotomy of celebrating women's heroism and denouncing sexism, instead showing how solidarity between laboring women and men could be intimately interwoven with male domination. Finally, several of the authors employ oral history in sophisticated ways, demonstrating that how a story is told can be just as important in shaping our understanding of history as the empirical detail it may seem to offer us.

Setting the Scene

Veiled Power ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Doreen Lustig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Private Business ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Relationship

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, international lawyers begin to conceive themselves as part of a modern discipline of law. This chapter returns to the debate over the legitimacy of the operation of chartered companies in Africa during this period. The dissolution of the charters towards the end of the century was reflected in the suspension of the debate over companies in international legal commentaries for almost a century. The silence following international lawyers’ active critique over the chartered companies could be conceived as a testament to the irrelevance of international legal ideas, institutions, and practices to the history of private business corporations in colonial and other global settings. This chapter argues against such an interpretation and unravels the relevance of international law to economic actors by analysing this episode from the vantage point of the Royal Niger Company operations in Africa. I argue that the dissolution of the charters did not represent a failure, as previously thought, but rather a multifaceted transformation through which the relationship between economic agents and governmental agents was renegotiated. Further, I assert that while material conditions are crucial to understanding the chronicle of the Charter’s dissolution, international law is pivotal to unraveling the contours of the alliance that replaced them.

STAGES IN SOCIAL POLICY DEVELOPMENT

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-272
Author(s):  
Venelin Terziev ◽  
Preslava Dimitrova
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
National Society ◽  
Complex Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The social policy of a country is a set of specific activities aimed at regulating the social relations between different in their social status subjects. This approach to clarifying social policy is also called functional and essentially addresses social policy as an activity to regulate the relationship of equality or inequality in society. It provides an opportunity to look for inequalities in the economic positions of individuals in relation to ownership, labor and working conditions, distribution of income and consumption, social security and health, to look for the sources of these inequalities and their social justification or undue application.The modern state takes on social functions that seek to regulate imbalances, to protect weak social positions and prevent the disintegration of the social system. It regulates the processes in society by harmonizing interests and opposing marginalization. Every modern country develops social activities that reflect the specifics of a particular society, correspond to its economic, political and cultural status. They are the result of political decisions aimed at directing and regulating the process of adaptation of the national society to the transformations of the market environment. Social policy is at the heart of the development and governance of each country. Despite the fact that too many factors and problems affect it, it largely determines the physical and mental state of the population as well as the relationships and interrelationships between people. On the other hand, social policy allows for a more global study and solving of vital social problems of civil society. On the basis of the programs and actions of political parties and state bodies, the guidelines for the development of society are outlined. Social policy should be seen as an activity to regulate the relationship of equality or inequality between different individuals and social groups in society. Its importance is determined by the possibility of establishing on the basis of the complex approach: the economic positions of the different social groups and individuals, by determining the differences between them in terms of income, consumption, working conditions, health, etc .; to explain the causes of inequality; to look for concrete and specific measures to overcome the emerging social disparities.

Fish as Property on the Small Aral Sea, Kazakhstan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Common Pool Resources ◽  
Aral Sea ◽  
Resource Exploitation ◽  
Irrigation Projects ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Property Regime ◽  
Formal Rules

This chapter looks at a postsocialist fishery in Kazakhstan to explore the relationship between property rules designed to manage natural resources, and practices of resource exploitation. The Aral Sea is famous for its desiccation over the second half of the twentieth century, which stemmed from Soviet irrigation projects; in 2006 a World Bank/Republic of Kazakhstan project restored a small part of the sea, and fish catches have recently recovered somewhat. In this chapter, based on ethnographic and archival research, I explore the disjuncture between formal rules and practice to address debates about the management of common-pool resources. Within the nomadic economy, in contrast to livestock, fish were not property objects; over the colonial, Soviet and post-Soviet periods, they became objects of economic value in different ways, mediating different sorts of social relations. Turning to the contemporary property regime, I suggest that formal rules matter, but in unintended ways.

Space Making as Artistic Practice: The Relationship between Grassroots Art Organizations and the Political Economy of Urban Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shira Zilberstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Art Organizations ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
The Relationship

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do–It–Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations. Through their engagements with cultural representations, space and time, grassroots artists represent and amplify the interests of marginal actors. By allying with residents, community organizations and other art spaces, grassroots artists form a social movement to redefine the goals and usages of urban space. My findings indicate that heterogeneous art networks exist and grassroots art networks can influence urban space in opposition to top–down development.

scholarly journals Urban specters

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110302
Author(s):  
Asha Best ◽  
Margaret M Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Method ◽  
Urban Futures ◽  
Black Life ◽  
The Relationship

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

The Stabilisation of the Capitalist Order and Liberal Value Orientations in Serbia

Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-407
Author(s):  
Mladen Lazić ◽  
Jelena Pešić
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Value Changes ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Normative Value ◽  
Value Dissonance

AbstractBased on research data from 2003, 2012, and 2018, the authors examine the extent to which capitalist social relations in Serbia have determined liberal value orientations. The change of the social order in Serbia after 1990 brought about a radical change of the basis upon which values are constituted. To interpret the relationship between structural and value changes, the authors employ the theory of normative-value dissonance. Special attention in the analysis is paid to the interpretation of value changes based on the distinction between intra- and inter-systemic normative-value dissonance. In the first part of their study, the authors examine changes in the acceptance of liberal values over the period of consolidation of capitalism in Serbia, while in the second part they focus on the 2018 data and specific predictors of political and economic liberalism.

Desire for Self-healing

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 317-335
Author(s):  
Ngar-sze Lau
Keyword(s):  
Theravada Buddhism ◽  
Self Healing ◽  
Core Knowledge ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Core ◽  
Physical Suffering ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Core Practice ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Abstract This practice report describes how Chinese meditators understand the “four foundations of mindfulness” (satipaṭṭhāna, sinianzhu 四念住) as a remedy for both mental and physical suffering. In the tradition of Theravāda Buddhism, satipaṭṭhāna is particularly recognized as the core knowledge for understanding the relationship between mind and body, and the core practice leading to liberation from suffering. Based on interviews with Chinese meditation practitioners, this study develops three main themes concerning how they have alleviated afflictions through the practice of satipaṭṭhāna. The first theme highlights how practitioners learn to overcome meditation difficulties with “right attitude.” The second theme is about practicing awareness with “six sense doors” open in order to facilitate the balance of the “five faculties.” The third theme explores how practitioners cultivate daily life practice through an understanding of the nature of mind and body as impermanent and as not-self. This paper details how these themes and embodied practices of satipaṭṭhāna constitute ways of self-healing for urban educated Buddhists in the contemporary Chinese context.

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