Art, Life and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Curating Social Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Central Argument

Addressing the latest encounter between feminist politics and art, this article identifies a curatorially driven turn towards social reproduction processes and infrastructures across the contemporary art field. It analyses the curatorial mediation of social practice through two UK-based projects that foreground social and economic justice issues, specifically through the politics and economies of food: Effy Harle and Finbar Prior’s Wandering Womb (2018), commissioned by Manual Labours for Nottingham Contemporary, and WochenKlausur’s Women-led Workers’ Cooperative (2013), initiated through Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts as part of the ECONOMY exhibition project. The central argument is that a rigorous engagement with social reproduction perspectives and theoretical vectors is vital to the analysis and critique of feminist curatorial work within the contemporary art institution.

Suzanne Lacy between Kaprow and Chicago

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
Amelia Jones
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Radical Innovations ◽  
Judy Chicago

Social practice and dematerialization are often cited as the most radical innovations in Euro-American contemporary art since the late 1960s, but rarely have historians acknowledged the crucial role of experimental pedagogy in this shift of art towards performance, conceptualism, and activism. The practice of Los Angeles–based performance artist Suzanne Lacy radically extended the ideas of her teachers and mentors Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago into revised structures of artmaking towards activist social practice performances driven by conceptual, political, and embodied concerns.

Digital Resources: Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
María C. Gaztambide
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Digital Archive ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Latino Artists

Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project is a multiyear initiative at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that seeks to consolidate Latin American and Latino art as a field of study and to place it on equal footing with other established aesthetic traditions. It encompasses the recovery, translation into English, and publication of primary texts by Latin American and Latino artists, critics, and curators who have played a fundamental role in the development of modern and contemporary art in countries or communities throughout the Americas. The ICAA makes these essential bibliographic materials available free of charge through a digital archive and a series of fully annotated book anthologies published in English. It is facilitating new historical scholarship on 20th-century Latin American and Latino art through a framework of thirteen open-ended editorial categories that center on thematic rather than more traditional chronological guidelines. This approach broadens the discourse on the modern and contemporary art produced along this cultural axis. A discussion and contextualization of a selection of recovered documents that relate to the editorial category of “Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?” supports this central argument. These and other little-known or previously inaccessible primary source and critical materials will ultimately encourage interdisciplinary and transnational (re)readings of how aesthetics, social issues, and artistic tendencies have been contested and developed in the region.

scholarly journals Workplace, emotional bonds and agency: Everyday gendered experiences of work in an export processing zone in Tamil Nadu, India

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (7) ◽  
pp. 1357-1374
Author(s):  
Madhumita Dutta
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Work Life ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Form Complex ◽  
Emotional Bonds ◽  
The Everyday

This article advances labour geography’s understanding of worker agency by examining how women actively remake the workplace by forming emotional bonds and community on and off the shop floor. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research with women workers in a Nokia cell-phone factory, I prioritise attention to the ways that women act, live, work and struggle in their attempt to ‘rework’ or resist their work-life situations in a patriarchal capitalist system. I show that in the everyday practices and experiences of work and work life, women form complex feelings towards their workplaces, including a sense of self-worth and feelings of belonging and mutual care. Work is more than just a job. The research urges greater recognition of the ways in which: (a) agency is produced in the workplace through the everyday social practice of care and emotional bonds that women form with each other and, through that, to their work; (b) that agency acts both as a form of resistance and as a form of attachment to the workplace; and (c) for women, work is not just about wages – nor is it just about social reproduction through the family – it is also about the social reproduction of new identities and forms of community that are forged at work, which both shape and are shaped by their experiences as workers.

scholarly journals Thinking with the uterine

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 324-327
Author(s):  
Maria Fannin
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
New Material ◽  
The Brain

This commentary on Sophie Lewis’s essay, ‘Cyborg uterine geography: complicating care and social reproduction’ considers what a ‘uterine geography’ could offer for thinking about the body, sex, reproduction, pregnancy, birth, afterbirth, care, pain and love in new ways. While affirming the efforts in the text to generate a more complex, more-than-human and queer account of reproduction, it also raises several questions. How do narratives of maternal–fetal ‘violence’ or ‘generosity’ or ‘hospitality’ work in a broader social and political field, and more generally, how can scientific or evolutionary accounts of bodies be put to critical use in social theory? How does a ‘cyborg uterine geography’ differ from other feminist accounts of care? What are the possibilities of drawing on the ‘uterine’ as both a new material and symbolic figure, in the light of recent works that emphasize the potential for thinking feminist politics through the brain, the heart or the gut? And finally, what are the limits of a uterine geography?

PUBLIC ART IN EDUCATIONAL AND RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-162
Author(s):  
С. A. Kartseva ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Research University ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
International University ◽  
Practical Recommendations

Combining educational environment with art has a long tradition within university museums, which are a valuable research resource, responsive to the needs of teaching, research and educational activities. At the same time, today not every school, university or research center has or can afford such museums. The article discusses innovative formats of interaction between educational institutions and artistic practices through public art — contemporary art practice, intended for the unprepared audience and implying the demonstration of art in a public, non-institutional environment. The article reveals the essence of the concept of public art, its evolution from understanding itself as an object to procedural and social practice; indicates the communicative, cultural and symbolic potential of public art in the formation of environments, communities, in the promotion of innovative ideas on the basis of universities or other educational institutions on the example of projects implemented at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow International University, Skolkovo Innovation Center. The conclusions of the article are the practical recommendations for creating public art projects on the territory of modern educational and research centers, based on communicative, site-specific, socially engaged approach.

scholarly journals Legitimacy and the Transfer of Children: Adoption, Belonging, and Online Genealogy

Genealogy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Patton-Imani
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Adoptive Family ◽  
Nature Versus Nurture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nature And Nurture ◽  
Micro Level

A great deal of both scholarly and public attention has been paid to questions of nature versus nurture in understanding identity and family construction in adoptees, yet much less attention has been given to the ways that power shapes the social reproduction of families through adoption. In this feminist interdisciplinary self-reflexive ethnographic research, I enter the world of online genealogy sites to critically explore the social practice of constructing a family tree as an adoptee. I explore genealogy as a culturally and historically specific representation of patriarchal heteronormative whiteness. I argue that adoptees’ liminal locations between socially understood categories of nature and nurture embedded in online family heritage websites make evident the ways that genealogical templates and stories reproduce mainstream family ideology through the erasure of “illegitimacy”. I consider what I found in my adoptive family history, critically exploring my “legitimate” relationship to my family in relation to the “illegitimate” (and unrecognized) relationship between my family and an enslaved child transferred as property between family members in 1813. This research makes visible power inequalities governing family reproduction at macro levels by exploring the contradictions and slippages regarding family “legitimacy” in micro level online genealogical constructions of adoptees’ family trees.

The shared stories that written words tell when no one is reading: exploring modality in typographic landscapes as an ecosocial semiotic system

2019 ◽  
pp. 147035721986008
Author(s):  
Ryan Pescatore Frisk ◽  
Luc Pauwels
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
Shared Stories ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Construction Organization ◽  
Distinct Features

In this article, the authors argue that typography at times functions as a primary semiotic resource when compared to the semantic meaning of text. The central inquiry further claims that this phenomenon is not an exception but, instead, a fundamental characteristic of systematic relationships in the broader semiotic network and may be understood from this perspective. The study explores typographic meaning as an ecosocial semiotic network to research how local ideologies are influenced by trajectories of semiotic potential across scales of time and space. The exploration takes up the task (however lightly or implicitly) of connecting ideas of distinct features of typography (serifs, proportions, construction, organization, cohesion, etc.) to a network of semiotic potential that is materialized within social practices of local communities. It develops an approach to understanding recurring characteristics in the semiotic system of typography through material/semiotic biases or material couplings, namely how material processes, human physiology and culture influence (and continuously reinforce) meaning in written words. Building on the assumption that aspects of material origin and social practice interact to produce variation in typographic artifacts, ecosocial semiotic theory is incorporated as a conceptual framework as well as an evaluation criteria to test the central argument. It evaluates an approach to connecting broadly distributed, large-scale cultural patterns to emplaced social practices through the idea of modality. Two prominent strands of modality are surveyed, connecting findings from the initial case study to a broader ecosocial semiotic network. Through the idea of modality, the authors present a clear argument for why typography, as a semiotic resource, is fundamentally different from images and may be seen as a direct manifestation of social difference within everyday practices.

Categories – an Attribute of Scientific and Sociotransformative Activity

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
S. S. Antyushin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
Special Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Entity

Introduction. Cognition is an essentially human attribute; a cultural entity and a precondition for social progress, in which categorisation and methodological significance play a key role. But the essence and functions of such categories can also cause disagreement in the scientific community. Hence the importance of understanding the origin, essence and meaning of categories by implication. Theoretical Basis. Methods. In order to fully and thoroughly comprehend the essence, role, types and functions of categories, it is necessary to employ rational systemic and dialectic methods, and also semantic analysis. Results. After due consideration of these issues, there was a increased conviction that categories are the most important tools, guidelines, foundations and outcomes of cognitive activity. The importance of categories in scientific research, in ensuring day-to-day life of society, as well as in the development of special knowledge systems and the implementation of specific types of social practice, is high. It is determined by the place of categories in the lexicon of science and social reproduction, in the organization of essential social activities, all of which would be impossible without having a theoretical, political and organizational uniqueness. A more complete and deeper understanding of the place of categories can be found in their origin and etymology, in the very concept of ”category” and in the essence of certain categories. Of great importance is also the typology of categories, as well as the functions and limits of their application. An important result of the study is the conclusion that categories do not ultimately give rise to fundamental contradictions between researchers of various specialisations. On the contrary, good and skilful use of categories makes it possible to gain a full perception of reality and interaction. Discussion and Conclusion. Understanding categories has become an important factor in the development of science and society. These findings present further opportunities for the development of science, technology, and the improvement of social relationships.

A socio-cognitive approach to historical politeness

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 104-132
Author(s):  
Richard J. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
English Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
First Order ◽  
Unstable Set ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Constructionist Approach

The central argument of this paper is that “politeness”, when looked at not as a theoretical term but as a lexeme in the English language, has a relatively unstable set of cognitive concepts for which it prompts when used. The first-order notion of “politeness” developed by Watts, Ide and Ehlich (1992a), Watts (2003, 2005) and Locher (2004) entails the need for a very different form of theorisation from the rationalist/objectivist approach presented in Brown and Levinson ([1978] 1987). The only way to develop such a new “theory” of first-order “politeness” is to take positively and negatively evaluated linguistic expressions referring to the general area of “politeness” (polite, polished, refined, well-mannered, standoffish, etc.) to prompt for the socio-cognitive construction of a range of meanings that do not always correspond to one another or even overlap, i.e. to develop a socio-cognitive constructionist approach to emergent social practice. In terms of looking at “politeness” from a historical point of view, it is obviously difficult if not impossible to reconstruct the forms of emergent social practice, but English writings during the early eighteenth century are replete with references to terms such as polite, polished, affected, politeness, etc. The close study of how such terms are used reveals that what was understood by them was very different from what politeness researchers of today understand by “politeness”, and such differences can only be accounted for by positing a relativist model that can account for variability and change.

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