scholarly journals War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry

Pólemos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Soncini

AbstractThe tribunal plays produced at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, North London have come to represent under many respects the hallmark of the new spate of documentary work on the British stage, often designated as “verbatim drama” in contemporary critical parlance. Expressly envisaged as theatrical interventions into the public sphere, these dramatizations of official public inquiries turn theatrical space into legal space, grounding their claims to veracity in the exact reproduction of the actually spoken. While crucial to their ontological authority, the self-imposed orthodoxy whereby the playwright is the mere editor of words recorded in inquiry transcripts has been put under considerable strain by the very topic that has played a central role in triggering and shaping the format, that of contemporary conflict. A considerable share of recent verbatim work deals with the war on terror, a war increasingly fought outside legal jurisdiction and hence a subject that has thrown into sharp relief the epistemological limits of a form of drama that is entirely dependent on the existence and availability of legal records. This essay looks at the strategies of “re-voicing” whereby Richard Norton-Taylor negotiates the strictures of the code in his tribunal play

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
H. Şule Albayrak

For decades the authoritarian secularist policies of the Turkish state, by imposing a headscarf ban at universities and in the civil service, excluded practising Muslim women from the public sphere until the reforms following 2010. However, Muslim women had continued to seek ways to increase their knowledge and improve their intellectual levels, not only as individuals, but also by establishing civil associations. As a result, a group of intellectual women has emerged who are not only educated in political, social, and economic issues, but who are also determined to attain their socio-economic and political rights. Those new actors in the Turkish public sphere are, however, concerned with being labeled as either “feminist,” “fundamentalist” or “Islamist.” This article therefore analyzes the distance between the self-identifications of intellectual Muslim women and certain classifications imposed on them. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with thirteen Turkish intellectual Muslim women were carried out which reveal that they reject and critique overly facile labels due to their negative connotations while offering more complex insights into their perspectives on Muslim women, authority, and identity.


Think ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (37) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Chris Norris

This essay takes a hard look at the current state of much academic (mainly analytic) philosophy and sets out to diagnose where things have gone wrong. It offers a sharply critical assessment of the prevailing narrowness, cliquishness, linguistic inertness, like-mindedness, intellectual caution, misplaced scientism, over-specialisation, guild mentality, lack of creative or inventive flair, and above all the self-perpetuating structures of privilege and patronage that have worked to produce this depressing situation. On the constructive side I suggest how a belated encounter with developments beyond its cultural-professional horizons – including certain aspects of ‘continental’ philosophy – might bring large (and reciprocal) benefits. I also offer some tentative ideas as to what ‘creativity’ could or should mean as applied to philosophical thinking and writing.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Szostak

YouTube is a massively popular video streaming website. It has become so ingrained in daily consciousness that it is almost difficult to conceive of a time in which it did not exist. YouTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Yourself.” It connotes a sense of freedom to be whoever you want to be and communicate this conceptualization of the self with the world. Vlogs, or video blogs, share the same function as a traditional diary except there is no assumption of privacy since the videos are uploaded publicly. Both men and women participate in the production of these videos. However, the experience of male and female YouTubers is quite different. The following paper will explore whether YouTube operates as a public sphere in light of the gender divide that appears to have formed on the site. The four objectives of the paper are as follows: to define the concept of the public sphere, to determine the factors that have contributed to a gender divide on YouTube by analyzing the gendered use of the medium, to examine the reception of the controversial “Girls on YouTube” video by female vloggers, and to evaluate whether YouTube operates as a public sphere in light of the findings of the preceding sections. Ultimately, this paper will give greater insight into whether new media offers the possibility for women's voices to be heard or if it is simply a remediation of older patriarchal technology.


2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-470
Author(s):  
Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora

Abstract Answering the Uncertainty. On the Staging of Truth and the Lust for Unambiguities in Times of Crisis Based on the observation that digital media are changing the nature of the public sphere and that disinformation is a new currency, the question of responsibility and secure knowledge is being raised again and again. There is hardly time for thorough assessments. The much too hastily written judgements of the digital world distort the overall picture because often only fragmentary information is processed. The self-critical examination of one’s own claims to meaning and validity, an argumentative questioning of the self-evident and discourse orientation are decisive educational moments in a time of collapsing contexts and the subjective truth associated with it.


2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 607-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Eder

The article situates the issue of the public sphere as a phenomenon that is historically bound and culturally specific. According to this point of view, the Western practices and the Western way of thinking about the public sphere appear as a historically particular way of dealing with the more general phenomenon which is the creation of a social bond beyond the family. Looking at the self-contradictory effects of the ‘modern’ Western public sphere, the question is asked whether the public association of self-interested or self-governing individuals might have to be theorized as a partial and insufficient solution to the social bond. A comparative perspective shows that it is not individuals but cultural forms that link people in the public sphere. They do so by providing a narrative basis of discourses and/or markets that in the self-understanding of modernity shape social life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Nisar Alungal Chungath

Identity is not a fixed and frozen prison-house for the self, but a liquid continuum, affected and shaped by the ‘outside’ or the world. The self, which is situated and which undergoes revisions and transformations, keeps identity as a frame within which it makes sense of things. On the one hand, there is a ‘history’ within which an identity is rooted and through which meaning-making is made possible, and on the other hand, every person aspires to be a ‘universal’ and recognition-worthy human being. Both inherent identity and inherent universality of the self should be considered in their interactions in the public sphere, which has been traditionally viewed as a space of discrete individualities. The ontological force of this argument aside, the paper demonstrates that reduction of an identity without crediting its aspiration for universality and consideration of universality without crediting the historical underpinnings of identity are both acts of violation. 


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-817
Author(s):  
Paul Hedges

AbstractThis article theorizes the self-immolation of alleged Falun Gong practitioners in Tiananmen Square in 2001 in relation to literature on martyrdom, self-immolation, and political protest. It explores the cultural context in relation to Buddhist traditions of self-immolation, Chinese political protest, and other uses of self-immolation as political protest. It will seek to expand the analysis of why these self-immolations may be said to have “failed” as a form of protest, and present a set of four key factors. Issues of legitimation and authority in the events and their representation will be raised, especially the contested nature of whether the self-immolations were “religious,” looking at the different meanings of this term in Chinese and Western contexts. It is argued that both secular and religious self-immolation can be seen as legitimate in the public sphere.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Alora Paulsen Mulvey

Using 27-year-old Canadian beauty blogger Estée Lalonde as a site of automedia analysis (Maguire 2015), this paper argues that through the enactment of domestic femininity in the public sphere, social media influencers embody postfeminist ideals of individual empowerment while selling their branded selves through networked intimacy (Abidin 2015; Gill, 2016). Methodologically, I approach the case study with an understanding of the intersection between online platforms of the intersection between online platforms, life writing, and constructions of the self. Using cross-promotion, scheduled posts, and self-branding, influencers create a cohesive branded self, emphasizing perceived authenticity and a sense of community among followers. The exercise of self-branding is used to gain cultural and material capital (Hearn, 2008). Understanding postfeminism as an analytical lens through which we can problematize media texts (Gill, 2016), I argue that influencer marketing privileges a one-dimensional, postfeminist representation of an empowered young woman following her life’s passion (Duffy & Hund, 2015).


Author(s):  
Leila Hadj Abdou

This contribution takes a look at the phenomenon of ‘gender-nationalismʼ. It argues that references about gender equality and women’s rights play an important role in contemporary politics of belonging: these references are used as boundary markers in nationalist narratives, constructing the self versus the immigrant other. The contribution traces the emergence of this phenomenon in Europe, and focuses on its occurrence in recent debates. It concludes that whilst gender equality is a crucial claim that needs to be upheld in the public sphere, we also need to pay attention to intersectional mechanisms of exclusion and oppression which are at play in contemporary versions of gender nationalism.


Author(s):  
Gustavo Procopio Furtado

The turn toward intimate terrains and private life is a major trend in contemporary documentary. Materials, styles, and themes germane to the photo album and the home movie increasingly migrate to the documentary screen and into the public sphere. As this chapter discusses, this move does not represent a retreat from the social and the historical in favor of atomistic or narcissistic self-involvement but rather a changing approach to the sociohistoric, which is rendered through the self-conscious and refracting lens of personal experience and located in the microcosm of interpersonal relationships. Engaging with the history and theory of familial image-making, this chapter explores the reworking of the home mode in Consuelo Lins’s Babás (2010), Gabriel Mascaro’s Doméstica (2012), and João Moreira Salles’s Santiago (2007)—three films that deal with relationships of power, labor, and servitude in private life and the home.


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