Michael Graves’s Portland Building

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-269
Author(s):  
Meredith L. Clausen

Singled out as a landmark in architectural history even before it was built, Michael Graves’s Portland Building, known only through drawings, was considered an icon of postmodernism and immediately became a fixture in architectural history texts. Since it exploded onto the scene in the early 1980s, it has been heralded as one of the most controversial, published buildings in architectural history. But little has been written about the building itself, how it came to be, how well it functions, and how it has stood the test of time over the past thirty years. In Michael Graves’s Portland Building: Power, Politics, and Postmodernism, Meredith L. Clausen argues that despite the voluminous critical literature of theorists and critics focusing on its meaning, symbolism, associations, and reinterpretation of classicism, a decidedly different picture of the building emerges when viewed through the lens of historical documents. The focus here is on the dynamics of the competition, the conflicting civic priorities, the powerful role of the media, and politics both local and in architecture.

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn L. Rothe ◽  
Scott Maggard

This article provides an overview of post-conflict justice (PCJ) as well as a detailed analysis of factors that impede or facilitate the implementation of mechanisms to address the atrocities of a conflict. Grounded in an extensive new dataset, developed over the past three years, covering all conflicts in Africa between 1946 and 2009, we extend previous research by including empirical testing of previously untested assumptions and variables impacting PCJ, most notably, the role of power, politics, economics, and geo-strategic interests at the state and international political levels as well as combining previously tested variables amongst and between each other. Further, the aspects of PCJ, including conflicts where mechanisms were not deployed are included in the analysis along with those coded as symbolic in nature. We conclude by discussing the pragmatic issues associated with testing the concept of realpolitik and policy implications based on our analysis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Brosius ◽  
Erika J van Elsas ◽  
Claes H de Vreese

Over the past decade, the European Union has lost the trust of many citizens. This article investigates whether and how media information, in particular visibility and tonality, impact trust in the European Union among citizens. Combining content analysis and Eurobarometer survey data from 10 countries between 2004 and 2015, we study both direct and moderating media effects. Media tone and visibility have limited direct effects on trust in the European Union, but they moderate the relation between trust in national institutions and trust in the European Union. This relation is amplified when the European Union is more visible in the media and when media tone is more positive towards the European Union, whereas it is dampened when media tone is more negative. The findings highlight the role of news media in the crisis of trust in the European Union.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 377-423
Author(s):  
Slađana Josipović Batorek ◽  
Valentina Kezić

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s (CPY) rise to power in 1945 was followed by a period of fundamental socio-political changes that encompassed all aspects of life. In order to establish a complete political and ideological authority, the government attempted to suppress all elements which, in their view, were not aligned with the doctrine of the Communist Party. As a result, everything that was perceived as remnants of the old socio-political order was marginalised, such as religion, tradition and customs. Moreover, reinterpretation of the past also took place, as well as creation of new rituals and Tito’s cult of personality. Accordingly, a completely new calendar of official, state holidays was established, deprived of any national or religious tradition. One of those holidays was May Day, which was celebrated for two days and whose purpose, like most other holidays of that period, was to create uniqueness of feelings and actions in society, focusing on the working class, socialism, CPY, Yugoslavia and Josip Broz Tito. Besides, celebrations of major anniversaries and holidays, including May Day, presented an opportunity for transmission of ideological and political messages, most often articulated through numerous slogans which clearly defined the direction in which the society should move. The media played a key role in this process. Therefore, the central part of the paper consists of the analysis of newspaper articles from Glas Slavonije in order to understand its role in the implementation of those new political rituals and social values.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tapio Juntunen

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has produced a number of commentaries that have tried to grasp the crisis through the comforting lens of historical analogies. One of the most perplexing of these has been the revival of Finlandization, or the idea of the “Finnish model” as a possible solution to the Ukraine crisis. In this article I interrogate these arguments, firstly, by historicising the original process of Finlandization during the Cold War. Secondly, I argue that the renaissance of Finlandization is based on parachronistic reasoning. In other words, the Finlandization analogy has been applied to modern-day Ukraine in such a way that the alien elements of the past context are, to paraphrase Quentin Skinner, “dissolved into an apparent but misleading familiarity” in the present re-appropriation of the idea and its contextual prerequisites. Indeed, the reappearance of Finlandization in the context of the Ukraine crisis reinforces the idea that the real drivers of international affairs can be reduced to the axioms derived from the transhistorical logic of international anarchy and the iron laws of great power politics. Thus, this article makes a novel contribution to the theoretical discussion on the role of analogies and myths in International Relations.


Asian Studies ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 67-77
Author(s):  
Sasa ISTENIČ

The importance of the media in democracies has long been recognized. The media has often been seen as a preliminary mechanism of democratization process. Over the past 20 years, both Taiwan and Slovenia have been undergoing profound political changes, transforming from authoritarianism to democracy. This research will be a modest attempt to portray the significant role that media has played in the two countries’ democratization processes and draw some interesting parallels between them.   


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 118-123
Author(s):  
OLGA YUTSCHENKO ◽  
◽  
YULIA GAMALEEVA

The purpose of research. The article deals with the general tendencies of the formation process of a historical figure as a national hero in media space. Winston Churchill’s cinematography imagery is analyzed and the features of interpretation of his role in history are defined. The purpose of research is determination of specificities in the formation process of imagery’s historical figure as national hero in cinematography. Results. Nowadays the way of representing historical space through the media sphere is one of the most popular for auditory and at the same time, it represents the new vision of the historical past. The tendency of connecting historical past and historical figure together drifts the angle from the whole epoch to «historical faces». That's the reason why historical epochs are translated through imagery of figures from the past. In this case historical space is gradually tapered to the person’s story and becomes more individual.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergiu Gherghina ◽  
Mihail Chiru

The November 2009 Romanian presidential elections illustrate the process through which media exposure to exit polls during the election day allows strategic voting in the least expected situations (i.e. in the first round of a two-ballot setting). Organized in a two-round system in which the first two competitors qualify for the second round, these elections display one unsolved dilemma. The difference registered in elections between the two challengers is twice as large as the average support in the pre-election polls (a comparable difference was never registered in post-communist Romania). Our quantitative analysis uses election results from the past two decades and aggregated poll data from 2009 and reveals that a large share of the Romanian electorate avoids wasting votes and casts them for candidates with real winning chances. This article argues that polls presented to the voters, by the media during the elections, made the difference. They were used as electoral strategies to trigger strategic voting and thus promote specific candidates.


2015 ◽  
Vol 97 (900) ◽  
pp. 1121-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heide Fehrenbach ◽  
Davide Rodogno

AbstractThis article is a historical examination of the use of photography in the informational and fundraising strategies of humanitarian organizations. Drawing on archival research and recent scholarship, it shows that the figure of the dead or suffering child has been a centrepiece of humanitarian campaigns for over a century and suggests that in earlier eras too, such photos, under certain conditions, could “go viral” and achieve iconic status. Opening with last year's photo campaign involving the case of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach near Bodrum in early September 2015, the article draws on select historical examples to explore continuities and ruptures in the narrative framing and emotional address of photos depicting dead or suffering children, and in the ethically and politically charged decisions by NGO actors and the media to publish and distribute such images. We propose that today, as in the past, the relationship between media and humanitarian NGOs remains symbiotic despite contemporary claims about the revolutionary role of new visual technologies and social media.


2022 ◽  
pp. 91-98
Author(s):  
Roberta Agnese

The Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don’t collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives — partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed — are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate?


2020 ◽  
pp. 84-93
Author(s):  
А.К. Амирханова

Цели исследования состоят в том, чтобы установить происхождение обычая стрельбы из огнестрельного оружия на свадьбах у народов Дагестана, определить его состояние в настоящее время и степень связи между историческими и современными характеристиками явления. Источниками послужили результаты научных изысканий российских этнографов и сообщения из современных российских средств массовой информации. Выявлено, что в прошлом стрельба на свадьбе рассматривалась как оберег от злых сил, придавала торжеству эмоциональный колорит. Домусульманский обычай сохранил актуальность и после утверждения ислама. Установлено отсутствие связи между стрельбой на современных свадьбах и традициями, имевшими место у народов Дагестана в прошлом. Общество признает факты утраты первоначального обрядового смысла стрельбы на свадьбах и придания ей развлекательной функции. Среди населения в основном наблюдается осознание нежелательности «экспорта» обычая стрельбы за пределы Дагестана или Северного Кавказа. The study aims to establish the origin of the custom of shooting firearms at weddings among the peoples of Dagestan, to determine the state of this custom at present, and to establish the degree of connection between the historical and modern characteristics of the phenomenon. The materials were the results of research by Russian ethnographers, who studied the traditional culture of the peoples of Dagestan, as well as reports from modern Russian media. When working on the study, the author adhered to a complex methodological scheme, which is based on a combination of methods of evolutionary, functional and structural analysis used in the study of ethnographic facts. It has been established that, even before the advent of firearms, sharp loud sounds were used during wedding ceremonies to protect newlyweds from evil forces. For example, participants in celebrations, using a variety of objects, made a special noise during the transfer of the bride. With the advent of firearms, the peoples of Dagestan began to use them in protecting wedding rituals which could have their own specific meaning for different peoples. It has been revealed that the studied custom, based on pre-Muslim beliefs, turned out to be stable enough to remain relevant even after the establishment of Islam. The functions of shooting at modern Dagestan weddings have been investigated. Numerous reports from the media about cases of the use of firearms during the movement of wedding corteges, including outside Dagestan (in Moscow, Stavropol), have been given. The author pays considerable attention to the negative reaction of society, which condemns the dangerous entertainment of modern youth at weddings, and notes the facts of criminal prosecution of persons who committed such offenses. In recent years, shooting at weddings is often replaced by the use of pyrotechnic devices. The author concludes that the role of firearms in traditional wedding celebrations among the peoples of Dagestan was initially associated mainly with imitative magic rituals. Currently, there is an almost complete lack of connection between the traditions that took place among the peoples of Dagestan in the past and the shooting at modern weddings. Reacting to shooting at modern weddings, the public acknowledges the loss of its original ritual meaning, characterizes it as entertainment or a manifestation of recklessness. People are generally aware of the undesirability of “exporting” the custom of shooting outside Dagestan or the North Caucasus.


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