scholarly journals Palm Tree Whispers and Mountain Escapes: How Contemporary Artworks Contribute to an Inclusive Public Sphere

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Annatina Aerne

How do artworks contribute to a more inclusive public sphere? Artworks contribute to the inclusiveness of a public sphere in that they help us consider previous objects as acting subjects, and thus as entities deserving membership in the public sphere. In addition, artworks typically attract a public, thus generating the necessary recognition for additional subjects. We propose a typology that categorizes artworks’ contribution to an inclusive public sphere. The typology is based on two axes: (a) artworks’ explicitness in attributing the status of a subject to a previous object and (b) the number of people that get to see the artwork. In order to illustrate the applicability of the typology and in order to understand how the two dimensions relate to one another, we analyze how two artworks include the non‐human as subjects into the public sphere: Eduardo Navarro’s Sound Mirror (shown at the 2016 São Paulo Biennal) and Prabhakar Pachpute’s Mountain Escape (exhibited in the 2016 Colombian Salón Nacional de Artistas). Comparing both artistic strategies we find that there may be a trade‐off between the explicitness and the reach of a new subjectification.

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (51) ◽  
pp. 629-650
Author(s):  
Arthur Hirata Prist ◽  
Maria Paula Dallari Bucci

Resumo Este artigo propõe uma análise dos aspectos políticos e jurídicos do Direito à Cidade sob a perspectiva do conceito de esfera pública. O Direito à Cidade é interpretado como um elo dinâmico entre a mobilização política, a democratização das relações sociais e do aparato institucional do Estado e a garantia de melhores condições materiais de existência no espaço urbano. A partir da revisão bibliográfica sobre o tema das lutas sociais urbanas no Brasil e na cidade de São Paulo, pretende-se demonstrar que o Direito à Cidade é exercido pela população a partir dos embates na esfera pública responsáveis por impulsionar a renovação da ordem jurídica e atribuir novos sentidos ao Direito existente.


ARTMargins ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Nicholas C. Morgan

Between 1991 and 1993, the artist José Leonilson contributed a weekly illustration to Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s highest circulation daily newspaper. This article argues that these drawings inserted a minoritarian voice into the public sphere in a way that contested its normative operations by emphasizing the micropolitical and the intimate, often through allegory. Some of the illustrations address AIDS, to which Leonilson succumbed two weeks after the last was published, and this article situates his work in relation to the intertwining discourses around sexuality, public health and media in Brazil at the time. What emerges is a conception of mass media and of publicness as a space of fiction that could, paradoxically, be instrumentalized in the face of the increasing standardization of previously deviant and unclassified sexualities.


Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682110124
Author(s):  
Alexander Harder ◽  
Benjamin Opratko

This article introduces the concept of cultures of rejection as a framing device to investigate conditions of acceptability of authoritarian populism among workers in Germany and Austria. After situating the concept in the current scholarly debate on right-wing populism and discussing its main theoretical points of reference, we offer an analysis focusing on experiences of crisis and transformation. Two elements of cultures of rejection are discussed in depth: the rejection of racialised and/or culturalised ‘unproductive’ others; and the rejection of the public sphere, linked to the emergence of a ‘shielded subjectivity’. These articulations of rejection are then discussed as related to two dimensions of a crisis of authority: the crisis of state or political authority in the field of labour and the economy; and the crisis of a moral order, experienced as decline in social cohesion. In conclusion, we identify possible avenues for further research, demonstrating the productivity of the conceptual framework of cultures of rejection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-65
Author(s):  
Mary Varghese ◽  
Kamila Ghazali

Abstract This article seeks to contribute to the existing body of knowledge about the relationship between political discourse and national identity. 1Malaysia, introduced in 2009 by Malaysia’s then newly appointed 6th Prime Minister Najib Razak, was greeted with expectation and concern by various segments of the Malaysian population. For some, it signalled a new inclusiveness that was to change the discourse on belonging. For others, it raised concerns about changes to the status quo of ethnic issues. Given the varying responses of society to the concept of 1Malaysia, an examination of different texts through the critical paradigm of CDA provide useful insights into how the public sphere has attempted to construct this notion. Therefore, this paper critically examines the Prime Minister’s early speeches as well as relevant chapters of the socioeconomic agenda, the 10th Malaysia Plan, to identify the referential and predicational strategies employed in characterising 1Malaysia. The findings suggest a notion of unity that appears to address varying issues.


2005 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Asen

Argument teachers and scholars have frequently invoked external justification-impressing one's viewpoint upon another-as the primary social function of argument. Pluralism and fundamental disagreement in contemporary democratic societies raise questions regarding the status of argument, including the functions argument should serve. In this essay, I suggest alternatives of agenda expansion, responsibility attribution, and identity formation as important functions of argument in diverse societies. These alternative functions are especially important under conditions of social inequality, since they allow less powerful individuals and groups to confront more powerful actors in situations where decision making is not open to all.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Musthafa Mubashir ◽  
M. Shuaib Mohamed Haneef

Malayalam films since the 1970s have captured the history of Gulf migration from Kerala, which occurs primarily due to the desperate need of its people for jobs and for money. Predominantly, the discourses of migrants in the films are embedded in various things, including dress from the Gulf, the insignia of opulence that depict the status of the migrants in the public sphere. Using thematic analysis of two Malayalam films, Pathemari and Marubhoomiyile Aana, this study argues that the motif of the Gulf is associated with power and control in the cultural discourse of Kerala. Drawing on the semiotic analysis of Barthes, we contend that the replacement of mundu, a traditional attire of Kerala men, by trousers, is one among several mythical markers of modernity, including perfumes and watches brought from the Gulf. The performativity and materiality of dress in these two films produce imageries of the Gulf by which the wearers, mostly male, accumulate social and symbolic capital and assert dominance in the film’s narration.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel G. Villaroman

Abstract This article analyses the engagement of minority religious groups with the local planning process in Australia as they try to build places of worship. Such groups oftentimes encounter opposition from local residents who are reluctant to share the public sphere with the newly arrived and less known ‘other.’ The public sphere has become a contested terrain between those who desire to preserve the status quo of the built environment and those who desire to affirm their collective identity through new religious structures. The Australian state, acting through local councils, finds itself in the middle of this contest and is tasked to resolve it. This article offers illustrative snapshots of how Australia promotes, respects and protects religious freedom, particularly its aspect concerning the ability of minority religious groups to build their own places of worship. Through case studies, this article assesses, albeit with respect to such cases only, how religious freedom is being concretised in the ‘religious’ physical landscape of Australia—that is its temples, mosques, churches, gurdwaras, mandirs and other minority places of worship.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro I. Paz

Citizenship has become a major topic in anthropology and the study of language (including sociolinguistics) since the early 1990s, with scholars in these fields especially examining the status and political claims of immigrants, refugees, indigenous groups, and other subaltern populations. This article argues that models of communication lie at the heart of debates about citizenship and explores two fundamentally communicative processes: first, the mutual recognition of citizens as citizens, and second, the interpellation by state apparatuses of citizens. It first discusses the emergence of the question of citizenship within anthropology and the study of language. It then considers the tension that arises as any recognition of difference confronts the normative model of citizenship already institutionalized in the state apparatus. Finally, this article examines the interlacing of these scholarly trajectories in one of the premier sites where citizens communicate as citizens: the public sphere.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 498-521
Author(s):  
Alicia Steinmetz

AbstractThis article contributes to the debate over the appropriate place of religion in public reason by showing the limits of this framework for understanding and evaluating the real-world religious political activism of social movements. Using the 1980s Sanctuary Movement as a central case study, I show how public reason fails to appreciate the complex religious dynamics of this movement, the reasons actors employ religious reasoning, and, as a result, the very meaning of these acts. In response, I argue that a Deweyan perspective on the tasks and challenges of the democratic public offers a richer, more contextualized approach to evaluating the status of religion in the public sphere as well as other emerging publics whose modes of engagement defy prevailing notions of reasonableness and civility.


2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich

One of the most important challenges for the occupation of Iraq has been making decisions about the status of people who were either responsible for or who passively benefited from the regime's past injustices. But how should such people—in this case, members of the Baath Party—be dealt with? And how have they been dealt with under the U.S. occupation? Although lustration is just one of many institutions of jus post bellum, it is arguably one of the most important. The pursuit of administrative justice affects the reconstitution of the public sphere—literally and figuratively—in more fundamental ways than most other institutions of transitional justice. Yet our understanding of the ethics of occupation in the twenty-first century continues to be incomplete, and ethical principles are needed for guiding and clarifying how occupations may justly be carried out and for establishing a legitimate role for international morals in the conduct of peace. This article develops three such principles for guiding the practice of lustration, and argues that they have been widely flouted during the occupation of Iraq. This is problematic from the perspective of jus post bellum, for to paraphrase Michael Walzer's argument in Just and Unjust Wars, the restraint of peace is the beginning of peace.


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