scholarly journals The European Topos

Media-N ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-45
Author(s):  
Matt Bernico

There is an unexplored synergy between the ways media archaeology and decolonial theory handle the notion of modernity. Both consider modernity as happening at different places and at different times: modernity is an event that is larger than Europe or the United States. Using this resonance, this article will make a media archaeological reading of the decolonial theorists, Walter Mignolo and Santiago Castro-Gomez’s concept, the zero point. The zero point will be read as a media topos present throughout the immersive media that grounds much western media history and visual culture. Finally, based on these criticisms, this article will offer an alternative starting point based in the imaginary media of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novel, The Invention of Morel. The goal of this intervention is to demonstrate the way the western paradigm of technology has imperialized the imaginations of the world and to offer another place for media artists and technologists to begin from.

Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 636-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Bristow ◽  
Sarah Robinson

Brexit could be seen as the largest popular rebellion against the power elites in the UK modern history. It is also part of a larger phenomenon – the resurgence of nationalism and right-wing politics within Europe, the United States and beyond. Bringing in its wake the worrying manifestations of racism, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism, Brexit and its consequences should be a core concern for Critical Management Studies academics in helping to shape post-Brexit societies, organizations and workplaces, and in fighting and challenging the sinister forces that permeate them. In this article, we consider how CMS can rise to the challenges and possibilities of this ‘phenomenon-in-the-making’. We reflect on the intellectual tools available to CMS researchers and the ways in which they may be suited to this task. In particular, we explore how the key positions of anti-performativity, critical performativity, political performativity and public CMS can be used as a starting point for thinking about the potential relevance of CMS in Brexit and post-Brexit contexts. Our intention is to encourage CMS-ers to contribute positively to the post-Brexit world in academic as well as personal capacities. For this, we argue that a new public CMS is needed, which would (1) be guided by the premise that we have no greater and no lesser right than anyone else to shape the world, (2) entail as much critical reflexivity in relation to our unintended performativities as our intended ones and (3) be underpinned by marginalism as a critical political project.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
Diana Chiş-Manolache ◽  
Ciprian Chiş

AbstractGenerally speaking, the relations between different states of the world, but especially between the states that represent world powers or have a certain type of arsenal, are able to influence the stability and the state of calmness from a certain region of the world, but also the notion of peace at the globally level. The 2020 year began with such a situation, in the sense that United States of America and Iran, which have been for a long period in relations not among the most well, have arrived at a moment that could represent, to a very large extent, the starting point of a conflict that will enter in the world history. The elimination of a very important Iranian general by US troops in early January 2020, by a surprise attack amonk Iraqian teritory, markedly aggravated relations between the United States of America and Iran, but also between the great world power and Iraq or other major global players who have harshly criticized the US attack.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Chou

Reference and Reverence is a two-year long photographic project on the emerging trend of ecological burial in the United States. The body of work is a photo-based documentary that considers natural burial as an alternative to standard funeral practices. My thesis project is in book form as well as an exhibition installation. The work addresses green burial’s newfound re-emergence as well as the examination of visual culture regarding death, dying, and funeral practices. In an era of environmental concern, the importance of planet stewardship and modern industrial burial practices are questioned. The reflection is one of re-visiting death as tradition, as well as one of contemplating our co-existence with the world.


Author(s):  
Yukon Huang

Deng Xiaoping’s death in 1997 marked the end of an era and provides the starting point for a discussion about public perceptions. Today’s China emerged from his reforms, which opened the country to the outside world. Views of outsiders have shifted markedly over the past several decades. The majority of Americans see China’s rise as a threat to their country’s global stature, but Europeans are less preoccupied with power politics. Both groups wrongly see China as the leading economic power contrary to the rest of the world which see the United States. Popular feelings toward China vary widely across and within regions; they are influenced by proximity and colored by history and ideology. This chapter discusses the geopolitical factors that shape these opinions in the West, among the BRICS, in the developing world, and among China’s neighbors, as well as China’s efforts to influence these opinions.


Author(s):  
Ashley Hunt

As we begin to think about the United States as a carceral state, this means that the scale of incarceration practices have grown so great within it that they have a determining effect on the shape of the the society as a whole. In addition to the budgets, routines, and technologies used is the culture of that carceral state, where relationships form between elements of its culture and its politics. In terms of its visual culture, that relationship forms a visuality, a culture and politics of vision that both reflects the state’s carceral qualities and, in turn, helps to structure and organize the society in a carceral manner. Images, architecture, light, presentation and camouflage, surveillance, and the play of sight between groups of people and the world are all materials through which the ideas of a society are worked out, its politics played out, its technology implemented, its rationality or common sense and identities forming. They also shape the politics of freedom and control, where what might be a free, privileged expression to one person could be a dangerous exposure to another, where invisibility or inscrutability may be a resource. In this article, these questions are asked in relation to the history of prison architecture, from premodern times to the present, while considering the multiple discourses that overlap throughout that history: war, enslavement, civil punishment, and freedom struggle, but also a discourse of agency, where subordinated peoples can or cannot resist, or remain hostile to or in difference from the control placed upon them.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Chou

Reference and Reverence is a two-year long photographic project on the emerging trend of ecological burial in the United States. The body of work is a photo-based documentary that considers natural burial as an alternative to standard funeral practices. My thesis project is in book form as well as an exhibition installation. The work addresses green burial’s newfound re-emergence as well as the examination of visual culture regarding death, dying, and funeral practices. In an era of environmental concern, the importance of planet stewardship and modern industrial burial practices are questioned. The reflection is one of re-visiting death as tradition, as well as one of contemplating our co-existence with the world.


1984 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-88
Author(s):  
Rasheeduddin Khan

What is the Commonwealth? Is it the continuation of the British Empire by other means? Does it constitute a form of neo-colonialism? Is it a trap laid by the old colonialists to lure the newly freed countries into newer forms of dependence? The answer to questions like these used to be in the affirmative in 1948, by a wide variety of perceptive analysts of international politics. Thirty-five years later and wiser today in 1983, except the ignorant, the naive or the hardcore text-book dogmatist, indeed none with an understanding of the new and complex international situation and an awareness of the logic of an interdependent world, would be prone to give a straight-cut answer. The international context in which the Commonwealth took its shape and form in the fifties of this century was basicaliy different in terms of political power-equation; the situation of world finance, trade and commerce; the far-reaching effects of the revolution in technology, electronics, communication, aeronautics, defence technology and in the many critical fields with an impact on human life and group relations. Together with this the phenomenal proliferation of human population and explosion of democratic human consciousness and the surging passion for national identity, freedom and equality, had brought into being a global situation that was qualitatively different from any epoch in human history. It was a new world, a radically different world, but an amazing world of contrasts and of opportunities. On the collapse of the European imposed global order around 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged on the world scene (to borrow the current jargon) as Super-Powers. The global spread of the United States and the US dominated TNC's created a situation of new challenges even to the old world. The formation of the socialist commity of nations in eastern Europe and Asia, and the spread of socialist ideas and perceptions the world over, provided sustenance and support to the struggling people and established an alternative focus in the balance of power. The ferment in the colonies was such that with the breaking of the chains in India, one by one new states in Asia, Africa, Central America and Oceania appeared on the horizon of the expanding international community. Since the Commonwealth was not born in an age of imperialism but in the age of the winding-up of imperialism, its roots can be traced not in British constitutional practices and institutions — part of it as the starting point are undoubtedly there — but in their “distuption” mutation and transformation by the triumphant liberation movements which congregated in the commanwealth.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malini Ratnasingam ◽  
Lee Ellis

Background. Nearly all of the research on sex differences in mass media utilization has been based on samples from the United States and a few other Western countries. Aim. The present study examines sex differences in mass media utilization in four Asian countries (Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Singapore). Methods. College students self-reported the frequency with which they accessed the following five mass media outlets: television dramas, televised news and documentaries, music, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet. Results. Two significant sex differences were found when participants from the four countries were considered as a whole: Women watched television dramas more than did men; and in Japan, female students listened to music more than did their male counterparts. Limitations. A wider array of mass media outlets could have been explored. Conclusions. Findings were largely consistent with results from studies conducted elsewhere in the world, particularly regarding sex differences in television drama viewing. A neurohormonal evolutionary explanation is offered for the basic findings.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Silvia Spitta

Sandra Ramos (b. 1969) is one of the few artists to reflect critically on both sides of the Cuban di-lemma, fully embodying the etymological origins of the word in ancient Greek: di-, meaning twice, and lemma, denoting a form of argument involving a choice between equally unfavorable alternatives. Throughout her works she shines a light on the dilemmas faced by Cubans whether in Cuba or the United States, underlining the bad personal and political choices people face in both countries. During the hard 1990s, while still in Havana, the artist focused on the traumatic one-way journey into exile by thousands, as well as the experience of profound abandonment experienced by those who were left behind on the island. Today she lives in Miami and operates a studio there as well as one in Havana. Her initial disorientation in the USA has morphed into an acerbic representation and critique of the current administration and a deep concern with the environmental collapse we face. A buffoonlike Trumpito has joined el Bobo de Abela and Liborio in her gallery of comic characters derived from the rich Cuban graphic arts tradition where she was formed. While Cuba is now represented as a rotten cake with menacing flies hovering over it ready to pounce, a bombastic Trumpito marches across the world stage, trampling everything underfoot, a dollar sign for a face.


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