Learning to Add Value at the Studio

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-108
Author(s):  
Lilly Irani
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Design Studio ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Business Creation ◽  
Everyday Talk ◽  
Client Expectations ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
New Business

This chapter details how designers at the studio organized their lives, their relationships, and their self-understandings as they continually relearned how to “add value” in the context of shifting global divisions of labor and speculative hype. Good entrepreneurial citizens did not only find value for themselves and for their clients; they added value to the nation. They channeled their developmental desires and hopes into forms—programming, design, intellectual property, new business creation—that ascended to the highest rungs of a global capital's hierarchies of value. Those who added value to the nation, to the design studio, and to client projects were those to cultivate and include. Those who failed to add value were understood instead as jobless masses and as failed potential. These middle-class ideologies suffused news, policy, client expectations, and everyday talk. As ideologies and as everyday pressures, they shaped the everyday practices of organizing and valuing work and workers in the studio.

scholarly journals Thrift, Imperfection and Popular Feminist Apartment Plot on Television

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 501-516
Author(s):  
Claire Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Television Production ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Women's Lives

This paper will explore the ways in which thrift operates as a signifier of a specific type of lprecarity and imperfection in young women’s lives in several popular series associated with the current ‘golden age’ of women’s television production. The twenty-something women of series including Girls, Insecure, Broad City, Fleabag, Can’t Cope Won’t Cope and Search Party, have all been raised in comfortable middle-class homes and are now living independently in major global, expensive cities. The precarity of the ways in which they dwell, at both a practical and figurative level, is a symptom of what has come to be understood as ‘adulting’—where relatively privileged millennials struggle with the rituals and realities of adult life in a starkly neoliberal society. Through a focus on the narrative device of the apartment plot, this paper will examine how the concept of thrift, with its central spectrum of necessity and choice, can illuminate both the everyday practices and the overarching logic of the adulting phenomenon as represented in this wave of television production. By attending to a variety of contemporary series by, for and about women, it will also argue for the ways in which both thrift and adulting can be understood as specifically gendered behaviours.

Doing Boundary Work: Suburban Residents’ Associations in Johannesburg

2020 ◽  
pp. 002190962097056
Author(s):  
Margot Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Land Use Changes ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Lower Income ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday

Despite best hopes of social and urban transformation, Johannesburg’s middle-class suburbs have remained largely inaccessible to lower income and more marginalised communities. This article examines the everyday practices and repertoires of action by resident associations in Johannesburg, demonstrating their ability to moderate more progressive state impulses and other land use changes. It argues that resident associations have become the custodians of middle-class visions and aesthetics and carry out the boundary work and symbolic violence that maintains and defends suburban borders.

A Typology of International Judicial Practices

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey L Dunoff ◽  
Mark A Pollack
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Practice Theory ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
International Courts ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Judicial Opinions

This chapter discusses the inner working of ICs, such as the drafting of judicial opinions; practices concerning separate opinions; the role of language and translation; and the roles of third parties. It also presents a preliminary effort to identify and examine the everyday practices of international judges. In undertaking this task, the authors draw selectively upon a large literature on ‘practice theory’ that has only rarely been applied to international law in general or to international courts in particular. A typology and synoptic overview of practices is presented.

scholarly journals How We Heal: Genealogical Narratives of Healing among San Lázaro Devotees

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Elaine Penagos
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Narrative Medicine ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Cuban Americans ◽  
Photo Essay ◽  
Healing Narratives

Healing is the basis of belief in San Lázaro, a popular saint among Cubans, Cuban-Americans, and other Latinx peoples. Stories about healing, received through faith in San Lázaro, are typically passed on through family members, rendering them genealogical narratives of healing. In this photo essay, the author draws on her maternal grandmother’s devotion to San Lázaro and explores how other devotees of this saint create genealogical narratives of healing that are passed down from generation to generation. These genealogical narratives of healing function as testaments to the efficaciousness of San Lázaro’s healing abilities and act as familial avenues through which younger generations inherit belief in the saint. Using interview excerpts and ethnographic observations conducted at Rincón de San Lázaro church in Hialeah, Florida, the author locates registers of lo cotidiano, the everyday practices of the mundane required for daily functions and survival, and employs arts-based methods such as photography, narrative inquiry, and thematic poetic coding to show how the stories that believers tell about San Lázaro, and their experiences of healing through faith in the saint, constitute both genealogical narratives of healing and genealogical healing narratives where testimonies become a type of narrative medicine.

scholarly journals Borders and resilience: Asylum seeker reception at the securitized Finnish-Swedish border

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110000
Author(s):  
Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Border Controls ◽  
And Control ◽  
Cross Border Cooperation

The past decade has witnessed a shift from “open borders” policies and cross-border cooperation towards heightened border securitization and the building of border walls. In the EU context, since the migration influx of 2015–2016, many Member States have retained the re-instituted Schengen border controls intended to be temporary. Such heightened border securitization has produced high levels of anxiety among various populations and increased societal polarization. This paper focuses on the processes underpinning asylum seeker reception at the re-bordered Finnish-Swedish border and in the Finnish border town of Tornio. The asylum process is studied from the perspective of local authorities and NGO actors active in the everyday reception, care and control practices in the border securitization environment enacted in Tornio in 2015. The analysis highlights how the ‘success’ of everyday reception work at the Tornio border crossing was bound to the historical openness of the border and pre-existing relations of trust and cooperation between different actors at various scales. The paper thus provides a new understanding of the significance of borders and border crossings from the perspective of resilience and highlights some of the paradoxes of border securitization. It notes that although border closures are commonly envisioned as a direct response to forced migration, the everyday practices and capacities of the asylum reception at the Finnish-Swedish border are themselves highly dependent on pre-existing border crossings and cross-border cooperation.

scholarly journals The Denouncers: Populism and the Press in Venezuela

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT SAMET
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Recent Attention

AbstractDespite recent attention to the relationship between the media and populist mobilisation in Latin America, there is a misfit between the everyday practices of journalists and the theoretical tools that we have for making sense of these practices. The objective of this article is to help reorient research on populism and the press in Latin America so that it better reflects the grounded practices and autochthonous norms of the region. To that end, I turn to the case of Venezuela, and a practice that has been largely escaped attention from scholars – the use of denuncias.

Mafalda: Middle Class, Everyday Life, and Politics in Argentina, 1964-1973

2014 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabella Cosse
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
State Terrorism ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Modernization ◽  
Methodological Approaches

Abstract In this article I reconstruct the history of Mafalda, the famous comic strip by the Argentine cartoonist Quino that was read, discussed, and viewed as an emblematic representation of Argentina’s middle class. With the aim of contributing to discussions on the interpretation of the middle class in Argentina and Latin America, I examine the emergence, circulation, and sociopolitical significance of the comic from its first strips in 1964 until Quino stopped producing new installments in 1973, making use of two conceptual and methodological approaches: a perspective situated at the intersection of the everyday and the political, as well as a consideration of humor as a way of exploring social identities. I argue first that Mafalda’s ironic and conceptual humor worked with the contradictions of the middle class as it faced social modernization, cultural and political radicalization, and a weakening democracy. Second, I suggest that the strip contributed to a representation of a heterogeneous middle class marked by ideological differences but nonetheless conceived as one. Third, I claim that such a representation lost its relevance with the political polarization and violence of the 1970s, as portraying a middle class—or a society—united despite differences was no longer feasible in that context. To illustrate this, the article closes by noting that, shortly after Mafalda was discontinued, state terrorism would brutally demonstrate just how little space there was in Argentina for the young, antiestablishment generation depicted in the strip.

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