‘Do I Even Exist?’ Kurdish Diaspora Artists Reflect on Imaginary Exhibits in a Kurdistan Museum

2020 ◽  
pp. 241-267
Author(s):  
Vera Eccarius-Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Ethnographic Interviews ◽  
National Museums

In the MENA region state-sponsored cultural institutions such as museums often advanced a unified story of nationhood rather than to account for diverse ethno-linguistic and religious communities such as the Kurds. Visiting museums, Kurds have encountered deep silences, distortions and complete omissions of their lives. During the Baathist regime in Iraq, which controlled the country after 1968, national museums served to enhance the state’s legitimacy. Modern Turkish museums perpetuate a nationalistic narrative that discriminates against ethnic Kurds. To counter colonial and repressive narratives, diaspora Kurdish artists now articulate the need for alternative knowledge production. In this chapter, ethnographic interviews focused on curating Kurdish museum exhibits offer insights into how diaspora Kurdish participants frame their identities. The planned Kurdistan Museum in Erbil is at the center of Kurdish diasporic critique. Cultural activism among Kurdish diaspora artists, not unlike political consciousness-raising, represents a form of resistance to the way in which Kurdish experiences have been manipulated by hostile power structures.

Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The City

This edited volume provides a multifaceted investigation of the dynamic interrelations between visual arts and urbanization in contemporary Mainland China with a focus on unseen representations and urban interventions brought about by the transformations of the urban space and the various problems associated with it. Through a wide range of illuminating case studies, the authors demonstrate how innovative artistic and creative practices initiated by various stakeholders not only raise critical awareness on socio-political issues of Chinese urbanization but also actively reshape the urban living spaces. The formation of new collaborations, agencies, aesthetics and cultural production sites facilitate diverse forms of cultural activism as they challenge the dominant ways of interpreting social changes and encourage civic participation in the production of alternative meanings in and of the city. Their significance lies in their potential to question current values and power structures as well as to foster new subjectivities for disparate individuals and social groups.

scholarly journals They Arrived Completely Intact: The Evacuation of Chersonese Museum Collections to Sverdlovsk

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Mokhov ◽  
Andrey Shamanaev ◽  
Karina Kapsalykova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Emergency Evacuation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Public Organisations ◽  
The Military

This article considers the emergency evacuation of the collections of the Chersonese Historical and Archaeological Museum from Sevastopol to Sverdlovsk during the Great Patriotic War, between September and December 1941. The authors analyse some issues concerning the preparation and transportation of the museum collection and the interaction between state structures and cultural institutions in wartime conditions. The study is based on unpublished archival materials from the funds of the State Archive of Sverdlovsk Region and the Documentation Centre of Public Organisations of Sverdlovsk Region. The study of problems connected with saving cultural heritage during military conflicts is relevant considering the threat of local wars in the modern world. At present, military actions pose serious risks of the destruction, damage, and illicit transfer of museum exhibits. The authors employ the historical and anthropological approach, paying a great deal of attention to the historiography of the issue of cultural heritage preservation during the Great Patriotic War. The experience of evacuating heritage collections from the Chersonese Museum is both unique and typical. One hundred and eight crates of artifacts, books, and archival documents were sent from Sevastopol to Sverdlovsk, accompanied by a single employee of the museum, S. F. Strzelecki. Owing to his effort, the priceless collection was successfully delivered to the rear. Most problems faced during the emergency evacuation of the Chersonese collections related to the deficit of material resources, rapid changes in the situation at the front, inefficient interaction between the bodies of power, academic and cultural institutions, and deficiencies in the transportation system. The authors argue that during the early stages of the Great Patriotic War, the conditions in the military and cultural spheres posed a significant threat to the preservation of cultural heritage. There were no mobilisation plans for museums and the authorities failed to assess the real risks of wartime. Taking these factors into account should help diminish the threat of cultural heritage loss during military conflicts.

Disidentification

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Elizabeth Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
The Social

Deriving from José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational 1999 text Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, disidentification is a theoretical heuristic and performative practice that is an essential framework for thinking through, and living in, intersecting sites of marginality and oppression. In particular, disidentification is a heuristic that provides critical scholars with a framework for theorizing the relationships between subject formation, ideology, politics, and power while also offering people from marginalized communities a way to navigate intersecting forms of oppression and enact agency. Scholars use disidentification to refer to performances that minoritarian subjects engage in to survive within inhospitable spaces, while nevertheless working to subvert them. Thus, as both a theoretical framework and a performative practice, disidentification is an antiracist tool that can be utilized to theorize and respond to normative power structures including Communication Studies’ modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Indeed, the discipline of Communication Studies is diverse, but in spite of this, what coheres this expansive body of scholarship is an investment in understanding how communication produces, scaffolds, organizes, and potentially revises our world. Disidentification, by foregrounding identities and experiences of difference, offers Communication Studies researchers a way to consider how one’s life can be understood in relation to others, within the social structures that govern daily life, and within the ideological commitments that organize our experiences.

scholarly journals Imperial dialectics and epistemic mapping: From decolonisation to anti-Eurocentric IR

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Murray
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Social Inquiry ◽  
Cultural Foundations ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Capability

What would it mean to construct a post-imperial discipline rather than a ‘post-Western’ one? ‘Post-imperial’ means addressing the ways in which colonial empires divided the world into separate realms of human capability and thought. The binary categories of Western and Eastern, or Western and non-Western, represent one such way of dividing the world according to an imperial imaginary. Rather than merely excluding, these divisions created justifications for local universalisms and power structures. Yet, many anti-Eurocentric scholars now make use of these categories in order to argue for fixed epistemic differences between Western and non-Western populations. Accordingly, I critique the imperial division of the world by drawing on the intellectual trajectories of two thinkers who struggled against empire in the 20th century: WEB Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. Du Bois and Fanon were both aware of how ethnic and cultural foundations for politics could reproduce imperial order, and, therefore, offer potential alternatives to Western/non-Western ontologies. This includes recognising that representations of difference are processual, determined by strategic necessity, and subject to incentives to represent difference within hierarchical institutions. This article builds on recent studies in International Relations and other disciplines to think through the legacies of empire in knowledge production, and to push towards more historical and relational approaches to world political and social inquiry.

Mapping Empire: Knowledge Production and Government in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nour Nicole Dados
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Government Administration ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
Demographic Methods

Many studies of the nineteenth century Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have been concerned with the economic, social and political influence exerted by European colonial governments through the accumulation of knowledge about the region and its subsequent military domination. The case of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century demonstrates that European techniques of knowledge production were also strategically adopted by ruling elites outside the colonial metropolises. Ottoman adoption of European technologies and techniques were politically entwined with the empire’s territorial claims against nascent nationalisms and a calculated move towards knowledge-based forms of government administration in the quest to hold onto power. Cartographic and demographic methods used by the Ottomans produced new assemblages of territory and population that profoundly reshaped the objective of government and the conduct of imperial administration. Statistics and geography became the choice tools of social progress and advancement, underpinning the numerous reforms of the nineteenth century aimed at rationalisation and centralisation.

Knowledge infrastructure and research agendas for quotidian Anthropocenes: Critical localism with planetary scope

2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110319
Author(s):  
Kim Fortun ◽  
James Adams ◽  
Tim Schütz ◽  
Scott Gabriel Knowles
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Knowledge Infrastructure ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Term Field

The Anthropocene requires the development of new forms of knowledge and supporting sociotechnical infrastructure. While there have been calls for both interdisciplinary and community-engaged approaches, there remains a need to develop, test, and sustain modes of Anthropocene knowledge production that effectively link people working at different scales, in different sites, with many different types of expertise. In this Perspectives piece, we describe one such approach to Anthropocene knowledge production, centered in short-term Field Campuses that bring together community actors in cultural institutions, media, and government agencies with external academic researchers, bringing cultural analysis into the work of characterizing and responding to the Anthropocene. We argue that it is important to build public knowledge infrastructure that allows people to visualize and address many intersecting scales and systems (ecological, atmospheric, economic, technological, social, cultural, etc.) that shape the Anthropocene at the local level.

scholarly journals COMMUNITY PERCEPTIONS OF REASONS FOR PREFERENCE FOR CONSANGUINEOUS MARRIAGES IN PAKISTAN

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. HUSSAIN
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Consanguineous Marriages ◽  
The Family ◽  
Perceived Reasons

Although the recent Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) show that two-thirds of marriages in Pakistan are consanguineous, the sociocultural determinants of such marriages remain largely unexplored. This paper examines the relative importance of the three commonly perceived reasons for such marriages: religious, economic and cultural. The analysis is based on qualitative data collected in 1995 from multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities in Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan. Results show that consanguineous marriages are preferred across all ethnic and religious groups to a varying degree, and that parents continue to be the prime decision-makers for marriages of both sons and daughters. The major reasons for a preference for consanguineous marriages are sociocultural rather than any perceived economic benefits, either in the form of consolidation of family property or smaller and less expensive dowries. Among Muslims, following religious traditions is the least commonly cited reason for such marriages. Despite the reported sociocultural advantages of consanguineous marriages, such unions are perceived to be exploitative as they perpetuate the existing power structures within the family.

The MESA Global Academy: Sustaining Knowledge Production Among MENA Scholars

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-317
Author(s):  
Mimi Kirk
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Research Collaborations ◽  
Academic Trajectory ◽  
Middle East Studies

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Global Academy is an initiative that sustains research collaborations and knowledge production among regionally-focused scholars from the Middle East and North Africa and their counterparts outside the region. Spearheaded by MESA, the project is an expression of the scholarly field's commitment to scholarship in and from the region. By awarding scholarships to displaced scholars from the MENA region currently located in North America, and thereby enabling them to attend meetings, workshops, and conferences, the project supports individuals whose academic trajectory has been adversely affected by developments in their home countries.

scholarly journals Exercising radical democracy

2018 ◽  
pp. 16-32
Author(s):  
Aaron Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Relational Art ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
New Crop

The utopian promise of the digital era and the seemingly open, democratic power of the Internet have raised the hopes of activists and documentarians alike. The immediacy, reciprocity and accessibility of the emergent communication technologies appeared to be particularly suitable for media projects that aspire to mobilise for action, engage communities, and challenge the existing power structures in order to have direct influence on policy making. Over the last ten years, a whole new crop of documentary projects involving new modalities and unorthodox ways of knowledge production came into existence. Interestingly, the rise of this particular form coincided with the global economic crisis and a number of social and political upheavals of epochal proportions. Documentary representation, like all other forms of cultural expression, was not immune to those shifts. This article looks at the ensuing crisis of representation as linked to contemporary documentary practice, and examines some of the ways the new, web-based forms of documentary use polyvocality to engage their audience, build communities, and mobilise in struggles for social change. It features several examples and draws on the existing documentary theory, as well as the implicit, yet rarely invoked, links to the so-called “relational art”.

The rise of the north-western Tswana kingdoms: on the dynamics of interaction between internal relations and external forces

Africa ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 550-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ørnulf Gulbrandsen
Keyword(s):  
Internal Control ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Copper Production ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
The North ◽  
Internal Relations ◽  
External Forces ◽  
North Western

AbstractWhile southern African polities are often considered as essentially fissionary in nature, this article gives emphasis to the equally important fusionary processes. Examining the rise of the north-western kingdoms, it is focused upon the accumulation of material and symbolic capital in the royal centres. Particular attention is paid to how the rulers exploited this capital in their efforts to amalgamate the power structures surrounding their offices. The accumulation of the royal capital is related to the kingdoms' interaction with the larger world, and it is argued that the rise of the north-western Tswana kingdoms—located on the edge of the Kalahari—might profitably be seen as localised culminations of regional processes, propelled by regional and global forces. Thus the present historical approach helps to demonstrate how these kingdoms gained strength by translating ever newer types of external forces into the constructive underpinnings of a central authority: the initial conquest and incorporation of local groups gave these polities demographic strength. By virtue of virgin pastures, copper production and the natural resources of the Kalahari the centre grew in wealth and strength, attracting foreign groups and incorporating them politically through clientisation. These regional economic and ecological processes underpinned the growth of royal pastoral wealth and diversified the composition of the population, allowing the king to use particular cultural institutions to strengthen his internal control and military capacity. In particular, through several decades of military success from the later eighteenth century onwards, the resources and authority commanded by the king were institutionalised through a politico-administrative ward system.It is argued that the progressive strength of these polities involved two types of dialectical transformation: first, a socio-political dialectic at work in the interaction between internal relations and external forces, by which the king translated cattle and people into political controls; and, secondly, the reproduction and strengthening of the symbolic capital vested in the royal ancestorhood, upon which the king's legitimacy rested, was effected by the transformation of any successful ruler from being king to becoming a royal ancestor. Although the transformative operations of the rulers are thus emphasised, their successful agency in translating external forces into royal capital is attributed primarily not to their personal capacity but to the advantageous structural conditions under which they operated as the historical con-text evolved.

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