scholarly journals From Crisis to Compensation: Reinventing Identity and Place in the Sideshow and the Laboratory

Humanities ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Elisavet Ioannidou

Examining the ambivalent place of the sideshow and the laboratory within Victorian culture and its reimaginings, this essay explores the contradiction between the narratively orchestrating role and peripheral location of the sideshow in Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels (2015) and the laboratory in NBC’s Dracula (2013–2014), reading these neo-Victorian spaces as heterotopias, relational places simultaneously belonging to and excluded from the dominant social order. These spaces’ impacts on individual identity illustrate this uneasy relationship. Both the sideshow and the laboratory constitute sites of resignification, emerging as “crisis heterotopias” or sites of passage: in Parry’s novel, the sideshow allows the Church twins to embrace their unique identities, surpassing the limitations of their physical resemblance; in Dracula, laboratory experiments reverse Dracula’s undead condition. Effecting reinvention, these spaces reconfigure the characters’ senses of belonging, propelling them to places beyond their confines, and thus projecting the latter’s heterotopic qualities onto the city. Potentially harmful, yet opening up urban space to include identities which are considered aberrant, these relocations envision the city as a “heterotopia of compensation”: an alternative, possibly idealized, space that reifies the sideshow’s and the laboratory’s attempts to achieve greater extroversion and visibility for their liminal occupants, thus fostering neo-Victorianism’s outreach efforts to support the disempowered.

2021 ◽  
pp. 964-988
Author(s):  
Dominic Lieven

The construction of a mighty empire and impressive high culture in a region uniquely far from the centers of global trade and culture was a great achievement. Elements of Eurasian empire and European military-fiscal state merged in the tsarist polity. This polity’s success rested on a powerful “sacred” monarchy that dominated the church and forged a close alliance with the landowning nobility while preserving a massive “state peasantry” whose surplus went to the crown alone. As with the English, French, and Spanish, Russia’s peripheral location in Europe facilitated the conquest of non-European territories. The Industrial and French revolutions posed great challenges to Russia’s geopolitical security and social order, as well as to the regime’s legitimacy. Though these challenges (e.g., nationalism) were faced by most empires, in the Russian case factors that had been essential to previous success (autocracy, serfdom, Westernized elites) contributed to undermining the regime’s legitimacy by 1900.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Н. К. Міхно

The study tested that cities are studied from different perspectives: from city-to-city links, structural elements of urban space to everyday practices of cities. Among the representatives of the scientific field, which made a significant contribution to the development of the theory of urban research is to highlight J. Bodriyar, P. Bourdieu, D. Becker, D. Jacobs, C. Lynch, A. Lefevra, M. Castells, D. Garvey, A. Scott, R. Pal, J. Fischer, H. Delitz and others. Moreover interesting and thorough are the scientific works of Ukrainian researchers – V. Sereda, M. Sobolevskaya, L. Males, Y. Soroka, D. Sudin, A. Petrenko-Lisak, A. Mikheeva, L. Nagorna, O. Musiyuzdov and a number of others. In this case, the methodological position of the researchers is relevant, which states that the symbolic space of the city is formed through the ability of visual objects to translate cultural and symbolic codes with the help of geometric, semantic and aesthetic characteristics. For example, in this work, one of the key terms is «architectural landscapes» with which it is possible to analyze the combination of spatial forms in the city with meaningful cultural and ideological content. It was recorded that the signs or symbolic markers can serve as architectural buildings, monuments, memorable signs, street names, informational and promotional posters, and so on. The main objects of research in the sociology of the study of architectural forms gradually became the phenomenon of buildings and structures, as well as the development of theoretical directions in architecture, the study of the place and role of space in sociology and cultural studies. As a result in the methodological space, along with the phenomenological, anthropological, and linguistic turns, the term «architectural turn» appears. From the point of view of the system theory, architecture is not seen as the main subject of research, namely communication on architecture. Accordingly, institutional theory in sociology considers architecture as an «institutional mechanism» that firmly asks individuals a certain social order and allows for the implementation of architectural ideas. On the other hand, at the same time, open questions remain regarding the meaningful content of the meanings contained in the objects of architecture. The postmodern direction, which reveals other aspects of the study of architectural forms, deserves special attention. Discreteness Architectural of social life, «decentralization of the subject», the decomposition of reality into actual and virtual, freedom and spontaneity as characteristics of the postmodern era are reflected and read in the architecture of postmodern. The architectural space of the city is considered by a number of domestic and foreign researchers in the context of symbolic interaction between power structures and actors through architectural constructions and design of a living environment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-398
Author(s):  
Maya Mynster Christensen ◽  
Peter Albrecht

This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and South, borders and bordering practices are reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to threaten social order and have thus become manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows. At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. By approaching urban policing as a practice of bordering that is informed by material and imaginary manifestations, tensions between (de)territorializing and (de)stabilization are highlighted as both the vehicle and outcome of bordering practices. These tensions, we propose, can be captured through the concept of trembling. Trembling implies both a physical and emotional response to anxiety, excitement and frailty that is paradoxically built into borders and bordering practices.


2021 ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Eva Moreda Rodríguez

The chapter focuses on the gabinetes fonográficos active in Barcelona from 1898 onward. It aims to analyze why Barcelona’s early recording industry remained more precarious and less successful than that in Madrid, and advances two reasons: the failure of the Barcelona gabinetes to position themselves within local discourses around science, technology, modernity, and Catalan national identity; and their increasingly peripheral location in the developing urban space of Barcelona. The chapter then discusses how Barcelona eventually came to lead the Spanish recording industry after the advent of the gramophone, with a subsidiary of Gramophone and a new generation of record shops opening in the city.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395171666512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor Shelton

This paper explores the variety of ways that emerging sources of (big) data are being used to re-conceptualize the city, and how these understandings of what the urban is shapes the design of interventions into it. Drawing on work on the performativity of economics, this paper uses two vignettes of the ‘new urban science’ and municipal vacant property mapping in order to argue that the mobilization of Big Data in the urban context doesn’t necessarily produce a single, greater understanding of the city as it actually is, but rather a highly variegated series of essentialized understandings of the city that render it knowable, governable and intervene-able. Through the construction of new, data-driven urban geographical imaginaries, these projects have opened up the space for urban interventions that work to depoliticize urban injustices and valorize new kinds of technical expertise as the means of going about solving these problems, opening up new possibilities for a remaking of urban space in the image of these sociotechnical paradigms. Ultimately, this paper argues that despite the importance of Big Data, as both a discourse and practice, to emerging forms of urban research and management, there is no singular or universal understanding of the urban that is promoted or developed through the application of these new sources of data, which in turn opens up meaningful possibilities for developing alternative uses of Big Data for understanding and intervening in the city in more emancipatory ways.


Author(s):  
Ruth Conrad

SummaryIn my paper I follow the thesis that cities are ambivalent and constantly produce ambivalences. Whoever reflects on the church in a changing world of the 21


2020 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Barbara Konecka-Szydłowska

Public space of the Morasko Campus in Poznań in the opinion of students Public spaces are an important part of urban space. The paper presents the results of the research on the assessment of the public space of the Morasko Campus situated in the northern part of Poznan. The analysis covers the years 2006 and 2017 and uses the semantic differential method worked out by Osgood, Succi and Tannenbaum in 1957. The study of public space was conducted in terms of five basic categories of spatial order: (1) town-planning – architectural order, (2) functional order, (3) aesthetic order, (4) social order and (5) ecological order. The obtained results show that, in the opinion of students, the Morasko space obtained a higher assessment in all the categories over the study period (an increase in the average assessment from 3.9 to 4.8). In 2017, ecological order was the category assessed highest , and functional order the one assessed lowest,. In the studied years the Campus space was assessed lowest by the students of the Faculty of Geographical and Geological Sciences, which was caused by its peripheral location. Due to the great importance of the natural values of the Campus, their detailed description is presented at the end of the study. Zarys treści: Ważną częścią przestrzeni miejskiej są przestrzenie publiczne. W opracowaniu zaprezentowano wyniki badań na temat oceny przestrzeni Kampusu Morasko, położonego w północnej części Poznania. Zakres czasowy analizy obejmuje zasadniczo lata 2006 i 2017. W opracowaniu posłużono się metodą dyferencjału semantycznego opracowaną przez Osgooda, Succiego i Tannenbauma w 1957 r. Badanie przestrzeni publicznej przeprowadzono w odniesieniu do pięciu podstawowych kategorii ładu przestrzennego: 1) ładu urbanistyczno-architektonicznego, 2) ładu funkcjonalnego, 3) ładu estetycznego, 4) ładu społecznego oraz 5) ładu ekologicznego. Uzyskane wyniki pozwalają stwierdzić, że zdaniem studentów w badanym okresie nastąpił wzrost oceny przestrzeni Kampusu Morasko we wszystkich kategoriach (wzrost średniej oceny syntetycznej z 3,9 do 4,8). W 2017 r. zdecydowanie najwyżej ocenianą kategorią był ład ekologiczny, a najniżej ład funkcjonalny. W badanych latach najgorzej przestrzeń Kampusu oceniali studenci Wydziału Nauk Geograficznych i Geologicznych, co spowodowane było peryferyjną lokalizacją tego wydziału. Ze względu na duże znaczenie walorów przyrodniczych Kampusu w końcowej części pracy przeprowadzono ich pogłębioną charakterystykę.


Author(s):  
Taras Mylian

Archaeological research in Lviv has a long tradition and dates back about two hundred years. During this time, information about the ancient history of Lviv from many sections of the city was obtained. The beginnings of the archaeological study of the ancient history of the city date back to the first half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to Pauli, attention was drawn to ancient artifacts from the territory of Lviv. Some of the findings begin to form the collections of the first museum collections. In the second half of the XIX century, the formation of archaeological institutions in Lviv began. Government agencies appear to monitor the storage of monuments. As a result of joint action, rescue excavations during the construction of the railway were made. Archaeologists from Lviv are beginning to form hypotheses about the founding and development of the city. Archaeological sources have updated information about the pre-developmental stage of the development and gave new evidence about the stages of development of the annalistic city. This state of affairs remains until the middle of the twentieth century. However, sometimes archaeological research was influenced by ideological factors. With another change of social order in the second half of XX century managed to preserve the main trends of formation and structure of the archaeological branch of the city. The institutions in which the teams of researchers form are decisive. There is an organ function to preserve and study archaeology monuments. From this period, the intensification of the research process begins. Planned works covered both the Vysokyj Zamok (High Castle) and the city centre. Since Ukrainian independence, research has increased exponentially. They are occupied by large squares and give significant advantages in the formation and development of the urban space of Lviv in ancient times. The discovered artifacts are on display during museum exhibitions. Key words: archaeological research, Lviv, museum collections, Vysokyj Zamok (High Castle), city centre.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlon Lima Da Silva ◽  
Janete Marília Gentil Coimbra de Oliveira

ResumoO trabalho discute a produção do espaço urbano, tendo referência o contexto da política habitacional recente (2003-2014) e a construção de novos conjuntos habitacionais. Parte do ano de 2003, momento em que inicia uma nova fase na política habitacional brasileira, avançando até a criação do Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC) e do Programa Minha Casa Minha Vida (PMCMV). Analisa a produção do espaço urbano, considerando a construção de novos conjuntos habitacionais e suas localizações. Para tanto, utiliza como referência espacial a Região Metropolitana de Belém (RMB). Apesar dos avanços incorporados ao Estatuto das Cidades, em 2001, a política recente tem reforçado uma lógica perversa da localização periférica dos conjuntos habitacionais destinados aos estratos de menor renda, com contribuição direta do PMCMV. Como decorrência, o tecido urbano da RMB tem se estendido precariamente sobre as áreas rurais, num cenário que parece se repetir ao longo das políticas habitacionais, revelando contradições e conflitos na produção do espaço urbano.Palavras-Chave: Espaço Urbano, Política Habitacional, Região Metropolitana de Belém. AbstractThe work discusses the production of urban space, having reference to the recent housing policy (2003-2014) and the construction of new housing estates. From the year of 2003, at which point starts a new phase in the Brazilian housing policy, advancing up the creation of the Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC) and the Programa Minha Casa Minha Vida (PMCMV). It analyzes the production of urban space, considering the construction of new housing estates and their locations. Therefore, uses as a spatial reference the Região Metropolitana de Belém (RMB). Despite advances incorporated in the Statute of the City, in 2001, the recent policy has reinforced a perverse logic of the peripheral location of the housing estates for the lower income strata, with direct contribution of PMCMV. As a result, the urban fabric of the RMB has extended precariously on the rural areas, a scenario that seems to repeat itself over housing policy, revealing contradictions and conflicts in the production of urban space.Keywords: Urban Space, Housing Policy, the Metropolitan Region of Belém. ResumenEl trabajo analiza la producción del espacio urbano, con referencia a la reciente política habitacional (2003-2014) y la construcción de nuevas viviendas. Parte del año de 2003, punto en que se inicia una nueva etapa en la política habitacional brasileña, avanzando hasta la creación del Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC) y el Programa Minha Casa Minha Vida (PMCMV). Analiza la producción del espacio urbano, considerando la construcción de nuevas urbanizaciones y sus ubicaciones. Para eso, toma como referencia espacial la Región Metropolitana de Belém (RMB). Pese a los avances incorporados en el Estatuto de la Ciudad, en 2001, la política reciente ha reforzado una lógica perversa de la localización periférica de las viviendas destinadas a los estratos de menor renta, con la contribución directa de PMCMV. Como resultado, el tejido urbano del RMB se ha ampliado precariamente en las zonas rurales, un escenario que parece repetirse sobre la política de vivienda, revelando las contradicciones y conflictos en la producción del espacio urbano.Palabras clave: Espacio Urbano, Política Habitacional, Región Metropolitana de Belém. 


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Alina Nowicka -Jeżowa

Summary The article tries to outline the position of Piotr Skarga in the Jesuit debates about the legacy of humanist Renaissance. The author argues that Skarga was fully committed to the adaptation of humanist and even medieval ideas into the revitalized post-Tridentine Catholicism. Skarga’s aim was to reformulate the humanist worldview, its idea of man, system of values and political views so that they would fit the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. In effect, though, it meant supplanting the pluralist and open humanist culture by a construct as solidly Catholic as possible. He sifted through, verified, and re-interpreted the humanist material: as a result the humanist myth of the City of the Sun was eclipsed by reminders of the transience of all earthly goods and pursuits; elements of the Greek and Roman tradition were reconnected with the authoritative Biblical account of world history; and man was reinscribed into the theocentric perspective. Skarga brought back the dogmas of the original sin and sanctifying grace, reiterated the importance of asceticism and self-discipline, redefined the ideas of human dignity and freedom, and, in consequence, came up with a clear-cut, integrist view of the meaning and goal of the good life as well as the proper mission of the citizen and the nation. The polemical edge of Piotr Skarga’s cultural project was aimed both at Protestantism and the Erasmian tendency within the Catholic church. While strongly coloured by the Ignatian spirituality with its insistence on rigorous discipline, a sense of responsibility for the lives of other people and the culture of the community, and a commitment to the heroic ideal of a miles Christi, taking headon the challenges of the flesh, the world, Satan, and the enemies of the patria and the Church, it also went a long way to adapt the Jesuit model to Poland’s socio-cultural conditions and the mentality of its inhabitants.


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