What’s in a Name? Questions for a New Monument

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margrethe Troensegaard
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Culturally Diverse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Core ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Sculpture ◽  
The Social ◽  
We The People

What is the contemporary condition of the monument? In relation to the current issue’s discussion of immersive and discursive exhibition practices, this essay places itself at a slight remove; rather than to analyse and evaluate specific curatorial strategies it seeks to raise questions of relevance to such practices and begins by moving the discourse out of the museum and into the public space. The point of interrogation here is the monument, a form with a particular capacity to tease and expose the triad we find at the core of any curatorial discourse: the relation between institution, artwork and audience. Following an introductory reflection on how to describe and define a ‘monument’, a term so broadly used it all but loses its value, the text proceeds to examine three cases, Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, Dakar (2010), Danh Vo’s WE THE PEOPLE (DETAIL), various locations (2010-13), and Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, New York (2013). The sequencing of these geographically and culturally diverse works makes way for an interrogatory piece of writing that addresses the question of permanence versus temporariness of the artwork as exhibition (and the exhibition as artwork), and that of the political agency of the artistic form. Probing the social agency of the monument, the text draws lines between the symbolising capacity once held by modern sculpture and the oscillation between immersion and discursiveness as two complimentary modes of communication. The discursive content or function of the monument (i.e. what it commemorates) is activated through the viewer’s personal, immersive encounter with its form, a form that potentially places its viewer as a participant to the construction of its message rather than as a mere receiver.

Reading inquiry through the prism of unemployement

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
Guillaume Heuguet
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Science Inquiry ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

This exploratory text starts from a doctoral-unemployed experience and was triggered by the discussions within a collective of doctoral students on this particularly ambiguous status since it is situated between student, unemployed, worker, self-entrepreneur, citizen-subject of social rights or user-commuter in offices and forms. These discussions motivated the reading and commentary of a heterogeneous set of texts on unemployment, precariousness and the functioning of the institutions of the social state. This article thus focuses on the relationship between knowledge and unemployment, as embodied in the public space, in the relationship with Pôle Emploi, and in the academic literature. It articulates a threefold problematic : what is known and said publicly about unemployment? What can we learn from the very experience of the relationship with an institution like Pôle Emploi? How can these observations contribute to an understanding of social science inquiry and the political role of knowledge fromm precariousness?

Regional-Cosmopolitan Constituent Power

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Markus Patberg
Keyword(s):  
Member State ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The People ◽  
We The People ◽  
The Eu

This chapter deals with the question of whether the public narrative of ‘We, the people of Europe’, which claims constituent power for a cross-border demos composed of EU citizens, can be justified in terms of a systematic model. To that end, it draws on the political theory of regional cosmopolitanism, which holds that even though the EU is not a state, it has its own political community. The literature on regional cosmopolitanism offers two possible strategies of defending the idea of an EU-wide constituent power: a first-principles approach and a reconstructive approach. The chapter argues that only the latter proves viable, and then goes on to examine the merits of the model that it gives rise to. While regional-cosmopolitan constituent power plausibly responds to the fact that the EU has created a new group of addressees and authors of the law, it neglects the continuing importance of the member state peoples and fails to explain how an EU-wide constituent power could be reconciled with the compound and dependent nature of the EU polity.

The Literary Depiction of the “Public Space”: Chen Zhongshi’s White Deer Plain Revisited

Rural China ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-171
Author(s):  
Zhi Gao
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Economic

Chen Zhongshi’s novel, White Deer Plain, is a complex text revealing the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of a community in transformation in which multiple public spaces coexist and struggle to survive. As a reinterpretation of the novel, this article examines three types of public spaces: the popular, the political, and the cultural-educational, respectively. Focusing on the forms of depiction, the inner workings of the public spaces, the overlapping between different spaces and their expansion, this article aims to delineate the trajectories of the rise and fall of such public spaces and explore their entangling and association with modernity.

scholarly journals For Dignity, Against Racism: The Struggles of Asylum Seekers in Italy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Pasqualetto ◽  
Fabio Perocco
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

In Italy, over the last years in the world of social struggles asylum seekers have been in the spotlight several times, having led several episodes of mobilisations and protests. They emerged as political subjects, with their own claims and situations; parallel to the issue of reception, they expressed themselves in the public space as asylum seekers, with campaigns, pickets, and marches, with which the respect for their rights and dignity is advocated. This study analyses the causes, forms and repercussions of the struggles of asylum seekers in the last decade. After the analysis of the experience of immigrants’ struggles over the last three decades, the article examines the social roots and the features of the struggles of asylum seekers between 2011 to 2019, and considers their meaning in the political context.

scholarly journals PRAGMATICS OF LANGUAGE AND VALUES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: TOWARDS AN EXPANSIVE PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO THE USED DISCOURSE

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (04) ◽  
pp. 221-231
Author(s):  
Youness HABBACH
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Sphere

This research aims at analysing the pragmatic prominent discourse in the public sphere, the digital sphere in particular, that reflects special changes in the society. The meant discourse has not been investigated adequately and sufficiently namely the social, the political and the digital virtual discourses which bear an effective semantic and pragmatic power on the public space and at the same time incorporate strong transformations in the values patterns. This study utilizes a pragmatic approach, since the pragmatics is a study of using language in communication, and works on analysing daily discourses using a journalistic editorial. So, what are the changes reflected by this discourse? And what are the values represented and expressed by the prevailing discourses in the public sphere?

scholarly journals Hygiène publique et construction de l’ Etat grec, 1833 - 1845

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Αθανάσιος Μπαρλαγιάννης
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Complete System ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
State Action ◽  
The Public ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
The Social ◽  
Of Greece

This study is about the organization of public hygiene in the kingdom of Greece between 1833, when prince Otto of Bavaria ascends to the throne, and 1845, when the political and epidemiological frontiers of the kingdom are traced by a complete system of lazarettos and sanitary offices. We will firstly analyze the structures of sanitary prevention in the interior of the country (vaccinators, public health doctors, municipal doctors) as well as at its frontiers, and then we will focus on the measures against contagious diseases (such as the plague and smallpox) and against miasmas. We are also interested in examining the main diseases that determine the mortality of the period under scrutiny and the medical theories that explain the applicable sanitary measures. At the same time, we will review some of the aspects of the classical distinction of Erwin Ackerknecht between contagionism and miasmatic theory. Finally, we will study the difficult formation of an official group of medical professionals. The interest in public hygiene imposes the study of the biological construction of the state and, subsequently, of the state itself. Public hygiene defines the threats which it tries to prevent, and it creates and secures the collectivity. In the Police State of thecameralist king Otto, these developments are controlled by the bureaucracy, the administration, the public force and the science of medical police. Its purpose is to construct and order the public space, the space of state action, which is natural as well as social. This action of ordering imposes the centralization of health and at the same time it normalizes the natural elements and the social forces so that they can coordinate without resistance; in other words, the action of ordering pacifies. Medical police controls these processes by reconfiguring the ties that bind individuals with each other and with the geography, the nature and their diseases.

scholarly journals Surfing the Public Square: On Worldlessness, Social Media, and the Dissolution of the Polis

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 668-678
Author(s):  
Sue Spaid
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Private Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
Private And Public

AbstractThis paper employs Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the social, which lacks location and mandates conformity, to evaluate social media’s: a) challenge to the polis, b) relationship to the social, b) influence on private space, d) impact on public space, and e) virus-like capacity to capture, mimic, and replicate the agonistic polis, where “everything [is] decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence.” Using Arendt’s exact language, this paper begins by discussing how she differentiated the political, private, social, and public realms. After explaining how online activities resemble (or not) her notion of the social, I demonstrate how the rise of the social, which she characterized as dominated by behavior (not action), ruled by nobody and occurring nowhere, continues to eclipse both private and public space at an alarming pace. Finally, I discuss the ramifications of social media’s setting the stage for worldlessness to spin out of control, as the public square becomes an intangible web. Unlike an Arendtian web of worldly human relationships that fosters individuality and enables excellence to be publicly tested, social media feeds a craving for kinship and connection, however remotely. Leaving such needs unfulfilled, social media risks to trump bios politicos.

scholarly journals We the people, We the public space. An interactive exhibition at the 9th World Urban Forum

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-162
Author(s):  
Luisa Bravo ◽  
Valerio Francia
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Forum ◽  
Inclusive Development ◽  
Kuala Lumpur ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
City Space ◽  
Space Architecture ◽  
We The People

At the Ninth session of the World Urban Forum, convened by UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, held on 7-13 February 2018 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, City Space Architecture was selected to be part of the event as an exhibitor: it was included in the exhibition area, held at the main venue of the Forum, the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, besides the Petronas Towers, as the only Italian exhibitor, together with 200 selected exhibitors from 50 countries.The exhibition space hosted the exhibition ‘We the people, We the public space’: recalling the well-known United Nations’ campaign ‘We the people’ for the Global Goals[1] launched in 2015, the exhibition was intended to stress the concept that people and public space, intended as the space for democracy, social justice and equity, are strongly intertwined, so that talking about people is the same thing as talking about public space. The UN commitment ‘Leaving no one behind’[2] (United Nations, 2016 and 2017) for inclusive development is strictly related to people and therefore to public space: it is a demand for country leaders to prioritise the needs of those most marginalised and disadvantaged, facing poverty and discrimination, so that the goals for sustainable development are delivered by 2030[3].   [1] https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2015/09/we-the-people-for-the-global-goals/ [2] https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2016/leaving-no-one-behind [3] https://action4sd.org/leavenoonebehind/

Revisiting the End of Public Space: Assembling the Public in an Urban Park

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Madden
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Park ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Self Development

A case study of the renovation of New York City's Bryant Park, this article revisits the end of public space thesis. the renovated park signifies not the end of public space but the new ends to which public space is oriented. in Bryant Park, a new logic of urban publicity was assembled and built into the landscape. the social and technical means by which this transformation was achieved are analyzed. New public spaces of this sort promulgate a conception of the public that is decoupled from discourses of democratization, citizenship, and self–development and connected ever more firmly to consumption, commerce, and social surveillance. If such places do not herald the end of public space, they do represent “publicity without democracy.”

Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space in a Democracy

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Kohn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Control ◽  
The People ◽  
Institutional Structures

This article examines the legal and normative debates about the Occupy Toronto movement in order to illuminate the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It challenges the view that the occupation of parks and plazas was an illegitimate privatization of public space. In both New York City and Toronto, the courts relied on a theory that Habermas called “German Hobbesianism.” This sovereigntist theory of the public was used to justify removing the protesters and disbanding the encampments. The alternative is what I call the populist model of the public, a term which describes the political mobilization of the people outside the institutional structures of the state. While my focus is on public space, I suggest the appropriation of space was the most visible aspect of a broader call for collective control of the common wealth of society. In other words, we should understand the occupations synecdochally as struggles over the meaning and power of public and private.

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