Embodied Affective Citizenship

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Currans
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Reproductive Freedom ◽  
National Mall ◽  
A Site

This chapter brings together three overlapping concerns--embodiment, affect, and citizenship--by focusing on how this women-dominated group claimed a public space integrally tied to citizenship practice. We feel, emotionally and bodily, the ways that we are granted or denied citizenship. Citizenship is an emotional and embodied experience as well as a legal and political process. By marching on Washington, participants brought this complex web of experiences, what I call embodied affective citizenship, to a site central to how U.S. citizenship is imagined. Marchers representing different approaches to establishing reproductive freedom interacted, transforming the national mall into a site for negotiating how citizenship practice would be understood during and after the event.

Ground Control to Major Tom

2017 ◽  
pp. 264-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron D. Knochel
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Positioning Systems ◽  
Global Positioning ◽  
A Site ◽  
Intensive Course ◽  
The City

In this chapter I explore satellite seeing in the convergence of global visual culture as a human-satellite co-figuration. Satellites, Global Positioning Systems, and mobile devices are engaged as prosthetic extensions of an embodied experience that can augment the potential of place-based learning. I engage this co-figuration through Mirzoeff's (2000/2006) notion of intervisuality and diaspora, the work of contemporary artists Trevor Paglen and Jeremy Wood, and my experiences with graduate students in Helsinki, Finland in an intensive course that developed understandings of the city as a site of geographic and cultural identity while exploring ideas of public space and performative interventionist practices in art making. The relations of the human-satellite co-figuration give insight as to the convergence of the local as a scale of the global, imprinted with transcultural pathways for understanding how we are located in the world.

Ground Control to Major Tom

2021 ◽  
pp. 1053-1066
Author(s):  
Aaron D. Knochel
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Positioning Systems ◽  
Global Positioning ◽  
A Site ◽  
Intensive Course ◽  
The City

In this chapter I explore satellite seeing in the convergence of global visual culture as a human-satellite co-figuration. Satellites, Global Positioning Systems, and mobile devices are engaged as prosthetic extensions of an embodied experience that can augment the potential of place-based learning. I engage this co-figuration through Mirzoeff's (2000/2006) notion of intervisuality and diaspora, the work of contemporary artists Trevor Paglen and Jeremy Wood, and my experiences with graduate students in Helsinki, Finland in an intensive course that developed understandings of the city as a site of geographic and cultural identity while exploring ideas of public space and performative interventionist practices in art making. The relations of the human-satellite co-figuration give insight as to the convergence of the local as a scale of the global, imprinted with transcultural pathways for understanding how we are located in the world.

‘Yr Beast’: Gender Parrhesia and Punk Trans Womanhoods

2021 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Jay Szpilka
Keyword(s):  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Trans Women ◽  
A Site ◽  
Significant Attention ◽  
The Way

While the subject of women’s activity in historical and contemporary punk scenes has attracted significant attention, the presence of trans women in punk has received comparatively little research, in spite of their increasing visibility and long history in punk. This article examines the conditions for trans women’s entrance in punk and the challenges and opportunities that it offers for their self-assertion. By linking Michel Foucault’s notion of parrhesia with the way trans women in punk do their gender, an attempt is made at showing how the embodied experience of a trans woman making herself heard from the punk stage can serve as a site of ‘gender pluralism’.

An Example to Us All: Child Development and Identity Construction in Early 20th-Century Playgrounds

10.1068/a3237 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A Gagen
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Public Space ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
A Site ◽  
Us Cities

At the turn of the 20th century, children's play came under new and heightened scrutiny by urban reformers. As conditions in US cities threatened traditional notions of order, reformers sought new ways to direct urban-social development. In this paper I explore playground reform as an institutional response that aimed to produce and promote ideal gender identities in children. Supervised summer playgrounds were established across the United States as a means of drawing children off the street and into a corrective environment. Drawing from literature published by the Playground Association of America and a case study of playground management in Cambridge, MA, I explore playground training as a means of constructing gender identities in and through public space. Playground reformers asserted, drawing from child development theory, that the child's body was a conduit through which ‘inner’ identity surfaced. The child's body became a site through which gender identities could be both monitored and produced, compelling reformers to locate playgrounds in public, visible settings. Reformers' conviction that exposing girls to public vision threatened their development motivated a series of spatial restrictions. Whereas boys were unambiguously displayed to public audiences, girls' playgrounds were organised to accommodate this fear. Playground reformers' shrewd spatial tactics exemplify the ways in which institutional authorities conceive of and deploy space toward the construction of identity.

The community strike: From precarity to militant organizing

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
Marcel Paret
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Informal Settlements ◽  
The State ◽  
A Site ◽  
Collective Actor

How do insecure layers of the working class resist when they lack access to power and organization at the workplace? The community strike represents one possible approach. Whereas traditional workplace strikes target employers and exercise power by withholding labor, community strikes focus on the sphere of reproduction, target the state, and build power through moral appeals and disruptions of public space. Drawing on ethnography and interviews in the impoverished Black townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I illustrate this approach by examining widespread local protests in South Africa. Insecurely employed and unemployed residents implemented community strikes by demanding public services, barricading roads and destroying property, and boycotting activities such as work and school. Within these local revolts, community represented both a site of struggle and a collective actor. While community strikes enabled economically insecure groups to mobilize and make demands, they also confronted significant limits, including tensions between protesters and workers.

Performing “Moral Resistance”? Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Activism in Public Space

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Jackson ◽  
Gill Valentine
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Grassroots Activism ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Impact

This article focuses on acts of resistance regarding reproductive politics in contemporary Britain. Drawing on empirical research this article investigates grassroots activism around a complex moral, social, and political problem. This article therefore focuses on a site of resistance in everyday urban environments, investigating the practice and performance involved. Identifying specifically the territory(ies) and territorialities of these specific sites of resistance, this article looks at how opposing groups negotiate conflict in public space in territorial, as well as habitual, ways. Second, the article focuses on questions around the impact, distinction, and novelty both in the immediate and long term of these acts of resistance for those in public space. Here, then, the focus shifts to the reactions to this particular form of protest and questions the “acceptability” of specific resistances in the public imaginary.

“We are all republicans”: Political Articulation and the Production of Nationhood in France's Face Veil Debate

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 938-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Laxer
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
The Face ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for articulating, rather than merely reflecting, social identities, I argue that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of political parties’ struggles to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, I show that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the consensus thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary-drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood in contexts of immigrant diversity.

scholarly journals The Sonic Intra-Face of a Noisy Feminist Social Kitchen

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana España Keller
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ethical Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Site

This paper asks what is the value of transforming the kitchen into a sonic performative work and public site for art and social practice. A Public Kitchen is formed by recreating the private and domestic space of a kitchen into a public space through a sonic performance artwork. The kitchen table is a platform for exploring, repositioning and amplifying kitchen tools as material phenomena through electronic and manual manipulation into an immersive sonic performance installation. This platform becomes a collaborative social space, where somatic movement and sensory, sonic power of the repositioned kitchen tools are built on a relational architecture of iterative sound performances that position the art historical and the sociopolitical, transforming disciplinary interpretations of the body and technology as something that is not specifically exclusively human but post-human. A Public Kitchen represents a pedagogical strategy for organizing and responding collectively to the local, operating as an independent nomadic event that speaks through a creative practice that is an unfolding process. (Re)imagining the social in a Public Kitchen produces noisy affects in a sonic intra-face that can contribute to transforming our social imaginations, forming daring dissonant narratives that feed post-human ethical practices and feminist genealogies. This paper reveals what matters—a feminist struggle invaluable in channeling the intra-personal; through the entanglement of the self, where language, meaning and subjectivity are relational to human difference and to what is felt from the social, what informs from a multi-cultural nomadic existence and diffractive perspective. The labored body is entangled with post-human contingencies of food preparation, family and social history, ritual, tradition, social geography, local politics, and women’s oppression; and is resonant and communicates as a site where new sonic techniques of existence are created and experiences shared.

scholarly journals Knowledge Experiments: Technology and the Library

2012 ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Paulina Mickiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Decentralized Networks ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
A Site

The 21st century library has become a central nervous system for new and emergent media technologies, a site that centralizes increasingly decentralized networks and systems, and a localizable place in which new and emergent media technologies have not only found a home, an embodied place where they can be contained, but also a broader site in which the encounter between citizens, public knowledge and culture is staged. This article seeks to explore the “technologization” of the library. More specifically, it examines how this process of “technologization” has transformed the ways we use and understand the library as a public space and what this means for its future. The idea of the library as an important medium in itself has been overlooked in the broader context of communication and media studies.

Forever Nearing the Finish Line: Heritage Policy and the Problem of Memory in Postwar Beirut

2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne Fricke
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Company ◽  
Finish Line ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Cost ◽  
National Governments

Between 1976 and 1991, central Beirut, repository of centuries of historic structures, was substantially destroyed by civil war. In 1994, a private company known by its French acronym Solidère was created by government decree and given the task of reconstructing the center of Beirut. Despite political problems, the Solidère project brought the hope of social recovery through economic renewal; yet progress should not come at the cost of memory.How can Beirut, destroyed, be a site of both recovery and erasure? Even though traditional legal and political discourses acknowledge that cultural heritage holds a powerful position in reconstruction, there are few tools for capturing its functions. Using heuristics originally employed in archeology and art history, this article addresses psychological aspects of reconstruction by discussing contemporary Lebanese art. If culture is defined not only as what people do buthow they make sense of what they have done, the enormity of the political problems of post–civil war reconstruction become clear. National governments hoping to consolidate authority would do well to consider how best to approach public places resonant with emotionally charged memories.Policymakers should consider the complex benefits of negative heritage in drafting laws that will enable its protection. Legal reform carried out with the goal of balanced heritage policies that accommodate negative heritage is key for postconflict urban spaces. By acknowledging the weight of the past, such policies would also bolster confidence in the emergent government and the political process.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document