Imagining post-industrial Britain

Barry Hines ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Forrest ◽  
Sue Vice
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
Father's Experience ◽  
Post Industrial

This chapter explores Hines’s conception of Britain after the miners’ strike, and the difficulty he experienced in fictionalising those divisive events. While his 1994 novel The Heart of It is a metafictional account of a writer’s coming retrospectively to understand the strike through his father’s experience, three plays Hines wrote about it remain in draft form and never appeared in the public realm. Both Shooting Stars (1990) and Born Kicking (1992), take unexpected views on Hines’s staple subject of football and its social role, in relation respectively to the effect of unexpected wealth on a working-class man, and what happens if the footballer is a woman. Elvis Over England (1998), Hines’s last published novel, is a road journey undertaken by an unemployed steelworker who starts to confront his past by means of Elvis’s songs. Although critics and Hines himself predicted that Elvis Over England would end up on the screen, it was never filmed.

Oscar Bony's La Familia Obrera: The Labor and the Work

ARTMargins ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-71
Author(s):  
Niko Vicario
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Workers ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Artistic Labor ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Industrial Company

This article analyzes Oscar Bony's work La Familia Obrera (1968), in which a working class family sat on view in the gallery of the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires. What might be read from the transformation of a working class family into a work of art? How was Bony's own artistic labor reconfigured in the process? How did Bony's display of a working class family engage with both the context of the Instituto Di Tella—an extension of Argentina's most prominent industrial company—and the demands for productivity made by the developmentalist dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía? In other words, how was this work entangled in the contradictions of modernization and, more specifically, the transnational corporations with which the Di Tella family's operations were collaborating? By May of 1968, the Instituto Di Tella had become notorious not purely for its often outrageous experiments with media and performance art but also for its funding sources, namely the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Amidst the mobilization of the Left, many artists in Argentina that year would reject cultural institutions in favor of quasi-activist projects in the public realm, so as to imagine themselves as cultural workers. With La Familia Obrera, Bony, by contrast, produced an institutionally- reflexive gesture, negotiated from within. But much as artists and intellectuals began to understand the Di Tella as a Trojan Horse of transnational capital, so too was Bony's work not exactly what it appeared, manipulating its public through processes of surrogation.

The Noise Abatement Campaign in Industrializing Japan, 1923–37

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-327
Author(s):  
Shuhei Hosokawa
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Political Responsibility ◽  
Noise Abatement ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Causal Responsibility ◽  
Kanto Earthquake ◽  
Definition Of

Drawing on Karin Bijsterveld’s triple definition of noise as ownership, political responsibility, and causal responsibility, this article traces how modern Japan problematized noise, and how noise represented both the aspirational discourse of Western civilization and the experiential nuisance accompanying rapid changes in living conditions in 1920s Japan. Primarily based on newspaper archives, the analysis will approach the problematic of noise as it was manifested in different ways in the public and private realms. In the public realm, the mid-1920s marked a turning point due to the reconstruction work after the Great Kantô Earthquake (1923) and the spread of the use of radios, phonographs, and loudspeakers. Within a few years, public opinion against noise had been formed by a coalition of journalists, police, the judiciary, engineers, academics, and municipal officials. This section will also address the legal regulation of noise and its failure; because public opinion was “owned” by middle-class (sub)urbanites, factory noises in downtown areas were hardly included in noise abatement discourse. Around 1930, the sounds of radios became a social problem, but the police and the courts hesitated to intervene in a “private” conflict, partly because they valued radio as a tool for encouraging nationalist mobilization and transmitting announcements from above. In sum, this article investigates the diverse contexts in which noise was perceived and interpreted as such, as noise became an integral part of modern life in early 20th-century Japan.

Feminist Interpretations of Action and the Public in Hannah Arendt’s Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Noémi Bíró
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Feminism ◽  
Definition Of

"Feminist Interpretations of Action and the Public in Hannah Arendt’s Theory. Arendt’s typology of human activity and her arguments on the precondition of politics allow for a variety in interpretations for contemporary political thought. The feminist reception of Arendt’s work ranges from critical to conciliatory readings that attempt to find the points in which Arendt’s theory might inspire a feminist political project. In this paper I explore the ways in which feminist thought has responded to Arendt’s definition of action, freedom and politics, and whether her theoretical framework can be useful in a feminist rethinking of politics, power and the public realm. Keywords: Hannah Arendt, political action, the Public, the Social, feminism "

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

Coming Back Home to Live and Not Die: A Human Geography of a Working-Class Black Gay Male Navigating the Local Higher Education Pipeline

2021 ◽  
pp. 004208592098729
Author(s):  
Amalia Z. Dache ◽  
Keon M. McGuire
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Education Pipeline ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Narrative Mapping

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which ultimately led to Marcus’s (pseudonym) completion of graduate school and community-based policy research. Marcus’s educational human geography reveals the unique and complex intersections of masculinity, Blackness and class as identities woven into his experiences navigating the built environment.

scholarly journals The Metamorphosis of Written Devotion in the Age of Vatican II (c. 1948–c. 1998) in Hungary—Guestbooks in Hungarian Marian Shrines

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 235
Author(s):  
Krisztina Frauhammer
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Combined Effect ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Personal Prayer ◽  
The Church

This article presents the Hungarian manifestations of a written devotional practice that emerged in the second half of the 20th century worldwide: the rite of writing prayers in guestbooks or visitors’ books and spontaneously leaving prayer slips in shrines. Guestbooks or visitors’ books, a practice well known in museums and exhibitions, have appeared in Hungarian shrines for pilgrims to record requests, prayers, and declarations of gratitude. This is an unusual use of guestbooks, as, unlike regular guestbook entries, they contain personal prayers, which are surprisingly honest and self-reflective. Another curiosity of the books and slips is that anybody can see and read them, because they are on display in the shrines, mostly close to the statue of Virgin Mary. They allow the researcher to observe a special communication situation, the written representation of an informal, non-formalised, personal prayer. Of course, this is not unknown in the practice of prayer; what is new here is that it takes place in the public realm of a shrine, in written form. This paper seeks answers to the question of what genre antecedents, what patterns of behaviour, and which religious practices have led to the development of this recent practice of devotion in the examined period in Hungarian Catholic shrines. In connection with this issue, this paper would like to draw attention to the combined effect of the following three factors: the continuity of traditions, the emergence of innovative elements and the role of the church as an institution. Their parallel interactions help us to understand the guestbooks of the shrines.

scholarly journals Activating Data through Eco-Didactic Design in the Public Realm: Enabling Sustainable Development in Cities

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4577
Author(s):  
Carmela Cucuzzella ◽  
Morteza Hazbei ◽  
Sherif Goubran
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Design Data ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
The Public ◽  
Community Based Design ◽  
The City

This paper explores how design in the public realm can integrate city data to help disseminate the information embedded within it and provide urban opportunities for knowledge exchange. The hypothesis is that such art and design practices in public spaces, as places of knowledge exchange, may enable more sustainable communities and cities through the visualization of data. To achieve this, we developed a methodology to compare various design approaches for integrating three main elements in public-space design projects: city data, specific issues of sustainability, and varying methods for activating the data. To test this methodology, we applied it to a pedogeological project where students were required to render city data visible. We analyze the proposals presented by the young designers to understand their approaches to design, data, and education. We study how they “educate” and “dialogue” with the community about sustainable issues. Specifically, the research attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How can we use data in the design of public spaces as a means for sustainability knowledge exchange in the city? (2) How can community-based design contribute to innovative data collection and dissemination for advancing sustainability in the city? (3) What are the overlaps between the projects’ intended impacts and the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Our findings suggest that there is a need for such creative practices, as they make information available to the community, using unconventional methods. Furthermore, more research is needed to better understand the short- and long-term outcomes of these works in the public realm.

Gentrification and neighborhood melancholy. Collective sadness and ambivalence in Dortmund’s Hörde district

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402098725
Author(s):  
Susanne Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Residential Area ◽  
Artificial Lake ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
The Core ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City ◽  
The Phoenix

Since 2000, the City of Dortmund has pursued an ambitious flagship project in the district of Hoerde. On the enormous site of a former steel plant, and in the middle of an impoverished working class district, a large new upper-middle class residential area (Phoenix) has been developed around an artificial lake. Qualitative fieldwork suggests that the project has generated mixed feelings among longtime working class dwellers in the old part of Hoerde. Widespread enthusiasm about new lakeside living is interwoven with emotions of sadness and loss, reflecting a neighborhood transformation which unmistakably demonstrates their social, cultural, and political marginalization – feelings that were not allowed to become part of the jubilant official discourse which has marketed the Phoenix project as a shining example of the City’s successful post-industrial structural change. Ever since its announcement, the project has been blamed for triggering gentrification processes – despite the fact that there are still no empirical signs of rising rents or displacement. I argue that the concept of gentrification has been taken up so readily because it is popular, polyvalent, polemical, and critical, enabling citizens to find a language to denounce the blatant social inequalities and power imbalances that competitive urbanism has fostered in Dortmund. However, I also claim that the core of the prevailing sadness – the loss of the familiar neighborhood which could not be grieved over – remains under the radar of standard gentrification discourse. The article thus proposes neighborhood melancholy as a concept to account for the unclear, subconscious, and deeply ambivalent ways in which long-established residents experience their neighborhood’s transformation, expressed within the rubric of gentrification.

Via Ripetta 155: The last piece of Clara Sereni’s life writing story

2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582098651
Author(s):  
Giulia Po DeLisle
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bear Witness

Clara Sereni’s writing journey began in 1974 with Sigma Epsilon and went on to flourish through the years with the publication of numerous inspiring and thought-provoking literary works. Many of her autobiographical and fictional texts delve into the years between 1968 and 1977, a crucial decade that changed Italy and forever impacted the author’s life and political thinking. In Via Ripetta 155, Sereni found a renewed desire to bear witness to those politically revolutionary times by revisiting the experiences of her private self and her interaction with the public realm. This study engages with the analysis of this last piece of the complex puzzle that encompasses the written story of her life, and argues that the text represents a final self-empowering act in which the apartment of Via Ripetta becomes the stage for a dialectical discourse between personal achievements and socio-political changes, personal conflicts and public turmoil.

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