As cidades falam? (Tradução)

Tradução do artigo da Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology na Universidade de Columbia, Saskia Sassen, para a publicação Public Culture, Durham, v. 25, n. 2, de julho de 2013. Sassen (5 de janeiro de 1947) é uma socióloga holandesa-americana conhecida por suas análises da globalização e da migração humana internacional e seus impactos no contexto urbano. Publicou 12 livros, juntos traduzidos para mais de 20 idiomas, como The Global City (Princeton University Press, [1991] 2. ed., 2001), no qual desenvolveu o termo “cidade global”. Ela recebeu diversos prêmios e menções, incluindo 12 doutorados honoris causa, e foi selecionada como uma das principais pensadoras globais em diversas listas. Mais recentemente, recebeu o Prémio Príncipe de Astúrias 2013 nas Ciências Sociais e foi nomeada Membro Estrangeiro da Real Academia das Ciências da Holanda. A Revista Prumo agradece a generosidade da autora em ceder a autorização para tradução e publicação deste artigo.

Shipped Ashore: The origins and deployment of mermaid place names in Australia and related visual representations

Since European and, specifically, Anglo-Irish colonisation in the late 1700s, a number of Australian locations have been given the name ‘mermaid.’ This article examines the principal derivations of these place names – including those relating to the voyages of the HMC Mermaid around Australia’s coastline in the early 1800s – and some of the manners in which these names have been represented in signage, place branding, commercial applications and/or public discourse. In providing this critical survey, the article examines the inscription of a traditional European folkloric entity (and modern media representations of it) into Australian public culture and, in some instances, the related impact of these on destination branding.

Application of cloud technology in digital cultural heritage: an analysis of public culture cloud platforms in China

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the significant advantages of cloud technology in digital cultural heritage construction by analyzing public culture cloud platforms in China. The authors hope to provide references for other countries and regions on the applications of cloud computing techniques in digital cultural construction. Design/methodology/approach The primary research methods involved interview and case analysis. A comprehensive understanding of cloud technology and China’s culture cloud platforms were gained through research into extensive amounts of literature. Analyzing 21 culture cloud platforms offers a general understanding of culture clouds, while the Hunan Public Culture Cloud acts as a representative sample that gives detailed insight. Findings This paper explores the considerable advantages of cloud computing in digital cultural construction from four aspects: integration of decentralized heterogeneous resources, coordination and cooperation, accurately matching user needs and promotion of balanced service development. Originality/value Existing studies fall short of comprehensive investigations of culture cloud platforms and in-depth analysis of the advantages of cloud technology applications. This paper uses the construction of public culture cloud platforms in China as the research object. Further, this paper compares the construction status of different culture cloud platforms.

“Everybody criticizes police, but nobody criticizes museums”: Police Headquarters and Museums as Public Culture

Museums are increasingly placed front-and-centre in police headquarters. Based on interviews, field notes, and observations, we examine the significance of placing museums in the foyers of new police headquarters for public culture and police legitimacy. Drawing from critical heritage, cultural and policing studies literature, we argue the trend represents a strategic means of softening the image of police and creating myths central to reinforcing their legitimacy. We show that studying the representations inside police museums is crucial to comprehend how these entities depict social reality and provide frames through which the public make sense of policing and carcerality more broadly. Conceptualizing police museums as a form of public relations management that has material impacts on urban life and public culture, we reflect on what our findings mean for literature on cultural representations of “criminal justice.”

Sociability and Polite Improvement in Addison’s Periodicals

Addison argued in his periodical essays that the distinctive sociability of the coffee house was especially, if not uniquely, polite, rational, and civic, and as such, an important metaphor and location for Addison’s social reform. Addison developed his conception of coffee-house sociability in dialogue with Richard Steele, but while Steele argued that emulation of virtuous behaviour in neighbourly communities was sufficient guarantor of the polite and rational reformation of public culture, Addison repeatedly toyed with a more regulated model in which an arbiter or censor moderated coffee-house behaviour. In The Spectator, Addison had identified women readers as an important commercial and ideological opportunity. While women of the polite and middling classes bore the weight of Addison’s reformist expectations, such women were excluded from the public sociability of the coffee house. In recognition of this impasse, Addison and Steele addressed a series of essays to the tea table, a form of sociability in which women and female manners were dominant. These essays develop an innovative construction of tea-table sociability located in a fluid zone between public sociability and private domesticity, centred around tea consumption, polite conversation, and reading essays from The Spectator. The tea table was, accordingly, a significant extension and revision of their theory of public sociability.

Prologue I

Prologue I, God and Buckley at Yale (1951); Prologue II, Henry Sloan Coffin’s Yale (1897); Prologue III, Yale Embattled: Noah Porter versus William Graham Sumner (1880). Three historical vignettes in reverse historical order suggest changing stages regarding how Christianity might be related to a modern university. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) challenged the university’s claims to be Christian. Defenders of Yale dismissed any anti-Christian influences in the curriculum as matters of academic freedom and pointed to the extracurricular religious influences at the university. When William Sloan Coffin (’97), who chaired a special committee to answer Buckley, was a student, a broad character-oriented Protestantism held a respected place among Yale students and faculty. Going back to 1880, though, it was no longer possible for the Yale President to insist on Christian teaching, as President Noah Porter discovered in his efforts to restrict the teachings of Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner. Despite the imminent disappearance of explicit Christian influences in public culture, it was possible with the broadened definition of religion to see the situation as the spread of religious enlightenment.

Strategic Communication in Cultural Organizations, the Landscape Museum

This chapter intends to explore the role of strategic communication in cultural organizations, presenting the Landscape Museum. Since the field of strategic communication does not have a unifying conceptual framework (Hallahan et al., 2007), this work intends to explore one of the various communication pursuits: building and maintaining relationships or networks through dialogue. The Landscape Museum’s mission is to contribute to the development of a landscape citizenship, awakening a critical and participatory sense in citizens. The museum has been trying to achieve it by building and maintaining strong and permanent relationships through dialogue. Since “strategic communication also includes examining how an organization presents itself in society as a social actor in the creation of public culture and in the discussion of public issues” (Hallahan et al., 2007, p. 27) and considering Self’s (2015) proposal for dialogue, it “is not just about achieving consensus, but facilitates debate and advocacy in public policy formation” (p. 74), this chapter presents how the Landscape Museum specifically through its educational service has been promoting the acceptance, through dialogue, of ideas related to landscape’s protection and valorization and thus contributing to landscape citizenship.

“Mock Jewish” in Early Twentieth-Century Tunisia: Linguistic Form and Social Meaning

The article presents a sociolinguistic profile of “Mock Jewish,” or the stylized varieties of Judeo-Arabic deployed for humorous purposes in early twentieth-century Tunisian public culture. We assembled a corpus of texts from both print and audio-visual media, including newspaper columns, television and radio performances, folktales, and plays, in which “Jewish” (yahūdī) or “Israelite” (isrāʾīlī) voices are stylized with exaggerated forms of linguistic difference. The purpose of the analysis is not to evaluate the inauthenticity of Mock Jewish vis-à-vis Judeo-Arabic proper, but to understand how performers deploy these markedly “Jewish” stylistic tactics to create diverse social meanings and assess the effects of these performances on language and society. We argue that Mock Jewish forms part of the broader “ideologies of linguistic differentiation” that construct Jewish speech as separate and distinct from non-Jewish varieties. However, the performances of Mock Jewish are not limited to sectarian polemic, but engage diverse targets, derive from different motivations, and provoke divergent responses from audiences.

Have Schemas been Good to Think With?

Schemas are one of the most popular explanatory concepts in cultural sociology, and are increasingly used in sociology more broadly. In this article we ask the question: have schemas been good to think with? We answer this question by analyzing the ontological, epistemic, and methodological bases of schemas, including the conceptualizations, claims, assumptions, and methods that underpin the use of schemas in sociological inquiry. We show that sociologists have developed two distinct, contradictory, and often conflated perspectives on schemas, what we refer to as culturalist and cognitivist perspectives. We suggest that schemas have acquired a polysemic character in sociology, and that they have become a (more narrow and consequently more scientifically legitimate) proxy for Culture, and that these features have (paradoxically) facilitated the popularity of schemas within the discipline. Sociologists have recently begun to make the necessary advancements to turn schemas into a more useful explanatory concept, through both analytical improvements (by distinguishing schemas from both public culture and other forms of nondeclarative personal culture), and methodological innovations (for better deriving schemas from survey data, texts, and experiments). Yet, some challenges remain, and the analytical value of schemas remains promissory. We conclude by offering some guidelines for making more specific and measured claims about schemas in sociological research.

The Place of Confucianism in Pluralist East Asia

In this commentary on Shaun O’Dwyer’s Confucianism’s Prospects, I raise three challenges to the arguments presented in the book. First, against his empirical claim that East Asian societies have already become pluralistic, I show that there are important empirical studies supporting the “Confucian heritage” thesis that O’Dwyer rejects. Second, against his anti-perfectionist position, I argue that there are some significant perfectionist connotations in his use of the capabilities approach which are in tension with his critique of Confucian and liberal perfectionisms. Third, against his argument that contemporary Confucians have good reasons to embrace a liberal democracy and pluralistic public culture, I argue that the reasons he offers are not solid enough to convince his Confucian rivals.