Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media

Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Covering prominent art works by Ai Weiwei and Richard Mosse, and extending the spectrum of representation to refugee film workshops on the island of Lesvos as well as virtual reality installations of Alejandro G. Iñárritu and others, the chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés.

The Aesthetic Engagement Theory of Art

I introduce and explicate a new functionalist account of art, namely that something is an artwork iff the fulfillment of its function by a subject requires that the subject aesthetically engage it. This is the Aesthetic Engagement Theory of art. I show how the Aesthetic Engagement Theory outperforms salient rival theories in terms of extensional adequacy, non-arbitrariness, and ability to account for the distinctive value of art. I also give an account of what it is to aesthetically engage a work that relies on our agential capacity to treat an object as having non-instrumental value, even while the ultimate purpose for our engaging the object is to get something from it.

Museums, Socio-Ecological Thinking, and Activist Pedagogies of Imagination

This article explores the complex, “contact zone” nature of museums within the context of the current environmental crisis threatening our planet. Historically and even today, museums have engaged in a practice of “monocultural” thinking which is mired in a pretext to neutrality that has advanced the patriarchal capitalist neoliberal status quo and maintained a vision of a human/non-human binary of power, dominance, and control. However, there is also growing evidence that museums are shifting their approaches. Focusing on examples from Canada, we discuss how museums are using exhibitions and pedagogical and community outreach strategies to render visible deeply problematic and global “technofossil” practices, encourage activism through aesthetic engagement, encourage dialogue between community and industry as well as engage in imaginative decolonising initiatives that remap our understandings of who we are and where we need to go. We argue that in taking up environmental issues in politically intentional ways, museums create “oppositional views” that act as pedagogical sites of resistance.

‘Spain! Most Pleasant were my wanderings’: Robert Southey's Pedestrian and Mountaineering Writing in the Iberian Peninsula

This article explores Robert Southey's literary responses to his walking experiences in Spain as he recounted them in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797). Published after a four-month visit to the Iberian Peninsula, Letters departs from previous travelogues in offering, apart from factual details, subjective impressions of the places visited both in prose and verse. Nonetheless, I argue, Southey adopts a more intimate and self-reflective mood when he relates his pedestrian excursions in verse, not only showing a deeper aesthetic engagement with the natural surroundings but also acquiring an inward look. Moved by the bodily exertion of walking and hill climbing in Spain, Southey produced a series of poems in which the fragility of memory, the feelings of isolation and distress and the related poetic incapacity are explored. Encompassing examples from Coleridge's and Wordsworth's poems, in this essay I read Southey's poems in Letters as aligned with and contributing to the then emerging Romantic pedestrian poetics, though at the same time showing their ideosyncracy derived from Southey's complex approach to the Other in ‘a land of strangers’.

Aesthetics, verisimilitude and user engagement: reporting findings through fictional accounts in qualitative inquiry

This article explores the use of fiction as a mode of representing data in social research. I show that three of the key drivers for fictionalising research accounts relate to the ambitions of aesthetic engagement, verisimilitude and user engagement. I look at the different ways that authors have attempted to achieve these ambitions and the methodological tensions that arise from them. I show that contemporary evaluative criteria in qualitative inquiry helps us to understand that fictional reporting is an important tool for researchers in creating more affective writing. However, there are divergences in how researchers conceive of and use fictional accounts, which highlight the importance of continued debate about the methodological practices of its use. In order to contribute to these debates I point to three areas that need particular consideration for researchers working in this area: (1) the structures of academic publishing and their embodiment in university audit regimes; (2) the absence of engagement with alternative forms of writing in academic professional development and training; and (3) the substantial ethical dilemmas in the use of fictional accounts.

Aesthetic Objects, Aesthetic Judgments and the Crafting of Organizational Style in Creative Industries

In this article, we conceptually engage with style as central to creative industries. We specifically argue that style is crafted into being via an interplay between aesthetic judgments and “aesthetic objects.” We define aesthetic objects as temporary, material settlements fueled by a continual sense of dissatisfaction, eventually resolved through relational engagements. These remain under aesthetic inquiry throughout the process of crafting, until brought to particular close. We elaborate our theorizing with a non-traditional exemplar of the Bride Dress in the preparation of a 2009 Jean-Paul Gaultier’s fashion show. Our subsequent contribution is a richer conceptual understanding of style, with a material, aesthetic engagement at its center. In addition, in foregrounding under-explored features (i.e., aesthetic judgments, crafting of physical materials), and introducing new concepts (i.e., aesthetic objects), we outline promising openings for and significant connections with scholarship on creative or fluid industries, style, and organizational identity.