Violeta Parra: Her Life, Work, and Legacy

Violeta Parra (1917–1967) was a multifaceted and talented musician and artist. A prolific songwriter, she composed more than two hundred songs as well as experimental pieces for guitar, documentary soundtracks, and music for ballet. Her most famous song, “Gracias a la vida,” has been performed by musicians the world over. In the realm of the visual arts, she was a ceramicist, sculptress, painter, and tapestry maker. In 1964, she became the first Latin American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre Palace’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Parra was also an award-winning folklorist who collected hundreds of songs and other folklore from every region of Chile. Born in southern Chile, she moved to Santiago at age fifteen, where she spent two decades performing a mixture of popular songs from Latin America that is often referred to as música criolla. At age thirty-five she turned to the authentic, first as a folklorist and then as an artist. She was a leader of the Chilean folk revival of the 1950s and inspired the generation of Chilean musicians who formed the protest song movement known as nueva canción in the 1960s. A communist sympathizer, she traveled to Europe as a member of the Chilean delegation to the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students in 1955 (Warsaw) and 1962 (Helsinki). Each time she toured the Soviet Bloc, then made her way to Paris for an extended sojourn. Parra contributed a significant voice to the national debate over chilenidad (Chilean identity) during a critical juncture in Chile’s economic, social, and cultural development. Her biography sheds light on transnational cultural movements and competing notions of authenticity at the height of the Cold War. It is also the deeply human story of Parra’s tenacious struggle to be seen and heard as an artist on her own terms.

Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture

The end of the nineteenth century saw the Balkans animated with cultural movements and socio-political turmoil. Alongside these developments, the proliferation of print media and the arrival of moving images was transforming urban life and played a significant role in the creation of national culture. Based on archival research and previously overlooked footage and early press materials, Imaginary of the Balkans: Visual Culture, Modernity and Early Cinema is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. This work investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and the multi-cultural identity of its communities influenced and shaped visual culture and early cinema development. Moreover, it examines the relationship between the new medium and visual culture through the notion of the haptic, and explores the role early cinema and foreign productions played in the construction of Balkanist and semi-colonial discourses. Reframing hierarchical relations between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, this book departs from approaches such as “new cinema history” and “vernacular modernity” to counter modernity discourses of “lacks and absences”, and instead, establishes new connections between moving image and print artefacts, early film practitioners and intellectuals, the socio-cultural context and cultural responses to the new visual medium.

Understanding the Role of “the City” in Developing Complex Regulatory Frameworks

This paper considers the relationship between the legal regulation of haute couture in Europe and the importance of “the city” as the locus of complex cultural, legal, and geographical forces. Haute couture and its legal framework are used as a case study to investigate how local dynamics – in this case, focusing on the role of the city – can shape the national and international legal responses to a cultural phenomenon, as well as provide a more complete understanding of how culturally significant practices acquire such an enduring meaningfulness in society. Connecting the role of ‘the city’ and legal regulation is particularly interesting through the lens of haute couture because while cities are frequent hosts to artistic or cultural movements, haute couture resulted in an elaborate system of strict regulation that extends beyond the ordinary intellectual property toolbox. This framework has a broader function than national intellectual property law because it not only reflects the legal dynamic of a particular industry, but the cultural and artistic practices of a specific, and particularly localised in this case, city. Haute couture is a demonstration of the complex relationship between local, national, and international modalities of law-making. Haute couture emerged as a niche, city-specific, cultural development yet it resulted in a national framework of regulation that reinforced the centralisation of Paris in haute couture, building and further supporting localisation and sub-localisation in the context of the dense network of fashion houses, ateliers, and schools.

Strategic Planning and Crisis Management in Textile Sector in Turkey

Textile industries in Turkey are confronting changing difficulties at various times in this new millennium. Consequently, the world is becoming smaller in operational extent due to progress in information and communications technologies and other modern advances. The fractious cultural movements that induce successive crisis are confronted by organizations that risk their property, and therefore their on-going prospects. These have lately presented themselves in a variety of failures that range from financial failure, epidemics, and other natural calamities; violent actions among staffs and from terrorist factions as well. The private sector is confronting change as varied organizations experienced transitions, as a result of strong competition and compelling technological advances that arise during periods of socio-economic and political progress. Firms do not manage these factors by themselves but will respond to changes if they are required to strategically devise schemes. Planning for crises and responding appropriately to them, will make the firm improves its abilities to survive and thrive. Crisis management focuses on coping with threats, while strategic planning focuses on revealing opportunities. The use of strategic planning in the time of crisis will significantly benefit the firm by having advantages to operate and compete and also to have resilience in dealing with uncertainties. Therefore, to be resilient, firms will need to use intensively strategic planning in turbulent and changing situations in order to survive and thrive. It is the responsibility of managers and leaders in firms to consider all these types as possibilities for crises and have strategic and tactical plans, as a result crises could be rapidly resolved or prevented from happening. Strategic planning is critical to make sure that the textile sector is prepared to meet future difficulties. Modern strategy-oriented planning comprises a lengthy system for realizing a vision or managing future environmental conditions. The processes are neither fully prescriptive nor fully clear. Given this assumption, we typically characterize strategy-oriented planning processes in terms of structured activities that continually cover objectives and mission, survey the competitive environment, analyses strategic options, and coordinate implementing activities throughout an entire organization. Keywords: Strategic Planning, Crisis Management, Textile Sector, Turkey

‘We lie best when we lie to ourselves’: Stephen King’s It and the horrors of nostalgia

Stephen King’s 1986 novel It follows a traditional horror story arc of restoration of order through defeat of a monster, but the interlude sections of the novel complicate this narrative structure with an alternate story arc in which the people of Derry are also a source of horror within the novel, who enable the monster with their desire to sanitize the past of the town. This arc, in which the townspeople are perpetrators and enablers of horrors, reflects a cultural tendency towards nostalgic views of the past that would have been noticeable in political and cultural movements of the 1980s. As nostalgic currents have returned to prominence in political movements surrounding the election of Donald Trump and other populist movements, re-examining the interlude sections of It reveals commentary about the horrors of nostalgia that, like the cyclical reawakening of the novel’s monster, are relevant once again.

The Three Epochs of Hong Kong Lolita Subculture: Cultural Hybridization and Identity Construction

Lolita is identified as a female oriented subculture phenomenon which came about in the 1990s in Harajuku, Japan. Youths in Hong Kong, because culturally and geographically in close proximity to Japan, will usually adapt their neighboring city Tokyo’s cultural movements. This paper explores the development, meaning, significance of Lolita phenomena in Hong Kong from the postmodern historical and socio-cultural points of view. By assembling and examining the ethnographic data from face-to-face interviewees and materials from online resources between 2014 and 2017, we reviewed and proposed that there are three major epochs of Lolita subculture development in Hong Kong. The study concludes that the changes in online practices over the past two decades lead to the transformation of Lolita identity within the group. It also indicates that the development of Hong Kong Lolita subculture shows a positive impact of cultural hybridization. Moreover, through the active practice on virtual platforms, the group creates an imagined community for the participants to share their beliefs and dreams freely.

‘Speaking the Data’: Renegotiating the Digitally-Mediated Body Through Performative Embodied Praxis, Sound and Rhythmic Affect

This article explores an alternative autoethnographic methodological approach, using embodied praxis and sound, for critically re-thinking contemporary subjective health practices of digital ‘self-tracking’; popularized in recent years through the rise in wearable biometric fitness devices, and online socio-cultural movements such as the Quantified Self and Strava platforms, which enable subjects to “share” their quantifiable body-data metrics. Through a performative praxis case study titled Speaking the Data (2017), the author renegotiates the “voice” of subjective agency within the quantitative data-discourse, “speaking the data” that her body is producing in “real-time” on a digital smart-bike machine. This embodied renegotiation, recorded using a sound “data-stream,” produces an alternative subjective data-set which is extended to the reader, who is invited to become “listener” in the theoretical/experiential praxis space. The sound “data-stream” thus proffers an affective expansion to our perceptions of what “body-data” can be, extending the possibilities for the digitally mediated body beyond biometric forms of quantification, through other sensorial registers of embodiment, using sound, rhythmic affect and lived experience.

What Can Victims of Intimate Partner Violence in Iran Learn From the Google Search Engine?

Given the ever-increasing number of people accessing the Internet and the widespread use of search engines, social activists and human rights advocates have a great opportunity to use this resource to better serve victims of intimate partner violence (IPV), create cultural movements, and even create pressure to change the laws. This study utilized qualitative methods to analyze the content of the Google search engine to learn what information regarding IPV in Iran is available in Farsi language. Scholarly articles and the links addressing IPV in other Farsi language countries were excluded. Three themes were found: “knowledge,” “barriers and obstacles,” and “solutions.” The implications and suggestions derived from this study are designed to help activists better use the digital world to raise awareness about IPV in Iran.

THE HISTORY OF THE FORMATION OF THE CONCEPT OF MULTICULTURALISM

The article examines the emergence and formation of the concept of" multiculturalism", as well as its frequent use in scientific and public texts. In connection with the concept of" Multiculturalism", the definitions and views presented in the works of Russian and foreign scientists are presented. Various definitions of this concept analyze its uncertain political and cultural orientation. In this regard, the concept of "Multiculturalism" is interpreted in different media and in different audiences, which, in turn, requires a detailed study of this issue. In addition, it is characteristic that the concept of "multiculturalism" was formed in the classical immigration countries of the United States, Canada, and Australia, which is associated with the development of ethno-cultural movements, and as the main form of multiculturalism in European countries. The emergence of multiculturalism in Western Europe is associated with the historical era of colonial countries compared to countries of cultural immigration. The ideology of multiculturalism in the countries of Western Europe is supported by the spread of liberal values, which make us think about the ineffectiveness of modern Western European culture. The reason for this is that multiculturalism in Europe has a debt and coercive policy. This term appears and is discussed in many discussions when it comes to immigration and social difficulties, the lack of disagreement and cooperation in modern society, the crisis of the modern model of the state.

Regenerating the Historic Urban Landscape through Circular Bottom-Up Actions: The Urban Seeding Process in Rijeka

The increasing pressure on urban resilience and the parallel interest in the preservation of the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) have opened new frontiers of research that find, in the principles of the circular economy, good responses. Cities need to remake themselves from pure consumption to more resilient and circular centers, finding inspiration in their cultural and natural heritage and the history that generated it. The City of Rijeka, Croatia, one of the partners in the CLIC project (an EU-funded Horizon 2020 research project entitled “Circular models Leveraging Investments in Cultural heritage adaptive reuse”), represents an exceptional example of how to manage the change from an industrial port city to a more sustainable and citizen-oriented living space, looking at the potentials of the cultural and historical layers as opportunities for the population. The City of Rijeka, aware of such potentials, applied successfully as a European Capital of Culture 2020 (ECoC 2020), while unlikely facing the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Rijeka, thanks to the CLIC Heritage Innovative Partnership (HIP) program, the efforts to associate the circular economy and historic urban landscape benefit from an exceptional local awareness of the urban cultural and natural heritage, permitting the elaboration of the cultural corridor concept. By using the historical river of the city, the Rječina, as a connecting line of several heritage assets leading toward the Sea waterfront, the cultural corridor represents a space of culture creation based on continuity and proximity, where all citizens can securely reappropriate dismissed parts of the city, similar to the commons’ management practice. The cultural corridor has been imagined as a spatial implementation model that needs actions to be actuated. A set of actions was designed through the urban seeding process, tested in a workshop methodology, meant to address the HUL regeneration through an awareness-raising and cocreation approach by codesigning through situated learning, possible permanent or temporary actions, activities, assets to be replicated in the corridor and, per extension, in the entire city. This article will explain the way the cultural corridor concept and urban seeding were generated in the City of Rijeka, giving evidence of the motivations and the proposals made in parallel with the existing initiatives of the city and its cultural movements.