The Art of Digital Curation

Artists have long engaged with digital and networked technologies in critical and creative ways to explore both new art forms and novel ways of disseminating artworks. Net-based artworks are often created with the intent to circulate outside traditional institutional spaces, and many are shared via artist-run platforms that involve curatorial practices distinct from those of museums or commercial galleries. This article focuses on a particular artist-run platform called Paper-Thin, characterizing the activities involved in managing the platform as digital curation in a polysemous sense – as both the curation of digital artworks and the stewardship of digital information in a complex technological ecosystem. While scholars and cultural heritage professionals have developed innovative preservation strategies for digital and new media artworks housed in institutional collections, the ongoing care of artworks shared through networked alternative spaces is largely carried out co-operatively by the artists and curators of these platforms. Drawing on Howard Becker’s sociological theory of art worlds as networks of co-operative actors, this article describes the patterns of co-operative work involved in creating, exhibiting, and then caring for Net-based art. The article outlines the importance, for cultural heritage professionals, of understanding the digital-curation practices of artists, as these artist-run networked platforms demonstrate emergent approaches to the stewardship of digital culture that move beyond a custodial paradigm.

“I Don’t Know, I’m Just the Interpreter”: A first approach to the role of healthcare interpreters beyond bilingual medical encounters

Researchers have long been preoccupied with the issue of role in healthcare interpreting. However, most studies approach this construct in the course of medical consultations, leaving somewhat unattended other spaces and activities in which interpreters also participate. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the healthcare interpreters’ role in these areas. Drawing on participant observation, I examined the roles played by five interpreters at a hospital in Madrid for five months in activities different to provider-patient interactions (e.g. waiting with patients). Seven key roles were identified outside medical consultations: intercultural and moral mediator, patient advocate, institutional navigator, healthcare ambassador, information miner and companion/conversation partner. A key finding is that most events in which interpreters participate occur outside medical consultations, which makes it essential to shift the attention to the roles played in these alternative spaces. Understanding the role of healthcare interpreters in different activities within the realm of healthcare scenarios is essential to construct an accurate vision of what being just an interpreter really means.

Revisiting Female Resilience within the Psychiatric in Janice Galloway’s Fiction

The aim of this article is to analyse the fractures in the performance of normative discourses of identity in Janice Galloway’s novel The Trick Is To Keep Breathing (1989) and her short story “and drugs and rock and roll”, included in her latest collection Jellyfish (2015). Drawing on the thematic dialogue between the two works, set in Scotland, this article focuses specifically on their protagonists’ processes of healing following a period of depression, and the urban spatial representation of these experiences. In order to do so, it examines various practices associated with psychiatrics that isolate and dehumanise citizens and lead to the creation of a sharp social dichotomy as regards wellbeing. Finally, the article approaches the spatial embodiment of these characters, as well as the creation of alternative spaces inside medical institutions as part of a continuum in Galloway’s exploration of female resilience.

THEORETICAL EXPLORATION OF THE CAFE'S PROXEMICS AS A TRANSITIONAL EDUCATIONAL SPACE

This paper was a theoretical exploration of proxemic discourse and the experience of cafe space as a transitional educational space. It was based on the development of a paradigm in the 21st century that has targeted the cafe sector and provided the potential to be converted into an alternative educational space, especially for the millennial generation, called students. This study theoretically explored based on the phenomena seen at Yoman Cafe in Surabaya, Indonesia, which often became an alternative learning place for students at Universitas Negeri Surabaya. The research was conducted through participatory observations during March 2021, and it was analyzed by carrying out theoretical exploration of proxemics, spatial experiences, and alternative spaces. The results showed that the cafe currently had a dual role which was known as hybrid. Apart from being a cafe with the traditional definition of being a place to eat, the current cafe also had a role as an alternative space. This was based on the achievement of several aspects to create a sense of comfort as a transitional educational space, namely table settings that provided private space for visitors, comfortable and comprehensive furniture, selection of materials, ambiance entertainment, lighting and acoustics, colors, and use of aesthetic elements.

Black Gathering

In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

Breaking the Transitional Justice Machine: Exploring Spatiality, Space Travel, and Inbetween Spaces in Research Practice

This article offers a critical perspective on emerging and alternative spaces for emancipation within transitional justice studies. Taking into account recent critical literature and postcolonial interventions in transitional justice studies, we argue that barriers to moving our understanding of transitional justice forward are both conceptual and methodological. Conceptual hurdles are visible through narrow justice demands often limited to the context of post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings, thus normalizing injustice in liberal democratic and postcolonial contexts. Methodological impediments exist because transitional justice scholarship operates at a positivist level, or trying to explain certain, and desired, outcomes rather than destabilizing and unsettling unequal power relations. As a result, research practice in the field reflects the perspectives and preferences of elites in transition societies through a legal-technical mechanistic imagining of transitional justice that we refer to as the transitional justice machine. We argue that the needs and voices of marginalized social actors, particularly within states that are largely defined as liberal democratic or postcolonial, have long been ignored due to these practices. Against the backdrop of evolving agency patterns, including widespread global protest and demands to deal with the past across countries, we zoom in on a variety of actors who, until now, have not been at the focus of transitional justice studies. Drawing on a variety of case studies, this article contributes to the critical understanding of transitional justice studies as a Bourdieusian field. First, by expanding the conceptual lens to include racial, socio-economic, and postcolonial injustice, and, second, by advancing a more critical methodological approach that puts at its center unequal power relationships.

Culture-Led Place-Making and Heterotopic Brand Building: A Comparative Approach between Ljubljana and Porto

Contemporary strategic planning represents a logic of space reproduction based on the promotion of tourism as the cornerstone of cultural and creative economy. However, some grassroots social initiatives aim to build alternative spaces to the economic approach that permeates contemporary urban planning. This article reflects comparatively on the cases of the Metelkova self-organized autonomous zone (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and the STOP Shopping Center (Porto, Portugal). We suggest that both the squatting of military installations (Slovenia), as the strategic reconfiguration of a private commercial building (Portugal), share common aspects that must be addressed under a place-making approach. In doing so, we propose that the cultural activity produced in these places, their socioeconomic influence in the urban environment and their ability to promote tourism has resulted in a brand that allows them to be tolerated by their respective local governments.