Urbanism as a political way of life: the case of highly educated mainlanders in Hong Kong

Purpose The disengaged form of urban experience, addressed by Louis Wirth in his classic essay, is worthy of further theorization and contextualization. The themes such as indifference, alienation, and disengagement, once the focus of early urban theorists, remain underdeveloped in contemporary China. Through the case study of gangpiao (“Hong Kong drifters”), the highly educated youth from mainland China to Hong Kong, this paper aims to offer an apt and logical illustration of how a disengaged form of urban experience is contingently made. Design/methodology/approach Between 2017 and 2020, the author and his assistants interviewed 50 mainland Chinese youth, aged between 25 and 35, in Hong Kong and explored how they perceive, conceive and relate themselves to the city. Findings Most informants, instead of devoting themselves to the local community life, embrace a way of life characterized by impersonal, superficial and transitory contacts. The author argues that their feeling of estrangement and indifference, rather than a “natural” outcome of economic progress, is an ethos primarily nurtured by China’s governing strategy and tactics of segregation. The transnational space of gangpiao is a part of the process of reproduction of the Chinese state across territories. Originality/value Except for a very limited number of studies, most scholars and critics barely examine the responsibilities of non-state actors for the dominant project of urbanism. The themes such as indifference, alienation and disengagement, once the focus of early urban theorists, remain underdeveloped in the new era of Chinese urban culture. In other words, more scholarly attention should be paid to the circumstances under which people disregard local differences and envision and embrace a “generic” form of city and way of urban life.

Marian Plague Columns in Jaroměř and Polička: A Comparative Study on Baroque Sculptural Decorations of the Bohemian Urban Public Space in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century

Based on fragmentally preserved sources as well as existing literature related to the topic (especially regional historiography, art history and historic preservation), the present study sets Marian plague columns into a broader context. Through the comparison of two minor East-Bohemian towns of a comparable population, it follows the factors playing a signifi cant role in the creation of complex Baroque sculptural compositions. At the same time, it aims to identify the functions that the sculptures were to fulfi l through their position in the public space. In this sense the study is inspired by the classic essay by Peter Burke called Conspicuous consumption in seventeenth-century Italy, which considers “the consumption” to be a specifi c form of communication. The composition of Marian plague columns can be perceived as an undeniable form of communication. From multiple perspectives, the article documents the key determinants, which are sometimes rather surprising, infl uencing the choice of partial components of the sculptural compositions as well as their overall impression – the communicative intention. Both Marian plague columns, to this day the most important monuments decorating the public space of the towns in question, are therefore approached in an interdisciplinary way especially in the context of the history of the towns, their manors and the East-Bohemian region. Therefore, the religious situation of both towns and their surroundings is not overlooked either. With regard to the fact that Jaroměř and Polička have been royal dowry towns, the Marian plague columns also refl ect the relation to the Bohemian queen, which is expressed verbally as inscriptions on them. In particular, the artwork in Polička and the events related to its creation importantly signalize the “conspicuous consumption”.

‘The metropolis and the life of spirit’ by Georg Simmel: A new translation

Two previous English translations of this classic essay by Georg Simmel have been in wide circulation, shaping the worldwide reception of Simmel’s urban theory. Both rendered Simmel’s philosophical idiom in psychologistic terms, translating Seele (soul) as ‘psyche’ and Geist (spirit) as ‘mind’. With their overtones of behaviourism, earlier translations bear the clear mark of their time. This translation seeks to return, as much as is possible without sacrificing lucidity, to Simmel’s original idiom, in the hope that this will contribute to an imaginative rediscovery of this classic text. The introduction to the new translation gives an overview of the publication’s historical and intellectual context, its reception and influence, and the distinctiveness of Simmel’s approach.

Improving Access to Scientific Literature with Knowledge Graphs

The transfer of knowledge has not changed fundamentally for many hundreds of years: It is usually document-based-formerly printed on paper as a classic essay and nowadays as PDF. With around 2.5 million new research contributions every year, researchers drown in a flood of pseudo-digitized PDF publications. As a result research is seriously weakened. In this article, we argue for representing scholarly contributions in a structured and semantic way as a knowledge graph. The advantage is that information represented in a knowledge graph is readable by machines and humans. As an example, we give an overview on the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), a service implementing this approach. For creating the knowledge graph representation, we rely on a mixture of manual (crowd/expert sourcing) and (semi-)automated techniques. Only with such a combination of human and machine intelligence, we can achieve the required quality of the representation to allow for novel exploration and assistance services for researchers. As a result, a scholarly knowledge graph such as the ORKG can be used to give a condensed overview on the state-of-the-art addressing a particular research quest, for example as a tabular comparison of contributions according to various characteristics of the approaches. Further possible intuitive access interfaces to such scholarly knowledge graphs include domain-specific (chart) visualizations or answering of natural language questions.

Questionable Agreement: The Experience of Depression and DSM-5 Major Depressive Disorder Criteria

Immediately before the release of DSM-5, a group of psychiatric thought leaders published the results of field tests of DSM-5 diagnostic criteria. They characterized the interrater reliability for diagnosing major depressive disorder by two trained mental health practitioners as of “questionable agreement.” These field tests confirmed an open secret among psychiatrists that our current diagnostic criteria for diagnosing major depressive disorder are unreliable and neglect essential experiences of persons in depressive episodes. Alternative diagnostic criteria exist, but psychiatrists rarely encounter them, forestalling the discipline’s epistemological crisis. In Alsadair MacIntyre’s classic essay, such crises occur in science when a person encounters a rival schemata that is incompatible with their current schemata and subsequently constructs a narrative that allows them to reconstruct their own tradition. In search of rival schemata that are in conversation with their own tradition, psychiatric practitioners can utilize alternative diagnostic criteria like the Cultural Formulation Interview, embrace an epistemologically humble psychiatry, and attend to the narrative experience of a person experiencing a depressive episode.

Left politics and popular culture in Britain: From left-wing populism to ‘popular leftism’

This article analyses the cultural traction and media visibility yielded by left-wing ideas and people during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as British Labour Party leader (2015–2019), while also offering some more general reflections on the relationship between left politics and popular culture. I begin by noting that the cultural and media aspects of Corbynism have largely been neglected in the scholarly literature. I then go on to caution against the temptation of subsuming the cultural aspects of Corbyn-era left politics under the label of ‘left-wing populism’. Instead, I defend a conception of ‘popular leftism’ as distinct from ‘left-wing populism’, via an engagement with Stuart Hall’s classic essay ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’, as well as Sarah Banet-Wesier’s recent work on popular feminism. The second half of the article maps key features of ‘popular leftism’ as a distinct cultural/political formation that has emerged ‘in and against’ neoliberalism. In particular, it focuses on media visibility, affective tenor, and tactical and intellectual dynamics. While popular leftism’s entanglement with neoliberalism has proved problematic for its transformative capacity, I nonetheless conclude that its emergence is testament to the importance of popular cultural production and consumption in shaping recent iterations of left politics in Britain.

The devil in the number: Rethinking Garrett Hardin’s The tragedy of the commons and global overpopulation crisis

<p>Critiques about the misconstrued thesis of Garrett Hardin’s (1968) classic essay entitled <i>The Tragedy of the Commons</i> are well documented. However, little is known of the remote and proximate causes of the pejorative confusion about the vital essay. This article engages the discursive reconstruction of the thesis from the management of the commons to the original intent about the unscrupulousness of unchecked population growth as a critical factor to the looming collapse of the earth. Deploying an eloquent metaphor, <i>the devil in the number</i>, the article reinvents the illogic of overpopulating the world while simultaneously pursuing the technocratic solutions to nature’s burden. The article reports four marked factors that swayed perception away from Hardin’s thesis. The significance of Hardin’s essay for the overburdened ecosystem as the harbinger for the socio-economic and governance crisis across the global divides is also discussed.</p>

The devil in the number: Rethinking Garrett Hardin’s The tragedy of the commons and global overpopulation crisis

<p>Critiques about the misconstrued thesis of Garrett Hardin’s (1968) classic essay entitled <i>The Tragedy of the Commons</i> are well documented. However, little is known of the remote and proximate causes of the pejorative confusion about the vital essay. This article engages the discursive reconstruction of the thesis from the management of the commons to the original intent about the unscrupulousness of unchecked population growth as a critical factor to the looming collapse of the earth. Deploying an eloquent metaphor, <i>the devil in the number</i>, the article reinvents the illogic of overpopulating the world while simultaneously pursuing the technocratic solutions to nature’s burden. The article reports four marked factors that swayed perception away from Hardin’s thesis. The significance of Hardin’s essay for the overburdened ecosystem as the harbinger for the socio-economic and governance crisis across the global divides is also discussed.</p>

The everyday skills that get us by: Non-representational theories for a linealogy of quotidian cultures

In this article, I have three key aims. Firstly, I want to offer a particular definition and a bold defence of ‘non-representational theories’, indicating the importance of their anti-rationalist and anti-structuralist tendencies, and also pointing to their positive assertion of the primacy of practices or movement. Although a non-representational theoretical approach is closely associated today with contemporary geographic thought, I make a case here for an understanding of non-representational theories as a far broader cross-disciplinary project. Secondly, in the light of non-representational theories, I will be revisiting an old debate between culturalists and structuralists on matters of experience and representation. I consider, in a spirit of re-evaluation, Stuart Hall’s now classic essay on two paradigms in the development of cultural studies, as well as a selection of related interventions made by Hall. Thirdly, I will look to potential future directions for empirical research that is informed by a non-representational theoretical approach, in an area which I call ‘quotidian cultural studies’. My recommendations are for work that might explore, for example, acquired habits or ways of the hand in the uses of new media technologies (among other skills of tool use), and paths that are trodden along the ground on foot and through narrative or other media settings. A critical appropriation of Tim Ingold’s writings in anthropology leads me to describe such work as ‘linealogical’ investigations of everyday life.

The Iconoclasts of Queer Aztlán

This chapter draws on Cherríe Moraga’s classic essay “Queer Aztlán: The Re-Formation of Chicano Tribe” to distinguish how iconoclasm, the literal breaking of images, has been deployed as a unifying language for queer Chicanx avant-garde formed in the ethnic enclaves of Los Angeles. In institutional discourse, the East LA art collective known as Asco (Spanish for “nausea”) has tended to overshadow queer of color amorphous collectives, artistic circles,and collaborations. With attention to groups like Escandalosa Circle, Butch Gardens School of Art, Pursuits of the Penis, and Le Club for Boys, this chapter elucidates how a bold language faced indifference and sometimes violence in traditional museum settings. With a particular eye on the disciplining of Robert “Cyclona” Legorreta’s unruly archival body, another method and definition of Chicano queer avant-gardisms is demanded and found in the archival body/archival space methodology undergirding the case study chapters.