Politicizing Elsewhere(s)

Drawing on ethnographic research in a Nigerian-based Pentecostal church in Berlin, this article explores the discussions that emerged when my scholarly representations of the congregants’ aesthetic engagements with the Elsewhere diverged from the church leadership’s expectations. More specifically, it interrogates my representational practice in relation to the stakes of the diasporic congregation, which is operating at the political margin of Berlin’s widely diverse religious landscape. In exploring the collision of my analytical focus on the affect-charged elements of the believers’ routines of connecting to the Elsewhere with the church’s emphasis on affective discipline and moderation, the article demonstrates how aesthetic practices that engage with the Elsewhere not only have a religious but inevitably also a political bearing.

Landscape and Ecology

Images of landscape lie at the heart of nineteenth-century musical thought. From frozen winter fields, mountain echoes, distant horn calls, and the sound of the wind moving among the pines, landscape was a vivid representational practice, a creative resource, and a privileged site for immersion, gothic horror, and the Romantic sublime. As Raymond Williams observed, however, the nineteenth century also witnessed an unforeseen transformation of artistic responses to landscape, which paralleled the social and cultural transformation of the country and the city under processes of intense industrialization and economic development. This chapter attends to several musical landscapes, from the Beethovenian “Pastoral” to Delius’s colonial-era evocation of an exoticized American idyll, as a means of mapping nineteenth-century music’s obsession with the idea of landscape and place. Distance recurs repeatedly as a form of subjective presence and through paradoxical connections with proximity and intimacy.

‘Never forget’: fictionalising the Holocaust survivor with dementia

This article asks what the reasons are for the frequent linking of the image of the Holocaust with that of dementia in contemporary discursive and representational practice. In doing so, it analyses some of the numerous 21st-century examples of fiction, drama and film in which the figure of a Holocaust survivor living with dementia takes centre stage. It explores the contradictory cultural effects that arise from making such a connection, in contexts that include expressions of fear at the spectacle of dementia, as well as comparisons between the person living with that condition and the inmate of a concentration camp. Detailed consideration of novels by Jillian Cantor and Harriet Scott Chessman as well as a play by Michel Wallenstein and a film by Josh Appignanesi suggests that the fictions of this kind can appear to provide solace for the impending loss of the eyewitness generation, yet also offer potential for a model for caregiving practice to those living with dementia in broader terms.

Between automation and interpretation : Using data visualization in social media analytics companies

This chapter explores the use of data visualizations in social media analytics companies. Drawing on a dataset of ethnographic field notes and thematic interviews in four Finnish social media analytics companies, we argue that data visualizations are crucially involved in how analytics-based knowledge claims become accepted by companies and their clients. Basing on previous research on visualizations in organizations and as a representational practice, we explore their role in social media analytics. We identify three practices of using visualizations, which we have named have simple-boxing, flatter-boxing, and pretty-boxing. We argue that these practices enable analysts to achieve the simultaneous aims of producing credible and valuable analytics in a context marked by high business promises.

A NEW INTERPRETIVIST METASEMANTICS FOR FUNDAMENTAL LEGAL DISAGREEMENTS

ABSTRACTWhat does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged.

READY-MADE: THE PRESENTATION OF ART IN THE CONTEXTS OF METAPHORS AND PSYCHOLOGY IN ARTWORKS

Penyelidikan ini merangkumi pemahaman metafora melalui perkaitan objek perwakilan dengan seni untuk meningkatkan nilai dan estetika dalam memahami karya seni. Karya seni dapat didefinisikan dalam dua bentuk format iaitu representasi dan bukan representasi. Kedua-dua bentuk format ini menekankan modenisme. Penyelidikan ini membincangkan objek yang dijumpai mewakili kiasan 'kepercayaan' serta memiliki ciptaan seni sambil mencerminkan sejarah, fungsi dan dikontekstualisasikan dalam Karya Seni 2D. Konsep siap pakai diperkenalkan pada tahun 1917 ketika Marcel Duchamp memperkenalkan idea untuk menjelaskan kemampuan sifat fizikal, refleksi psikologi, dan adanya ideologi untuk meniru simbol, dan metafora sebagai akar dalam paradigma baru dalam praktik konseptual. Bahanbahan 'berbicara' dengan sendirinya dalam mewakili 'realisme' sebagai keputusan untuk memperkuat persepsi objektiviti dan mempersoalkan tradisi praktik perwakilan di era modernisme. Kualiti idea ini membawa kepada pengabstrakan dan pemahaman yang kompleks tentang bahasa dan komunikasi seni. Penyelidikan ini menerangkan dua metodologi dalam merujuk objek dan subjek dalam seni visual. Metodologi ini metafora dalam pendekatan semiotik dan psikoanalitik dalam perspektif. Dalam semiologi, metafora melibatkan dan memerlukan satu cara penting iaitu 'penanda' di mana ia merujuk kepada subjek utama (literal) dan juga dinyatakan dalam subjek sekunder (kiasan). This research covers the understanding of metaphor through the association of representational objects to art to enhance the value and aesthetic in understanding artworks. Artwork can be defined in two forms of format which are representational and non-representational. These two forms of format emphasise modernism. This research discusses the found objects which represent the metaphor of ‘belief’ as well as possess artistic creation while reflecting history, functionality and being contextualised in 2D Artworks. The concept of ready-made was introduced in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp introduced the idea of explaining the capability of physical properties, psychological reflection, and the existence of ideology to imitate symbol, and metaphor as a root in the new paradigm in conceptual practises. The materials ‘speak’ by itself in representing ‘realism’ as a decision to reinforce perception of objectivity and questioning the tradition of representational practice in the era of modernism. This quality of ideas leads to abstraction and complex understanding of the language and the communication of art. This research explains two methodologies in referring to objects and subjects in visual art. These methodologies are metaphor in semiotic approach and psychoanalytic in perspective. In semiology, metaphor involves and needs one mode of significance which is the ‘signifier’ in which it refers to the primary subject (literal) and also expressed in the secondary subject (figurative).

Perspectives

This chapter considers the aesthetics of western reservations and the so-called “Indian Wars” of the later nineteenth century. In the post-Civil War decades of US national expansion, print media promulgated a range of damaging narratives about savage, vengeful Indian warriors from a distant perspective. Meanwhile, Native artists and authors including Amos Bad Heart Bull (Oglala Lakota) and Charles Alexander Eastman (Mdewakanton Dakota) experimented with perspective and perception in image and text to make visible the many, diverse Native sites and forms of creative knowledge production inaccessible in print media. Their texts call for a model of reading that links the sensational battles of this period with histories of Indigenous representational practice well versed in stories and images of battle. Their works draw surprising connections between a variety of events, spaces, communities, and forms in a period known for the compartmentalization of Indian nations and lands, demonstrating that locally grounded aesthetic analysis remains important to understanding networks of Indian representation in more modern periods.

‘It was him’: Representational strategies, identity, and legitimization in the Boston Marathon bombing trial narratives

Adopting a systemic functional linguistic view of language as a system of options from which language users choose to construct meaning, this study seeks to critically explicate the constitutive roles of reference terms and event description in accomplishing character positioning in the opening event of a recent high-profile capital trial, the Boston Marathon bombing trial of 2015. Incorporating Halliday’s concept of transitivity and Van Leeuwen’s inventory of social actors, the quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals that the prosecution and defence differ starkly in representational practice and that both reference terms and event description are prime stylistic devices that synergistically serve not only to construct and ascribe polarized identities to characters in their narratives but also to (de-)humanize the defendant before the verdict is reached, thereby (de-)legitimizing blame and responsibility and potentially influencing the jury’s decisions.

Identity Crisis: The Agency of Instagram in Schools of Architecture

The focus of this paper addresses themes of neoliberalism, university commercialization and marketing, architecture school identity formation as a representational practice through social media, and the role of image curation and its production in contemporary architecture. This paper emerged after hearing the phrase ‘buyer’s motive,’ which explained what schools needed to consider for attracting students to their programs at a conference by Ruffalo Noel Levtiz on recruitment, marketing, and retention in higher education in the United States. The use of the word, ‘buyer’, instead of ‘student’, or ‘prospective student’, or ‘learner’ seemingly transformed the production of engaged education to its passive consumption.

Childhood as Discourse

Outside of pediatric medical science, positivistic developmental psychology, or econometrics and demography, childhood researchers highly value and often practice reading childhood as discourse, as a body of representational practice. Unfortunately, “discourse” is a concept whose bibliographic handling is susceptible to two errors: (a) the mistake of using overwrought theoretical distinctions that do not reflect the thick empirical nature of studying childhood as discourse, and (b) the futility of lumping most of the critical study of childhood into one meta-category. In response to this difficulty, this bibliography will pay little attention to whether writers offered an allegiance to discourse analysis as such. Instead, it identifies works that have significantly contributed to our ability to read childhood as discourse. After outlining the foundational works, guides, and invaluable tools of reference for discourse research, this bibliography is organized around the conclusion that our ability to read childhood as discourse stems from three fruitful pathways: the history of language, ideas, and knowledge; literary and art criticism; and cultural studies and contemporary ideology critique.