Toward People’s Community Control of Technology: Race, Access, and Education

This field review explores how the benefits of access to computing for racialized and minoritized communities has become an accepted fact in policy and research, despite decades of evidence that technical fixes do not solve the kinds of complex social problems that disproportionately affect these communities. I use the digital divide framework—a 1990s policy diagnosis that argues that the growth and success of the internet would bifurcate the public into digital “haves” and “have-nots”—as a lens to look at why access to computing frequently appears as a means to achieve economic, political, and social equality for racialized and minoritized communities. First, I present a brief cultural history of computer-assisted instruction to show that widely-held assumptions about the educational utility of computing emerged from utopian narratives about scientific progress and innovation—narratives that also traded on raced and gendered assumptions about users of computers. Next, I use the advent of the digital divide framework and its eventual transformation into digital inequality research to show how those raced and gendered norms about computing and computer users continue to inform research on information and communication technologies (ICTs) used in educational contexts. This is important because the norms implicated in digital divide research are also present in other sites where technology and civic life intersect, including democratic participation, public health, and immigration, among others. I conclude by arguing that naïve or cynical deployments of computing technology can actually harm or exploit the very same racialized and minoritized communities that access is supposed to benefit. In short, access to computing in education—or in any other domain—can only meaningfully contribute to equality when minoritized and racialized communities are allowed to pursue their own collective goals.

The Christian Invention of Time

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.

Signs and Emotions as the Experience of the Urban Explorer

Although we have the impression that we understand the urban texture in which we live, the city still holds surprises in the way it communicates everyday aspects, situations, and cultural history.The experience of the urban explorer, that flâneur/stroller mentioned by Guy Debord (1955) and the Situationist school, was until recently only a literary experience. The emotion of discovering the unusual in the urban daily life was communicated only in the form of textual narratives (Sinclair, 1997). Recently the psychogeographical approach to the city has become again a topic of interest. Although contemporary design transposed the behavioral codes of urban life into signs, it did not propose emoticons for the phenomenological experience of one who experiences the city. The original purpose of this paper is to translate the phenomenological experience of the urban explorer into infographics (which translates complex concepts into signs with condensed meaning) and to quantify and communicate emotionally and visually, the experience of the "invisible" [out of sight] cultural details to the hurried passerby. This paper will discuss the phenomenological (psychogeographical) experience of the city transferred into visual signs will be presented. The authors insist on the communicative value of infographics in making visible the hidden beauty of the city, the historical and esthetical details that are not seen by the passersby on the street, proposing a new urban visual language accompanied by visual design theory and cultural history explanations.

Love and Duty: Translating Films and Teaching Online Through a Pandemic

The Chinese Film Classics project, launched in 2020, is an online research and teaching initiative aimed at making early Chinese films and cinema history more accessible to the general public. Led by Christopher Rea at the University of British Columbia, the project is centered on the website http://chinesefilmclassics.org and the companion YouTube channel Modern Chinese Cultural Studies. These two platforms together host new English translations of over two dozen Republican-era Chinese films, over two hundred film clips organized into thematic playlists, and a free online course of video lectures on Chinese film classics. This essay tells the story of how the Chinese Film Classics project grew from being a book project into a multiplatform translation, teaching, and publication project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Online teaching and social media publication involved multiple global storytellers: filmmakers, educators, translators, students, and the broader Internet public. How might moving things online change, or improve, the practice of cultural history? Rea highlights in particular the practical considerations facing the translator and gives examples of how, in a social media context, some of the stories are told not by creators and audiences but by data analytics.