Zygmunt Bauman, internationally known and revered as the sociologist of postmodernity and of 'liquid' society, was for about a decade a serious and dedicated photographer. This book presents his black-and-white photographs from the 1980s, together with a range of essays, by colleagues, friends and family, about his work with images. The importance of his wife, Janina Bauman, in his life and work is acknowledged, with essays on photographs he took of her and also on her work in the film industry in Poland.
At the heart of many studies in media anthropology is an interest in media practices. While practice-oriented approaches have gained momentum as of late, there has been little discussion about how they can include particular "media texts" or "media content" into their research designs. This is especially true for digital content on social media platforms, such as digital images, captions, emojis, hashtags, and so on, which have become popular objects of ethnographic investigation. Though digital content has clear empirical value for ethnographic studies, researchers are unclear about how to approach it conceptually and methodologically. In the following chapter, I argue that digital content itself can be analysed as practice. Using my ethnographic study of digital practices at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as an example, I show that digital content can be studied as routines in the interplay of human bodies, social and cultural conventions, and the affordances of digital media technologies. My practice approach does not read content as text; rather, it asks how the practices of its creators live on through digital content. This perspective offers a new way of conducting content analysis from an ethnographic perspective and expands the toolbox available for media anthropological research.
Thinking with an Accent casts accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception shaping our global cultural economy. Theorizing accent as a mediatized object, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice, this volume invites readers to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical, multisensorial inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care. "There is no such thing as a voice without an accent, yet theories of voice still treat accents as the exception. Thinking with an Accent teaches us how to begin from accented voices and provides a panoply of tools for imagining, working with, building on, analyzing, and desiring accents." — JONATHAN STERNE, author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment "This creative and ambitious collection encourages us to reconsider our own accented lives and how they structure our social, digital, and literary worlds. An essential book." — DOLORES INÉS CASILLAS, author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy "This book teaches us that the accent must be understood not as an ontological reality but as a co-constituted happening. The result is that accent becomes something to think with, not just to study. Straightforward, well argued, and a pleasure to read." — KAREEM KHUBCHANDANI, author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife"
The article discusses Gustav Shpet's phenomenology and aesthetic theory as part of early Soviet culture. The author suggests that the 'official' acceptance of Shpet's philosophy, particularly through GAKhN, is emblematic of the internal complexity of the cultural regime in the 1920s. Shpet's pre-revolutionary phenomenology was praised for its modernizing potential, while his later anti-avant-garde art theory was criticized as old-fashioned and unscientific. Yet both were welcomed by Marxist thinkers and the Bolshevik regime. Shpet's involvement in Soviet culture from 1917 to 1929 can thus be seen as a reflection of its gradually changing needs. His aesthetics of 'new realism' and the 'inner form of the word' were deemed useful until the end of the 1920s, when he was finally charged with 'idealism' and 'anti-communism'. Nonetheless, Shpet's neo-classical cultural conception can be considered part of a broad conservative turn that eventually led to the introduction of socialist realism.
This open access book proposes a conceptual framework for understanding measurement across a broad range of scientific fields and areas of application, such as physics, engineering, education, and psychology. It addresses contemporary issues and controversies within measurement in light of the framework, including operationalism, definitional uncertainty, and the relations between measurement and computation, and describes how the framework, operating as a shared concept system, supports understanding measurement's work in different domains, using examples in the physical and human sciences. This revised and expanded second edition features a new analysis of the analogies and the differences between the error/uncertainty-related approach adopted in physical measurement and the validity-related approach adopted in psychosocial measurement. In addition, it provides a better analysis and presentation of measurement scales, in particular about their relations with quantity units, and introduces the measurand identification/definition as a part of the "Hexagon Framework" along with new examples from the physical and psychosocial sciences. Researchers and academics across a wide range of disciplines including biological, physical, social, and behavioral scientists, as well as specialists in measurement and philosophy appreciate the work's fresh and provocative approach to the field at a time when sound measurements of complex scientific systems are increasingly essential to solving critical global problems.
Sophie Day explores the houses that are imagined, built, repurposed, and dismantled among different communities in Ladakh, drawing attention to the ways in which houses are like and unlike people.A handful of in-depth 'house portraits' are selected for the insight they provide into major regional developments, based on the author's extended engagement since 1981. Most of these houses are Buddhist and associated with the town of Leh. Drawing on both image and text, collaborative methods for assembling material show the intricate relationships between people and places over the life course. Innovative methods for recording and archiving such as 'storyboards' are developed to frame different views of the house. This approach raises analytical questions about the composition of life within and beyond storyboards, offering new ways to understand a region that intrigues specialists and non-specialists alike.
This article brings an implicit problem: How to unite different peoples and cultures, that are in constant tranformation, around a commom project? The democratic regime is the most approprieate for this task, as it respects diferences and combines it with freedom and justice to promote equal opportunities. On the other hand, the union carried out democratically improves democracy, both favoring each other.
Roland Barthes's consideration of the drawings of New York artist Saul Steinberg — originally an artist book posthumously published in France in 1983 — is historically important as one of the last remaining books in Barthes's oeuvre to be translated into English.
all except you continues Barthes's inquiries into image–text relations, specifically the indiscernible horizon where writing meets drawing, one becoming the other. In his attempt to blur these registers, he produces less a critique than a translation, an attempt to merge author and artist, to see himself and his desire in the work of Steinberg, using the resources of structural linguistics and psychoanalysis. The impertinence of his critique mimics the deformations of Steinberg's drawings that are ""sassy, deformed by the look on high, stretched, excessively crunched."" We become suspicious that Barthes is writing more into Steinberg than Steinberg holds, or even that Steinberg is an alibi for some other aim that is withheld.
Joe Milutis's translation takes the opportunity of a running commentary, in the form of translator's notes, to amplify Barthes's impertinent reading and authorial one-upmanship by speculating on the presumed failures and detoured transferences of the text. Since Barthes is less concerned with writing about art than writing through it, Milutis's "double session" perhaps provides the most faithful translation of the Barthesian eros in his write-through of the write-through.
Wastiary, or Bestiary of Waste, is a creative exercise that occupies letters, numbers, and symbols of Western academic language to compose a list of 35 short entries on the uncomfortable but pressing topic of waste in the contemporary world. The collection is richly illustrated with artwork, photography, collage and mixed media. The book is a heterodox compendium of 'beasts of waste', playfully re-imagining the medieval treatise on various kinds of animal. It conveys the message that various forms of waste and pollution have achieved a beast-like or untameable quality, at times pungently transferring to considerations of 'the human', or humans treated as waste.
This open access book provides a cross-sectoral, integrative and multi-scale design and planning approach for adaptive urban transformation of fast urbanising deltas, taking the Pearl River Delta (China) as a case study. Deltaic areas are among the most promising regions in the world. Their strategic location and superior quality of their soils are core factors supporting both human development and the rise of these regions as global economic hubs. At the same time, however, deltas are extremely vulnerable to multiple threats from both climate change and urbanisation. These include an increased flood risk combined with the resulting loss of ecological and social-cultural values. To ensure a more sustainable future for these areas, spatial strategies are needed to strengthen resilience, i.e. help the systems to cope with their vulnerabilities as well as enhance their capacity to overcome natural and artificial threats. The book provides a unique approach that integrates research in urban landscape systems, territorial governance and visualisation techniques that will help to achieve more integrated and resilient deltas. Based on an assessment of the dynamics of change regarding the transformational cycles of natural and urban landscape elements, eco-dynamic regional design strategies are explored to reveal greater opportunities for the exploitation of natural and social-cultural factors within the processes of urban development.
This chapter contributes to the discussions on memorability by applying assemblage theoretical thinking to the analysis of memory and by developing the notion of mnemonic affordance. It analyzes Ella Ojala's family photographs' affordances in the mediation of the memory of forced migrations and family's dispersal on multiple scales. First, the chapter explores the photographs' affordances in mediating memory of dispersed family. Second, it examines the album's affordances in mediating Ojala's life story in her memoir novels. Third, by contextualizing Ojala's literary works vis-à-vis the time of their publication at the turn of 1990s Finland and discussing their recent archiving, the chapter discusses affordances of the family album in mediation of the memory related to Ingrian Finns' experiences more generally. The chapter indicates some of the potentials of assemblage thinking for conceptualizing memory as processual, malleable, and contingent on various discursive-material and contextual circumstances.
Das Soziale Europa ist zurück auf der politischen Agenda - als Folge schwerer Wirtschaftskrisen, der einstigen Austeritätspolitik und eines Wandels im europäischen Diskursrahmen. Fünf Jahre nach ihrer Proklamation ist die Europäische Säule sozialer Rechte - obwohl rechtlich unverbindlich - zum zentralen Bezugspunkt sozialpolitischer Vorhaben auf EU-Ebene geworden. Langsam, aber stetig verbessert sich die soziale Situation der EU, wobei es weiterhin große Divergenzen gibt. In den Mitgliedstaaten werden die Säule und das sie begleitende Social Scoreboard nur erratisch genutzt. Sozialinvestitionen und reformen, die mithilfe der Aufbau- und Resilienzfazilität finanziert werden, orientieren sich nur in Teilen an sozialen Defiziten. Zugleich hat das europäische Krisenmanagement in der Pandemie dazu beigetragen, die Säule sozialer Rechte umzusetzen. Mit ermöglicht haben diesen Erfolg finanzunterlegte Instrumente wie das Kurzarbeitergeld SURE. Durch eine Reihe von Maßnahmen ließe sich die Umsetzung der Säule stabilisieren. Zu empfehlen wäre, die Indikatoren des Scoreboards gezielter auch auf nationaler Ebene zu nutzen, SURE zu einer Europäischen Arbeitslosenversicherung weiterzuentwickeln, ein Verfahren zu sozialen Ungleichgewichten einzurichten sowie Freiräume für Sozialinvestitionen im Stabilitäts- und Wachstumspakt zu schaffen. (Autorenreferat)
In der Kurzanalyse 3|2023 des BAMF wird untersucht, wie sich die Wohnsituation der ukrainischen Geflüchteten zwischen Spätsommer 2022 und Frühjahr 2023 entwickelt hat. Die Analyse basiert auf Daten der ersten und zweiten Erhebungswelle der IAB-BiB/FReDA-BAMF-SOEP-Befragung "Geflüchtete aus der Ukraine in Deutschland". In der Kurzanalyse werden zunächst die rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen bei der Einreise und der Wohnsitzwahl ukrainischer Geflüchteter skizziert, bevor dargestellt wird, wie sich deren Wohnsituation im Spätsommer 2022 gestaltete. Daran anschließend wird die Entwicklung der Wohnsituation untersucht. Hierzu wird auf die Häufigkeit der Wohnsitzwechsel eingegangen und gezeigt, wie ukrainische Geflüchtete im Frühjahr 2023 wohnten. Weiterhin wird analysiert, wodurch sich mobile von immobilen Geflüchteten unterscheiden und welche Merkmale mit dem Übergang in eine Privatunterkunft zusammenhängen.
Literarische Texte von Autor*innen mit Migrationserfahrungen können ein kulturelles und ästhetisches Potential entfalten, das homogene Identitätskonzepte auflöst, nationale Paradigmen unterminiert und verschiedenartige Grenzen überwindet. Die Beiträge des Bandes legen dar, in welchen Formen und mit welchen Funktionen literarische Mehrsprachigkeit in Prozessen der Transkulturation zum Ausdruck kommt. Dabei fragen sie nach der spezifischen Qualität und Prägung literarischer Mehrsprachigkeit sowie nach Wechselwirkungen mit dem "transkulturellen Schreiben" bei deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsautor*innen mit Migrationshintergrund.
Die vorliegende Studie geht der Fragestellung nach, wie sich eine anbieterübergreifende, abonnementbasierte Plattform für den digitalen Journalismus, also eine Art Spotify im Journalismus, auf die Umsätze der Anbieter journalistischer Inhalte und die Abonnements im Digitaljournalismus in Deutschland auswirken würde.
