Suchergebnisse

As ephemeral as the social effects of dance may be, still more elusive are the embodiments of a critical public. The publics so dear to democratic practice so often appear only metonymically in rules that govern speech. Or they may seem to be inchoate yearnings whose only possible realization lies in formal representation. To attend to actual circuits of participation, one needs to account for the practical capacities that allow bodies to gather in public and move toward desirable ends. The imbrication of state and daily life in Cuba makes study of the affinities between formal and informal political domains particularly robust. Contemporary Cuban dance in a variety of venues—proscenium stages, streets, clubs, and houses—is used to grasp how pleasure meets critique where a social economy for corporeal mobilization is in evidence.

The financialization of culture (the spread of money management into daily life) has expanded into the lives of the poor & excluded across the globe with the rise of microcredit. Microcredit may actually increase dependence rather than self-sufficiency, especially among women. As the World Bank extends microcredit to the poor in different countries, it is defining a new geographic continuity for poverty. New Internet-based technologies hold the promise to drive financialization by making communication faster & closer for the middle class, but self-managed finances put these households at risk. The visions of Bill Gates (eg, 1999) & George Soros (eg, 1991) on financializing wealth are discussed; the idea that philanthropists amassing wealth can solve the world's problems is questioned. A vision for pooling wealth without immeasurable risk is needed. M. Pflum

The financialization of culture (the spread of money management into daily life) has expanded into the lives of the poor & excluded across the globe with the rise of microcredit. Microcredit may actually increase dependence rather than self-sufficiency, especially among women. As the World Bank extends microcredit to the poor in different countries, it is defining a new geographic continuity for poverty. New Internet-based technologies hold the promise to drive financialization by making communication faster & closer for the middle class, but self-managed finances put these households at risk. The visions of Bill Gates (eg, 1999) & George Soros (eg, 1991) on financializing wealth are discussed; the idea that philanthropists amassing wealth can solve the world's problems is questioned. A vision for pooling wealth without immeasurable risk is needed. M. Pflum

The image portrayed in literature is that communities express strong resistance to and negative attitudes about the introduction of a prison. Such claims, however, have not been supported with systematically collected data. A survey was administered to 3,795 residents of a county in which the construction of a new prison had just begun. Residents from throughout the county were asked to indicate their expectations about the impact of the prison on their community. Contrary to the literature, it was found that the majority of the 1,659 respondents were, at worst, neutral in their overall perceptions about the prison's likely impact. This article describes the results of this survey and examines them within the context of the literature on locally unwanted land use (LULU) and the not in my backyard (NIMBY) syndrome.

This article is based on the author's experience taking a hip-hop aerobics class at an Irvine, California, fitness center. It explores the engagement of a specific bodily practice across racial lines that is mediated by mass communication and live performance. This combination of a representational domain (the imaginary) and a practical means of enactment (the performative) is what is meant by the concept composite body. Contrary to the notion of stable and separate racial identities attached to discrete national ideals, a notion of multiculturalism is developed based on a field in which identities are in tension yet interdependent. The largely White and Asian American class of aerobicizers' incorporation of movement and bodily ideals drawn from what is taken as an African American cultural practice complicates certain views of race, nation, multiculturalism, and society. In this, the aerobics class is contrasted with the racialized landscape presented on the evening news.