Suchergebnisse

This brief essay engages with environmental stewardship and scale in the Anthropocene. Taking inspiration from Kees Boeke's illustrated children's book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps and Charles and Ray Eames's Powers of Ten—a short film based on Boeke's book—this photo essay illustrates how, through the production of eco-art, the practice of macro photography can suggest the presence of worlds within one's world. Creative engagements are offered so that children and adults, who must all live through and contend with the Anthropocene, might appreciate notions of environmental scale, particularly in relation to our ecological footprints over time. In so doing, visual media such as illustrated books, films, and macro photography encourage sustainability on a larger scale than humanity has yet to imagine.

Media production is today heavily computerised, and as a consequence of this, profoundly reliant on software. At the same time software does not represent a neutral artefact - it imposes certain affordances, logics, structures and hierarchies of knowledge onto the media making processes. This chapter explores the ways in which visual media creators negotiate the choices between multiple technological alternatives, and the ways in which these negotiations relate to the degree of creative autonomy experienced by cultural producers in their media practice. Combining perspectives from media studies of work in the cultural industries, and science and technology studies (STS), the paper suggests that choices of technology lead media producers to experience creative autonomy differently, by making them labour either within post-industrial technological frameworks that they do not have ownership or control over, or conversely, allow them greater ownership on technology and possibilities to mould their tools, bringing their practice closer to forms of pre-industrial craft production. Creative autonomy, I suggest, can therefore be negotiated by artists and media creators not only in relation to institutions of employment, or nation state politics, but also through deliberate choices of tools, the digital technical toolset that they select and embed in their practice; an approach largely inspired and practiced by some forms of hacker culture.

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Women's reproductive health care has been, especially in the last year, a very controversial topic highly debated among male politicians legislating women's bodies. The problem then becomes that women's voices on their reproductive bodies are ironically condoned. In response, for my Institute of Women's Leadership Scholar's Program Social Action Project, I developed and implemented a series of art workshops at various dorms at Douglass Residential College which explored young women's voices on their reproductive bodies through art.

This article identifies an unease, or even squeamishness, in the way in which political science addresses social media and digital politics, and argues that we urgently need to avoid such squeamishness if we are to adequately grasp the texture and character of contemporary digitally mediated politics. The first section highlights some of the methodological assumptions that underpin this squeamishness. Section 'Visual Culture and the "Memeification" of Politics', drawing on a recent research project on the changing shape of the British left, highlights a number of key trends in digital politics which deserve more attention from political scientists. In particular, I stress the ways in which politics is enacted in and through visual media such as gifs, memes and other forms of shareable visual content. Section 'Re-Orienting the Study of Digital Politics' then mines recent literature in media and communication studies to highlight a range of conceptual and methodological approaches that might be better able to capture the contours of these emergent forms of digitally mediated politics. In the section 'The Pleasures and Passions of Socially Mediated Politics: Towards a Research Agenda', I articulate a possible research agenda. Overall, I encourage political scientists to see the production and exchange of digital visual media not as some frivolous activity on the margins of politics, but as increasingly central to the everyday practices of politically engaged citizens.