Suchergebnisse

German commemorative culture is clearly in flux. Over the last year or so, a series of seemingly never-ending controversies have made it abundantly clear that, more than seventy-five years after the end of the Second World War, the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust is not only very much present in contemporary Germany but also remains deeply contested. The list of controversies is familiar to everybody who has followed German public debates over the last three years: first the debate over the planned appearance of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe at the 2020 Ruhr-Trienale in the spring of 2020; then the publication of the German translation of Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory in March 2021 and the heated controversy around A. Dirk Moses's "catechism" blog article a few months later; and finally, the recent debate about antisemitism at the documenta art exhibition curated by an Indonesian artist collective.

The rediscovery of a labour camp on the construction site of the Stalin Monument in Prague in spring 2021 was the result of a construction project of the Municipality of Prague. Until then, the existence of this specific site had not been reflected neither in the historical memory of the place nor in the literature devoted to the monstrous monument (dismantled in 1962), which was both a superb work of art and engineering and the most significant material manifestation of the cult of Stalin's personality outside the USSR. The discovered remains of the camp's modest, purely purpose-built buildings, as well as the artifacts and ecofacts that illustrate the living conditions of its inhabitants, contrast sharply with the costly, expressive, and landscape-dominating monument. The results of the archaeological research make a distinctive contribution to the contemporary debate on the nature of the Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia, as they thematise the bloodless yet pervasive aspect of the regime's repressiveness.

This forum features fifteen documents translated from Vietnamese into English that address high-profile rape allegations by the poet Dạ Thảo Phương against Lương Ngọc An, a well-known poet and a coworker of hers at Văn Nghệ [Literature and Arts] newspaper. While the assaults allegedly occurred between 1999 and 2000, they were first described in public by Dạ Thảo Phương in a series of Facebook posts during Spring 2022. In addition to Dạ Thảo Phương's posts, the forum includes a range of commentary on the case as well as a second allegation of sexual misconduct against Lương Ngọc An by the poet Bùi Mai Hạnh. We supplement this material with an essay about the broader legal, social, and cultural context of sexual violence in contemporary Vietnam by Dr. Nguyễn Thu Hương of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University of Hà Nội.

Professional women engage with individual and social issues of ageing, appearance and identity throughout their lives. The challenges professional women have faced since the 1970s have changed as to how they view themselves in new and varied contemporary careers and their perceptions of how others view them. Eleven career women in the Twin Cities, MN, were interviewed about how they managed their appearances throughout their careers. Responses were organized into groups built around the women's early career narratives – 20s–30s, mid-career narratives – 40s–60s, late and post-career narratives – 70s–90s. We found that these women consciously thought about the meaning and impact of work and their work wardrobe as they passed through each career stage, especially in terms of impression and identity management. We learned through the stories they told how the art, practice and meaning around dressing for work changed over time – with both continuity and change in their expressed outcomes.

This article argues the importance of considering wageless life and related post-wage regimes of work in the study of creative and cultural labour. Such consideration is necessary to understand how creative workers persevere in their profession, dedicating substantial amounts of time to making art in spite of prolonged precarity and low, irregular or non-existent wages. The article revisits sociological studies of creative work and finds that although such studies have tended to neglect the wageless life of creative workers they have nonetheless implicitly identified a range of alternative economic activities and 'consumption work' practices that go beyond wages and formal contractual employment. These activities include everyday strategies for 'getting by', such as barter, self-provisioning, commoning, thrift and downshifting. A systematic and sustained focus on wageless life that treats work as deeply enmeshed in everyday life is needed in order to make manifest the hidden politics of contemporary post-waged creative work.

'Psychotechnics', Weimar Germany's science du jour, typically is framed as a symptom of 'technological media' – obscuring the persistent significance of 'dexterity', 'skill' and 'manual labour' at the time. More broadly, there is a tendency to construe 'the haptic' as predominantly a casualty of modernity: skilled hands replaced by conveyor belts; skilled hands defended by the rearguard actions of arts-and-crafts movements; skilled hands destroyed by industrialized warfare. Drawing on contemporary investigations into the 'organ of touch', this essay aims to complicate this picture by reconstructing the proto-ergonomic project of Friedrich Herig, a German engineer, amateur prehistorian and expert on craft labour who rose to distinction in the 1920s as a designer of 'ideal' hand tools. Herig's eclectic sources of inspiration reveal that matters of 'touch', far from obsolete, were intimately bound up with matters of tools – their design, uses and putative origins – and thus, with matters of (manual) labour.

Abstract
Fascism invites its adherents to be part of something greater than themselves, invoking their longing for honor and glory, passion and heroism. An important avenue for articulating its affective dimension is cultural production. This article investigates the role of violence and passion in contemporary Swedish-language fascist fiction. The protagonist is typically a young white man or woman who wakes up to the realities of the ongoing white genocide through being exposed to violent crime committed by racialized aliens protected by the System. Seeking revenge, the protagonist learns how to be a man or meets her hero, and is introduced to fascist ideology and the art of killing. Fascist literature identifies aggression and ethnical cleansing as altruistic acts of love. With its passionate celebration of violence, fascism hails the productivity of destructivity, and the life-bequeathing aspects of death, which is at the core of fascism's urge for national rebirth.

Abstract
In contemporary working life, art-based initiatives are increasingly used in organizational training and
development. For artists, this has created new employment opportunities as creative entrepreneurs who provide specialist services
for workplaces. In this article, we study the dynamics of such encounters through the narrated accounts of training professionals.
Our data come from a professional mentoring program where the working pairs of artists and consultants shared stories about their
customer projects. By using conversation analysis as a method, we analyze the way stories are interactionally accomplished in peer
group sessions of the program. In particular, we analyze how participants produce different versions of the narrated events, and
by so doing, negotiate the questions of blame and accountability with regard to professional action. In conclusion, we discuss
stories and storytelling as organizational practice through which the moral order and legitimacy of the program is sustained and
the boundaries of the profession constructed.

Focusing on 'chronic kidney disease of unknown origin' (CKDu), this paper revisits ethnographic preoccupations with 'thin' and 'thick' descriptions in the context of the unexplained emergence of this unruly disease. CKDu has recently emerged in impoverished sites across the Global South as a 'medical enigma' that defies easy description. Despite growing research efforts from various quarters, however, the search for specific causes using conventional forms of analysis has made little progress. Taking CKDu as a residual category and a contemporary case of society–environment–body entanglements (Latimer and Gomez, 2019; Latour, 2018), we engage Heather Love's descriptive turn as a provocation to examine what it is that is encountered in encounters with 'the enigma of CKDu'. In doing so, we highlight the role of thick and thin descriptions (cf. Love, 2013) in terms of the political relations they make differently visible. We argue both are critical to the 'art of noticing' (Tsing, 2015).

Abstract
Film has been the primary way dominant society has consumed inaccurate and problematic symbols, images, and stereotypes of Native peoples for over one hundred years. Indigenous-made films, on the other hand, reclaim Indigenous representational space or 'visual sovereignty' through narratives of Indigenous experience that highlight culturally relevant stories and contemporary issues they face. In particular, Indigenous-made speculative fiction inspires contemplations of Indigenous agency in alternative realities. Indigenous futurisms expressed in works of speculative fiction is a rejection of theoretical, institutional, and political projects that imagined Indigenous peoples in the past and excluded them from the future. Through a survey of Neshnabé speculative fiction and other art, this article argues that Indigenous futurisms constitute creative approaches to sovereignty in a multiplicity of potential futures and is an analytical framework that illuminates the ever-expanding contours of Indigenous sovereignty in order to imagine an otherwise to present and past circumstances of Indigenous existence.

One of the main goals of sociology is to identify and evaluate institutional changes in society. The concept of the sociological imagination has gained wide use as a means of observing how personal issues are affected by social arrangements. This article critically examines how many contemporary sociologists, particularly in the area of teaching and learning, are using their sociological imaginations to observe and evaluate the changes taking place in higher education due to a paradigm shift that emphasizes occupational-professional programs at the expense of the arts and sciences. It is argued that this shift toward neoliberal principles is so pervasive that social scientists tend to think and speak in neoliberal terms even when expressing the importance of maintaining a sociological imagination. While some educators celebrate this trend in higher education, C. Wright Mills, the sociologist who coined the term, "sociological imagination," believed (like John Dewey) that a well-rounded education is vital to preserving a democracy.

This article considers the analytical potential of a concept of care that foregrounds human interdependencies, relational ties and the needs of others as the basis for action in analysing work, such as creative work, which is neither directly nor obviously associated with care provision. Work in the creative industries has recently become a central concern in sociology. Much of this scholarship reproduces or extends the idea of creative work as a paradigm of individualized work in contemporary societies that is characterized by high levels of worker autonomy, passion, self-expression and self-enterprise. This article challenges such theorizations by calling attention to the role of caring in creative work, understood both as an ontological phenomenon and as a relational practice of sustaining and repairing the world. Drawing on a qualitative study of socially engaged art in South-East Europe, I argue that creative work manifests itself as a labour of care and compassion.

Following the format of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's (SAIC) Self-Study report, I closely examine Sullivan Galleries (2017-2020, now SAIC Galleries), from a former student worker's standpoint. After withstanding a high turnover of spaces and staff, the teaching gallery established itself as a contemporary, socially-engaged institution in Chicago. This self-reflexive analysis mixed with personal memories, interviews, and critical thoughts puts forth the organization's internal reality into visible context. From studying the ecosystem of the gallery's various supporting roles, I find a struggle between curatorial and operational staff, the precarious position of the site manager, and unseen labor, all to put up an activist exhibition like RE:WORKING LABOR. In response, I explore the ideas and shortcomings of innovation, as the gallery feels pressure to be progressive, and question the importance of maintenance to sustain Sullivan Galleries as a socially-engaged institution.

This essay intends to address perspectives and reflections on nature and culture in the contemporary anthropological literature . Dialogically engaging with Ingold, Wag- ner, Viveiros de Castro, Descola and Strathern, I aim to demonstrate the implications of understanding culture as an axiomatic point of differentiation of human nature, or as re-elaboration of materiality through human action . This reflection calls us to rethink the Western scientific epistemology, along with its presupposed ontological order . Such questioning unfolds in the elaboration of the ethnographic text, which in turn is the result of a dialectical process that speaks not only of one culture, but of two, and especially of our gaze on the Other . In the ethnographic text, an anthropologist and a native are the potential locus of reproduction of their culture . Through this approach we extend the implications of epistemological concerns to fieldwork practices and to the art of under- standing other knowledge systems .

Summary: The article is based on the study of informal features of celebrating the former national holiday, the Republic Day (of the SFRY), in post-socialist Slovenia: Yugonostalgic parties, concerts, political graffiti and street art, songs, various public events, news in the media and internet events (holiday greetings, Facebook groups, blogs, virtual Yugoslavias etc.). In the research I applied a combination of the usual cultural-studies methods (urban ethnography, sociology of time and critical visual semiology), which deals with these phenomena from the point of its production (top-down) and from the point of its reception (bottom-up). These celebrations are, on the one hand, increasingly commodified (in the sense of pop-resistance, painless provocation, pure entertainment or profitable market niche), while on the other hand, they present a critique, challenge, opposition and symbolic alternative to contemporary Slovenian dominant ideological currents and politics (ethno-nationalism and neo-liberalism).