Suchergebnisse

Ultra-red's SILENT|LISTEN (2005-06) consists of a series of events in
which statements addressing the AIDS epidemic are presented alongside
Cage's silent composition 4′33″ (1952). Ultra-red's intervention refers
to activist collective ACT UP's militantly anti-homophobic slogan, "SILENCE
= DEATH," while implicating the cultural politics of Cagean silence, 4′33″ 's
contested status as part of an historically specific strategy of queer
resistance deployed during McCarthyism. Turning on the music-formal problem
of Werktreue , or "faithfulness" to an original score, SILENT|LISTEN is
considered alongside the appropriation art strategies of AIDS activism and
against recent theoretical attempts to bracket out "sound" from the
historical and formal specificity of musical practice.

As contemporary Thai society has become deeply enmeshed in consumerism and capitalism, with consumption now having been integrated as a way of life, Thai literature, especially those short stories written in the past decade, has touched upon the issue of consumerism in various degrees and aspects. This essay aims to investigate two major issues. Firstly, it aims to analyze how these short stories represent consumerism, especially its mechanisms that affect the daily lives of Thai people and their relationships. Secondly, it aims to shed light on the relationship between consumerism and identity politics as it appears in these short stories, and especially how consumerism both contradictorily liberates and constrains identity formation.

A survey of post-1989 Romania is to indicate that while looking forward and striving for democratic achievements, the country also had to look backward and "come to terms" with her non-democratic recent past. Unfortunately, for more than 15 years after the collapse of communism no firm resolution has been brought to any of these pasts. The present paper is an overview of the politics of memory and its impact on the process of democratization in the case of Romania from 1989 to 2004. In this sense it focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the way Romanian society dealt with history, memory, and amnesia when it came to Ion Antonescu and the Romanian Holocaust.

Objectives: To understand the perception of nursing students about alcohol, tobacco and other drugs in the context of their academic training. Method: This is a descriptive study with a qualitative approach using as production technique of the interview data with 15 nursing students of a private institution of higher education. Results: Data were grouped into two categories: knowledge of graduating nursing students on alcohol, tobacco and other drugs and academic formation versus practical application. Conclusion: The study shows a predominance of some participants' knowledge of drugs with specific information, without a more profound reflection on the subject in question on the politics of confrontation and actions of nurses.

To characterize U.S. politics today as polarized is to state the obvious. Nevertheless, Barack Obama's election as the forty-fourth and first African American president of the United States in 2008 had an air of inevitability to it. The presidency of George W. Bush was at that point widely regarded as a profound failure. His administration had mishandled two on-going wars, brought us the nationally humbling debacle of hurricane Katrina, and took us to the brink of economic collapse. And thus the Democratic party nominee for president, who happened to be Black, was handily elected with 53% of the popular vote, carrying twenty-eight states and with some 365 electoral college votes.

There has been a flurry of publications examining Ghana's decentralization programme since 1988 to date. None has, however, specifically focused on the creation of districts; that is, the political and geographical division of the state into smaller jurisdictions – arguably regarded as one of the key processes of decentralization. In other words, the numerous studies do not fully explain the politics of the creation of districts, which has not only been a recurring phenomenon but also a contentious and sensitive one. This paper aims at filling this lacuna by identifying the actors and discussing their interests, benefits and the tensions arising from the creation of new districts in Ghana. The lessons learnt are also highlighted.

The First World War and the Weimar Republic opened new opportunities for Jews in Germany, but they also complicated the Jews' situation. Significant antisemitism accompanied illiberal antirepublican sentiment, and the Jews' place in German society was increasingly called into question. Faced with this challenge, German Jews saw four options available to them: the Jewish particularism of Zionism, the universalism of Marxism, an embrace of German nationalism and minimization of Jewish identity, and bourgeois liberalism. These four positions found representation in the four Scholem brothers: Gershom (born Gerhard), Werner, Reinhold, and Erich. An examination of their lives and their relationship to Judaism and German politics elucidates the options that German Jews considered available in this era and the decisions they made.

Security governance is commonly understood as an answer to the new and constantly changing security environment after the Cold War. In the context of the European Union (EU), the governance approach is believed to understand better the evolving institutional characters, networks, and processes of the EU's actions in global politics. By employing a neo-Gramscian framework we challenge the 'orthodox view' in the EU governance literature that networks are flexible and hierarchy-immune responses to increasingly global policy challenges. We argue that networks in and of themselves reproduce existing power structures, and discuss the presence and replication of hegemony through these networks by examining the EU's governance system post the Lisbon Treaty.

The exhibition of prints Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, curated by Judith B. Hecker at New York's Museum of Modern Art, offered a view of South African art-making practice that flourished among all sectors of society during the apartheid years. The exhibition evoked a combination of cynicism, nostalgia, even sadness. The politics and the politically oriented art of the twentieth century recall utopian hopes that ended in dashed expectations. Yet art that speaks the language of the twentieth-century insurgent Left also recalls the brutality attributed to those struggles. The exhibition showed an acute awareness of these problems and seemed to have been organized with them as a sort of subtext.

This essay interrogates the assemblage of female sexuality. Drawing on an analysis of Masters and Johnson's anatomical research and primatological research on monkeys, I argue that the female sexuality was the product of encounters between women, machines and monkeys. Orgasm's extra-species life produced a conception of female sexuality as natural in evolutionary and anatomical terms. The set of assumptions that follow this naturalisation of female sexuality through an emphasis on orgasm allow us to further deconstruct notions of female sexuality, naturalness and the politics of knowledge that produce this assemblage. Ultimately, I argue that this focus on anatomy and female orgasm allows us to see the stakes of an anatomically based sexual difference.

Concern about vulnerabilities of IT systems is growing together with attention to risks of intrusive cyber-control over personal activities and data. This article discusses some new technologies that are being integrated into computing devices for realizing so-called Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management systems, which can remotely attest their current hardware/software state and can enforce external policies to access protected content. These technologies are then confronted with distributed Trust Management systems, which realize access control for local resources on the basis of delegation of access rights according to local trust decisions. Both technologies are discussed from various points of view: architecture, vision, ethics, politics and law.

AbstractIn the 1970s, the West German extra-parliamentary Left struggled to respond effectively to left-wing terrorism and the state powers mobilised against it. This article argues that a shared conception of counter-violence as legitimate resistance helps explain the Left's ambivalent relationship to political violence and its solidarity with militants. The mounting strain on the projects and protest networks of student rebels, older leftists, anti-nuclear demonstrators and feminist activists, however, provoked debate and, eventually, change. Caught between terrorism and counter-terrorism, leftists revised assumptions upon which their commitment to resistance had rested – and reconceived resistance itself as part of everyday, mainstream politics.

This article reflects on the project of creating multicultural inclusive museums. By definition, an inclusive museum honors the cultural constituencies it is paid to serve. Yet in reality, cultural sensitivity is one thing and education another. Blurring the distinction risks sacrificing education, a moral mandate, to the ideal of equality. My article points to examples where, for fear of offending, a museum betrays its educational mission. I trace the affinity between inclusive museum politics and consumerist culture and consider the case of the Creation Museum-a museum that, as per the multicultural ideal, tailors science to the sensibility of its customer base, in this instance the sensibility of American biblical literalists.

This article analyses the function of opening sequences in war films. With reference to Erll's studies on film and memory, the author suggests that, besides initiating processes of framing film worlds, opening sequences also activate a certain memory-making rhetoric that enables potential impacts on historical discourse and memory politics. He subdivides this last function into three rhetorical modes of cultural memory – an objectifying, subjective and reflexive approach. Subsequently, the author provides close readings of the opening sequences of various contemporary war films to exemplify and illustrate each function and rhetorical mode. In conclusion, the author connects a recent surge in films employing a subjective and reflexive rhetoric to changes in imaging technologies.

AbstractThe 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage specifies that communities are to be full partners in efforts to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage. Yet the notion of safeguarding has been complicated by the politics and mechanisms of digital circulation. Based on fieldwork in British Columbia and Thailand, I show that community-based productions of multimedia aimed at documenting, transmitting, and revitalizing intangible heritage are productive spaces in which local cultural property rights discourses are initiated and articulated. I argue that digital heritage initiatives can support decision making about the circulation—or restriction—of digital cultural heritage while drawing attention to the complexities of safeguarding heritage in the digital age.