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This paper examines the economic practices of maker spaces – open workshops that have increased in number over recent years and that aim to provide access to tools, materials and skills for small-scale manufacturing and repair. Scholarly interest in such spaces has been increasing across the social sciences more broadly, parallel to a growing interest in craft and making in economic geography. However, to rectify the 'capitalocentrism' of much existing work, the paper examines the case of a workshop in Edinburgh, Scotland, through the dual theoretical lens of diverse economies and social practice theory. This conceptual approach sees the space as a novel form of economic 'being-in-common', providing diverse and contradictory opportunities for post-capitalist practice. The paper draws conclusions regarding the limits and potential of such spaces for sowing the prefigurative seeds for a more inclusive, sustainable and democratic urbanism.

This paper draws on a case study of Achill Henge, County Mayo, Ireland, to examine the interplay between economic crisis, rebel creativity and shifting geographies of commemoration. Built in 2011 in a remote part of the west of Ireland, Achill Henge is a highly contested monument. Unfinished and under perennial threat of demolition, the Stonehenge-like structure was originally conceived as a 'tomb of the Celtic Tiger', in reference to Ireland's ill-fated economic 'miracle' of the 1990s and 2000s. This paper examines this economic context before adopting two perspectives. Firstly, drawing on critical ideas about commemoration, we identify how the Henge remembers economic and political failure, materialising a unique site of subaltern memory. Situating it within memorial landscapes in Ireland, we explore how it can serve to critically analyse practices of traditional and contemporary commemoration. Secondly, we examine how its unsanctioned liminality produces a valuable, exemplary site at which numerous unregulated, playful, performative and political practices can be carried out, away from mainstream convention and commercial banality.

"Without question, the East German National People's Army was a profoundly masculine institution that emphasized traditional ideals of stoicism, sacrifice, and physical courage. Nonetheless, as this innovative study demonstrates, depictions of the military in the film and literature of the GDR were far more nuanced and ambivalent. Departing from past studies that have found in such portrayals an unchanging, idealized masculinity, Comrades in Arms shows how cultural works both before and after reunification place violence, physical vulnerability, and military theatricality, as well as conscripts' powerful emotions and desires, at the center of soldiers' lives and the military institution itself"--

The old army returns to the Big Bend, 1911-1915 -- Villa and the great call-up, 1916 -- Kingdom of the Eighth Cavalry, 1917-1919 -- Twilight of the old army, 1920-1921 -- A brief history of army outposts and stations in the Big Bend, 1911-1921 -- U.S. Army commanders, Big Bend, 1912-1926 -- U.S. Army regiments in the Big Bend, 1911-1921 -- U.S. Army unit locations and chronology, Big Bend, 1911-1921

This practice-based thesis investigates how contemporary artists are using generic artistic strategies and ambivalent affect to inhabit post-digital conditions. It proposes that artists reproducing and re-performing generic post-digital aesthetics both engender and are enveloped by ambivalent affect, and that these strategies are immanently political rather than overtly critical. I argue that ambivalent artworks secede from requirements for newness and innovation, and the exploitation of creative labour that are a feature of post-digital environments. Drawing on Sianne Ngai's affect theory and Paolo Virno's post-Fordist thinking, I summarise contemporary conditions for creativity as a 'general intellect of the post-digital'; proposing that artists' and workers' relations with this mode of production are necessarily ambivalent. Throughout this research I produced several performance and video works that exemplify this ambivalence. These works reproduce standardised electronic music, stock imagery and PowerPoint presentations, alongside re-performances of digital labour such as online shopping, image searches, and paying rent online. Through these examples I develop concepts for discussing generic aesthetics, framing them as vital to understanding post-digital conditions. I address works by other artists including Amalia Ulman's Excellences and Perfections (2014), which I argue is neither critical nor complicit with generic post-digital routines, but rather signals affective ambivalence and a desire to secede from social media performance. I also discuss works by Cory Arcangel and others to develop the 'preset' as a tool for understanding the generic. These works indicate ambivalent affective relations with generic digital tools, and I argue they perform an immanent critique of newness and innovation as cultural values. Lastly, I argue that software-mediated tasks and gestures also produce ambivalent affect, and draw on my curatorial practice alongside Alexander Galloway's concept of the 'interface effect' to read ...

Currently, the idea and definition of learning and literacy is being pushed and pulled in competing directions. Current governmental policies, most notably embodied in the No Child Left Behind law, are pushing the definitions to mechanical enterprises aimed at the lowest common denominator. At the same time, the technology race is working to open access to being learned and literate to populations that are traditionally underrepresented in these arenas; however, at the same time, this technology is setting up new barriers that act to limit access. Finally, the student population of schools in the United States is quickly becoming the most diverse in the history of U.S. public education. This diversity is putting pressure on the ideals of learning and literacy to be opened up to more forms of knowing and being. Critical pedagogy offers the best opportunity to understand and respond to the current debate. Under this lens, being learned and literate are social constructs and, therefore, can and should be shaped to best meet the needs of all people.