Open Cultural Studies最新文献

{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue “Media Practices Commoning”","authors":"Anne Ganzert, Beate Ochsner, Robert Stock","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0010","url":null,"abstract":"The issue “Media Practices Commoning” contains a selection of contributions that critically discusses current concepts like commons and conviviality by situating them within the contemporary framework of digital media technologies. We thus contribute to the ongoing debate on media practices of commoning as well as a media ontological understanding of commoning processes. These are pressing issues in times of ubiquitous computing and platform capitalism, where an ever-increasing number of devices, technologies and complex infrastructures are interwoven with human and other organic agencies. Daily practices are increasingly framed by digital technologies and thus rendered as productive sources for data production. Thereby, the media ontological question is raised how practices, technologies and data might be conceptualised as commons without being commodified and functionally operationalised (Deuber-Man-kowsky). Yet these seemingly antagonistic strategies are intertwined, indicating that more and more new forms of coexistence emerge through an increasing number of socio-technical arrangements. Hence, the idea of conviviality, or living together, is undergoing deep transformations and requires a thorough analysis. The issue is a continuation of the conference “Media | Practices | Commoning” that took place at the University of Konstanz, Germany (October 9-11, 2017). An international and interdisciplinary group of speakers discussed the concepts of commoning and conviviality from different disciplines and perspectives. From this discussion, three lines of inquiry emerged that we set out to further develop in this issue. In a first line of inquiry we seek to explore the art of conviviality and recent forms of friendly togetherness while relating them to media-technological infrastructures that frame their emergence. Within recent notions of convivialism, a new style of cohabitation (Adloff and Legewie) is normatively claimed as a way of shaping as well as analysing a pos-itive constitution of social relations that overcomes globalist utilitarian","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"107 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41670071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women’s Activism in Pakistan: Role of Religious Nationalism and Feminist Ideology Among Self-Identified Conservatives and Liberals","authors":"G. Anjum","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper explores women’s activism and political engagement in contemporary Pakistan. In this exploration with self-identified liberal and conservative groups of women, emerged their experiences and narratives about Feminism and Nationalism with a common moderator being religious affiliations. In this qualitative and phenomenological exploration, the informants belonged to various self-identified liberal and conservative women-led organizations. To this end, 20 women (age-range 23-48 years) were interviewed. Results indicated that gender roles and feminism were seen very differently between the two groups; gender and national identity were closely associated with Islamic values and there was a negative association between nationalism and feminist ideology. Women from liberal organizations, mostly feminists, emphasized pro-public-sphere engagement of women, rebelling against religious fundamentalism. On the contrary, many self-reported conservative women proclaimed nationalist, anti-feminists (they did not identify as Islamic feminists) and pro-private-sphere engagement of women. Many of the liberal informants complained about Pakistan’s misogynistic society and hurdles they faced in demanding equal opportunities for women. This research has implications for gender equality and female identity in the context of nationalism, women’s mobility and entitlement to the public sphere. The study also has applied significance for prejudices and stereotypes that make it difficult for women, to break away from fixed categories of gender role expectations. This paper informs academics and practitioners on socially and politically engaged Pakistani women’s views regarding these narratives. The study concluded that women’s activism is influenced by their religious views and their religious interpretation of feminism and nationalism in Pakistani society.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"36 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42871962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Platforms and Potency: Democracy and Collective Agency in the Age of Social Media","authors":"J. Gilbert","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Attitudes to digital communication technologies since the 1990s have been characterized by waves of optimism and pessimism, as enthusiasts have highlighted their democratic and liberating potentials, while critics have pointed to the socially, politically and psychologically deleterious consequences of unchecked digital capitalism. This paper seeks to develop an analytical framework capable of appreciating and assessing the capacities of such technologies both to genuinely enhance democratic agency, and to become tools through which capitalist power is enhanced with widespread negative consequences. The paper in particular deploys my concept of ‘potent collectivity’ in order to name the type of democratic agency that such media technologies can be seen both to enable and enhance under certain circumstances, and to inhibit under others. It also considers the affective qualities of ‘potent collectivity’, and in particular the utility of a Deleuzo-Spinozan concept of ‘collective joy’ as designating the affective quality typical of ‘potent collectivity’. The paper uses the specific example of left-wing political activism in the UK during the period 2015-17 to illustrate the potential for platform technologies to enable new forms of democratic mobilization, while arguing for an analytical position that eschews any simple celebration of the liberating potential of new technologies; remaining sensitive to the negative features of ‘platform capitalism’.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"154 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43112489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Questions of Space in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema","authors":"S. Trinder","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Spatial fixing was an integral part of maintaining imperial power structures throughout the colonial period, and like other discourses, it later found itself reproduced in cinema. As such, the physical and mental use of space has become key to the dissemination of ideological messages in many films. Confronting this tendency, this study applies theories of postcolonialism to selected examples of contemporary Hollywood film to examine how far it reconstructs traditional binaries of space. This investigation finds that despite attempts to disseminate more culturally sensitive and globally-minded portrayals of the Other, space remains particularly problematic. It also remains vital to storytelling narratives of race, gender, class and society in consideration of the film cases analysed in this study. While Fanonian notions of space continue to permeate cinema—with Total Recall and Avatar in particular drawing upon stereotypical motifs, it is possible to observe developments upon these discourses. Elysium and District 9 exemplify this, with each feature employing space to address increased questioning of US cultural superiority since the failed Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and the 2008 global economic crash.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"1 - 11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41585466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"To be Black, Queer and Radical: Centring the epistemology of Marielle Franco","authors":"Gabriela Loureiro","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of this article is to pay tribute to Marielle Franco, a Brazilian LGBTQ+ Black activist from the favela who was brutally executed in March 14, 2018. Taking Marielle’s life and death as a case study, I will demonstrate how she embodied Black feminist theory and practice and how her execution can be better addressed by situating it within the context of spatialities of race and the necropolitical governance of Rio de Janeiro.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"50 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44257406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Border Crossing and Transculturation in Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House","authors":"Kamal Sbiri","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the construction of transcultural identity as it results from the process of border crossing in Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca (2007. London: Bantam Books). Whereas mobility is mostly characterized by the movement from north to south, The Caliph’s House describes an inverted motion from England to Casablanca in search for belonging. With his roots in Afganistan and historical ties with Morocco, Tahir Shah provides new narrative lines that delve into questions of alterity, mobility, and negotiating difference when crossing borders. With this in mind, I aim to show how alterity is refracted within the migrant’s identity. In so doing, I seek to clarify how this refraction helps in producing forms of selves that recognize all notions of silences and transform them metonymically into moments of conversation. With the help of Stephen Clingman’s theory on transnational literature, I will show that integration can be achieved successfully when difference is negotiated as part of the process of bordering.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"12 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44387828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Experiencing the Riverscape: An Eco-Spiritual Decoding of Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ in select writings of Neelum Saran Gour","authors":"Chhandita Das, P. Tripathi","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Contemporary times have triggered for an interdisciplinary cusp between disciplines that were conventionally read in a hinged academic encore. The Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ near Allahabad city where three holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati converge, is believed to be the holiest riverscape as one drop of amrit (nectar) during ocean churning by Gods and demons fell into its water and therefore, bathing and dipping in this sangam or confluence is considered auspicious. It is not that people only experience such spiritual values, rather internalize the same, even sometimes beyond religious restraints formulating a holistic human and ecological bonding. Therefore, river or for that matter riverscape like sangam transcends the environmental physical boundary to the living one as it shapes people’s experiences and accordingly adds meaning in their lives. Indian English author Neelum Saran Gour’s fictional representation of the riverscape of Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ in her select writings like Allahabad Aria (2015), Invisible Ink (2015), and Requiem in Raga Janki (2018) are woven within the interdisciplinary framework of ‘eco-spirituality’. The present research will examine how riverscape as an eco-spiritual entity shapes individuals’ experiences and helps them to locate the ‘self’ both in vyashti (the individual) and samashti (the collective) scale.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"96 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48088068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toys for Conviviality. Situating Commoning, Computation and Modelling","authors":"Selena Savić, Viktor Bedö, Michaela Büsse, Y. Martins, Shintaro Miyazaki","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Because of its inherent complexities vis-à-vis decision-making, commoning is a well-suited field of study to explore the potential of humanities-driven experimental design (media) research to provoke critical reflection, problem-finding and productive complication. By introducing two different agent-based models, the interdisciplinary research team discusses their experience with setting up parameters for modelling, their implications, and the possibilities and limits of employing modelling techniques as a basis for decision-making. While it shows that modelling can be helpful in detecting long-term results of decisions or testing out effects of unlikely yet challenging events, modelling might act as a discursive practice uncovering hidden assumptions inherent in the model setup and generating an increase of scientific uncertainty. The project “ThinkingToys for Commoning” thus argues for a critical modelling practice and culture, in which models act as toys for probing alternative modes of living together and exploring the constructedness of methods. In countering late forms of capitalism, the resulting situated and critical practice provides avenues for enabling more self-determined forms of governance.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"143 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47729331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Experimental Conviviality: Exploring Convivial and Sustainable Practices","authors":"Frank Adloff","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper develops a concept of conviviality as a form of friendly togetherness that includes people, technical infrastructures and nature. Therefore, Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, different strands of thinking about conviviality (e.g. Ivan Illich), John Dewey’ experimentalism and the political theory and movement of convivialism are firstly depicted and discussed. The goal, secondly, is to integrate these various theoretical perspectives in order a) to better grasp already existent forms of conviviality and to b) develop an analytical and normative standpoint that on the one hand helps to evaluate unsustainable, non-convivial and on the other convivial forms of living together. Thus, such an analytical and normative model of modes of conviviality points out that associative self-organisation is decisive for the theory and practice of conviviality. Exchange without remuneration (between people and between people and nature) as well as self-organised gathering can be seen as the basis of a convivial social order which is differentiated from a solely instrumental, unsustainable and monetarily defined version of prosperity and the good life.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"112 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47861865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Queering the Ghosts of Typicality: The Disruptive Potential of Fabian Ludueña’s Philosophy","authors":"F. Trento","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract According to the philosopher Fabián Ludueña, before biopolitics, Rome and Greece put in motion the zoopolitics of an Anthropotechnical machine. The practice of expositio is the foundational zoopolitical human gesture. It consisted of leaving new-born children exposed at street markets to be sold as slaves, or in nature, left to survive (or die). The spectres of those body-minds still haunt our onto-epistemologies: by creatively fabulating with Ludueña’s work, I suggest looking back to the broken chains of the production of able bodies instead of perpetuating the reproductive futurity. Ludueña’s work investigates how and why the figure of the spectre gradually disappeared from the discursive milieu, and why it needs to be brought back into the spotlight. Its potential resides in its existence between binary categories like God and human, man and animal, male and female. It queers, defying epistemological boundaries, what it means to be dead or alive. Melanie Yergeau employs the term “neuroqueer” to talk about the non-neurotypical and queer subjectivities that are a continuum of indiscernibility and are violently dislodged into binary categories. In the conclusion, I argue for operationalising the concept of the spectre to help to short-circuit the able-neurotypical and heteronormative futurism, looking back to the ghosts of the exposed children.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"74 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41510804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}