Public CulturePub Date : 2022-03-18DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9435427
A. Wu
{"title":"The Ambient Politics of Affective Computing","authors":"A. Wu","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9435427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9435427","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Much attention to affective computing has focused on its alleged ability to “tap into human affects,” a trope also foundational to broader theorizations about big-data surveillance. What remains understudied and undertheorized is affective computing’s social life, where interested parties contest and collude on its deployment. This essay traces how such portable technologies as sentiment analysis and “like” buttons wound up redefining collective action in China, which partly explains the conservative turn observed in Chinese online cultures since the mid-2010s. It unpacks affective computing’s ambient politics—the fraught processes whereby social actors aggressively repackage, reinterpret, and remediate these technologies to fit their agendas, changing social standards for denoting emotions along the way. This essay calls to reorient critical analysis of affective computing away from its design epistemics to its ambient politics and, in parallel, to shift the focus from interiorized subjects to conditions of collective existence.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42224234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-03-18DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9435413
A. Feldman
{"title":"The Front, the Frontier, Police Anarchy, and the Solidarity of the Shaken","authors":"A. Feldman","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9435413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9435413","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay opens the question of the political genesis of fractal topologies from monolithic fronts of power and privation. The political front can no longer be encapsulated as a continuous norm-provisioning ground. Emerging frontier zones of violence jettison anachronistic centralized fronts of law and procedure in their wake. The political frontier is exemplified by the current fusion of warfare and lawfare—the extrajudicial violence of racialized and militarized policing, the right to look and inspect and the murder and carceralization of minorities, migrants, and cognate others. Police power, as the surviving repository and legatee of the historical wreckage of sovereignties past, is the anarchy that has captured the state in the present.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47065141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-03-18DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9435470
S. Devabhaktuni, J. Mansbridge
{"title":"Democracy’s Dislocations: Spaces of Protest and the People of Hong Kong","authors":"S. Devabhaktuni, J. Mansbridge","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9435470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9435470","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the 2019 Hong Kong protests from the perspective of urban space and the city’s historical founding as a colonial entrepôt. Specifically, it explores how the protests destabilized both the urban fabric of the city and the political and economic agreements that have defined the city’s governance since handover. The analysis of the protests, and of the history leading up to them, is informed by writings on democracy and space by Doreen Massey and Chantal Mouffe, and considers the work of activists, researchers, and journalists whose voices have often been out of step with the movement and with international media narratives that have defined it. The article provides historical and theoretical insight into the role of both collaboration and conflict in the formation of the city’s political identity and points to possibilities for engaging with the still-open question of the meanings and practices of democracy in Hong Kong.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48131213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-03-18DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9435488
Daniel E. Agbiboa
{"title":"The Checkpoint State: Extortion, Discontents, and the Pursuit of Survival","authors":"Daniel E. Agbiboa","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9435488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9435488","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is about everyday encounters with the checkpoint state in a locus of enduring counterinsurgency. Specifically, the essay examines how road-transport workers in northeast Nigeria experience and negotiate the omnipresent threat of the checkpoint state in their workaday world. Further, the essay underscores the spatial practices and social imaginaries through which the checkpoint state is constituted as simultaneously an apparatus of predation and as a space of negotiation. For mobile subjects in extremis, the threat of the checkpoint state is not episodic, but a feature of the landscape itself—a permanent, radical sense of immobility and insecurity. The daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the “war on terror” compels road-transport workers to participate in the corrupt, coercive, and humiliating system they denounce.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41531941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-03-18DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9435456
A. Taneja
{"title":"“Hindustan Is a Dream”: Urdu Poetry and the Political Theology of Intimacy","authors":"A. Taneja","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9435456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9435456","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In a time of dominant Hindu nationalism and rising Islamophobia in India, Urdu poetry is the medium in which an alternative political theology finds popular articulation, questioning the “normative horizon” of the nation-state. The political theology being articulated through Urdu poetry is one that is concerned not with the state, but with the constitution of the self through a network of thick relations to locality. The vision articulated by this alternate political theology—which draws on both long-standing Indo-Islamic traditions and the lived experience of Indian democracy—calls for a radical reimagining of intimate relations as the basis of belonging and the forming of political community.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49624830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9262863
Jenna Grant
{"title":"Portrait and Scan","authors":"Jenna Grant","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262863","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article is an ethnography of color and black-and-white in medical images of a particular kind—prenatal ultrasound—in a particular place—Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is also a meditation on histories and theorizations of color. It moves from the discourse and practice of pregnant women, family members, and doctors about color and black-and-white, to political and intellectual histories of color in Cambodia and in anthropology, to Buddhist ontologies of pregnancy and life. Across this diverse terrain, the notion of the image-affect conveys how images stimulate affective responses in viewers and how images affect their referents. A method of listening to and for image-affects helps us to understand how people relate to the elemental instability of images and the instability of beings to which images refer and with which they become.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49090037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9262835
Nicole Starosielski
{"title":"The Ends of Media Studies","authors":"Nicole Starosielski","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262835","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article poses the question: what are the ends of media studies? It discusses a turn to “nature” and the elements that has pushed media studies beyond its traditional objects and subjects. While the conceptualization of environments and bodies as communicative substrates offers new avenues for media research, mediation has also been taken up in a wide range of disciplinary and intellectual contexts. Rather than establishing limits or an essential core of media studies, the article suggests that media scholars take an etic orientation and attend to the questions whose invisibility is constitutive of the field. Using the example of undersea cable systems, the article describes some of the many conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical ends of media analysis.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42910418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9262807
Erica Robles-Anderson
{"title":"The New Media Studies","authors":"Erica Robles-Anderson","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262807","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46424115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9262821
Kathryn A. Mariner
{"title":"American Elegy, Reflux","authors":"Kathryn A. Mariner","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262821","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This is a meditation on bad air as a defining bodily, temporal, political, and atmospheric condition of the twenty-first-century American Dream. In 2020, the novel viral respiratory illness COVID-19 stole the final breaths of nearly 350,000 Americans (and severely damaged the lungs of many, many more). George Floyd and Daniel Prude, unarmed and Black, were suffocated by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Rochester, New York, respectively. Protesters marching in the streets for racial justice were tear-gassed under milky skies. Wildfires raged up and down the West Coast of the United States, thickening the air in the mountains, in the valleys, in the woods, in the cities, with particulate matter. And doctors found a malignant mass in the right lung of this author’s mother. This essay uses the double meaning of aspiration (to inhale and to dream) to trace the myriad ways our collective breathing is central to, and curtailed by, the American Aspiration. Grounded through the breath, it traces the deep entanglements of global pandemic, climate change, state violence, and lung cancer, and their combined social, political, and environmental implications for Americans’ collective flourishing, or collective strangulation. Carried on the polar jet stream from rural Oregon, to the streets of Minneapolis and Rochester, to the tobacco plantations of the American South, it is a rhetorical exercise in breathless grief, in having the wind knocked out, in going up in smoke.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44605865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9262905
Yuriko Furuhata
{"title":"Archipelagic Archives","authors":"Yuriko Furuhata","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262905","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in the context of Japan’s development as an archipelagic empire. The first Japanese geological map (1876) was completed by American geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, who surveyed mineral deposits in Hokkaidō, Japan’s northern island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu people. Following decolonial and archipelagic thoughts, the author reads across earthly archives of geological strata and colonial archives of historical documents to elucidate the conceptual duality of archipelago as a geological formation and a geopolitical territory. In tracing this formative era of Japan’s resource extraction and settler colonialism, which precedes and informs the current rush to extract rare earth minerals necessary to maintain global digital infrastructures, this article aims to both de-Westernize the methodological orientation known as media geology and offer a prehistory of contemporary rare earth mining in the Pacific Ocean.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48317850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}