Public CulturePub Date : 2021-10-12DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9262919
E. Klinenberg, M. Sherman
{"title":"Face Mask Face-Offs","authors":"E. Klinenberg, M. Sherman","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262919","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be especially destructive and divisive. One of the few things that has united Americans during the pandemic, however, is the experience of watching a new genre of viral videos—face mask face-offs—that showcase citizens going toe-to-toe in public places because someone refuses to wear a mask. These videos are not mere political theater; they are replete with sociologically meaningful data about the nature of Americans’ cultural divisions. By closely analyzing recorded conflicts over collective coronavirus risks and individual freedoms in public settings, the authors identify six justifications for not wearing a mask. These justifications point to emerging cultural discourses and practices organized around phones that not only point to new ways for us to observe social life but participate in the reconfiguration of social life—and social conflict—itself.","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":"43034697","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: 10.1215/08992363-9262877
P. Eisenlohr
{"title":"Atmospheric Citizenship","authors":"P. Eisenlohr","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262877","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Mumbai the sonic dimensions of place-making and religious life are deeply connected to the right to the city. For Twelver Shi‘i Muslims, who are marginal to both the city and the nation, public religious rituals and processions have long played very important roles in staging claims to the city. Investigating the sonic aspects of urban place-making, including its religious dimensions, this essay draws on an analytic of atmospheres in order to capture the powerful emotive dimensions of place-making through sonic performances. Through its coupling with the feltbody, the sonic plays a privileged role in giving urban locales a specific feel as belonging to particular groups, investing this feel with an air of facticity that is largely immune to discursive critique. This article focuses on ritual performances and processions among Twelver Shi‘i Muslims during the Islamic month of Muharram in order to analyze nondiscursive and atmospheric forms of citizenship.","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":"41631934","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: 10.1215/08992363-9262849
B. Larkin
{"title":"The Cinematic Milieu","authors":"B. Larkin","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262849","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 To what extent are media technologies autonomous forces that reorganize the environment around them to accommodate their own technological needs? In what ways are these technologies responsive to the milieu they grow within? A central theme of comparative media examines how media enter into reciprocal exchange with the broader cultural, social, and economic formations in which they emerge and which differ from place to place and over time. This article draws on the concept of milieu in order to analyze the evolution of digital cinema infrastructures in contemporary Nigeria.","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":"44541978","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: 10.1215/08992363-9262891
D. Gill
{"title":"Sense Experiences","authors":"D. Gill","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9262891","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9262891","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article provides an account of how sense experiences are drawn into processes of contest over the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. Based on ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara, it examines the ruptures of the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey. Particular forms of listening emerged in Western urban centers, newly attuned to sounds of warfare commingled with Islamic melodic devotionals ordered by state officials. Unique and pronounced engagements with bodily liquids accompanied the handling and placement of the dead. The multi-sensory experiences of Muslim women municipal employees who wash and shroud the deceased elucidated the foundational roles of scent and body weight in constituting martyrdom. This article demonstrates how the body politic operates—with various forms of acquiescence and repudiation—through sound, smell, and touch.","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":"46104308","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 : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8917192
F. Devji
{"title":"The Childhood of Politics","authors":"F. Devji","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8917192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8917192","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that the global emergence of children at the forefront of causes from climate change to education reveals a contradiction at the heart of politics. If politics is defined by the making of a future, the children who are meant to be its heirs are crucial to it. Yet they represent the last category of persons formally to be disallowed political agency, suggesting it is their very unfreedom that allows children to exercise power. Does their mobilization in contemporary politics signal the limits of its realm?","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47821511","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 : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8917136
Paula Kift
{"title":"Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of Contact-Tracing Applications","authors":"Paula Kift","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8917136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8917136","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world turned to contact-tracing applications in an attempt to balance the reopening of the economy with keeping the virus at bay. But as this article demonstrates, contact-tracing applications not only fail to protect the most vulnerable among us; they also shift responsibility for failing to prepare public-health systems for a pandemic away from governments and onto the individual user struggling to contain its worst effects. In the process, contact-tracing applications change the definition of failure. They also reinforce existing inequalities. Technology in this case not only has politics; it prevents politics. By focusing on contact-tracing applications as an example, the article points to some of the deeper perils of accepting app-based solutions to structural problems.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48819577","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 : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8917150
AbdouMaliq Simone, V. Rao
{"title":"Counting the Uncountable: Revisiting Urban Majorities","authors":"AbdouMaliq Simone, V. Rao","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8917150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8917150","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Sustainable urban transformation increasingly relies upon technicities of computation and interoperability among variegated registers and domains. In contrast, the notion of an “urban majority,” first introduced by the authors nearly a decade ago, points to a different “mathematics” of combination. Here the ways in which different economic practices, demeanors, behavioral tactics, forms of social organization, territory, and mobility intersect and detach, coalesce into enduring cultures of inhabitation or proliferate as momentary occupancies of short-lived situations make up a kind of algorithmic process that continuously produces new functions and new values for individual and collective capacities, backgrounds, and ways of doing things. This capacity, albeit facing new vulnerabilities and recalibration, will become increasingly important in shaping urban change in a post-pandemic era.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43883218","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 : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8917122
A. Appadurai, M. Ralph, V. Rao, Erica Robles-Anderson
{"title":"Conjunctures: Who Counts, What Circulates, and the Politics of Children","authors":"A. Appadurai, M. Ralph, V. Rao, Erica Robles-Anderson","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8917122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8917122","url":null,"abstract":"The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps and air filters, shopping malls and circuses, urban majorities and children. Yet in the light of the current conditions, these topics reveal a set of conjunctural surprises. The essays in this issue remind us that the coronavirus spreads through particular contexts and that we should poise ourselves to observe and to notice what comes next. This issue opens with two essays about tracking majorities. In “Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of...","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42845200","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 : 2021-05-01DOI: 10.1215/08992363-8917164
M. Kohrman
{"title":"Filtered Life: Air Purification, Gender, and Cigarettes in the People's Republic of China","authors":"M. Kohrman","doi":"10.1215/08992363-8917164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8917164","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Air purification in Chinese contexts over the last half century has been generative for a way of being human, what the author calls “filtered life.” This is a materially, aesthetically, and even humorously mediated form of dwelling. In it, people confront ethics and anxieties under conditions of aerosolized ruination. This article sheds special light on links between gender binaries and filtered life. It traces how, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists, marketers, and many others residing in urban China interacted with air filters in ways textured by the male state. Notably chronicled here is a critique of ecological ruin emergent in homes of the People's Republic of China (PRC), one mutating from ire toward husbands for smoking cigarettes in the home to more recent indictments of men despoiling the environment.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48144986","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}