Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world.
\nWe live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment.
\nIn Feminist City , through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together. **
A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian.Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as \u201csocial practice.\u201d Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan.Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.
\u201cThis is a field-defining volume. Based on ten years of comparative field research and a unique combination of medical and anthropological expertise, Didier Fassin\u2019s Humanitarian Reason avoids moralizing in favor of careful sociological analysis. Humanitarianism emerges both as a form of reason and as a key force in the contemporary arts of government. \u201c --Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University, author of Death and the Idea of Mexico\"This is a rigourous, principled, and compelling account of the emergence of humanitarianism and of what happens when humanitarianism is put into practice. Through a tour of various humanitarian projects in France and elsewhere, Didier Fassin develops a compelling case for a sea change in our social imaginary, one in which an ethics of suffering and compassion has come to displace a politics of rights and justice. Fassin moves with finesse between constructionist and realist arguments in this major transatlantic work of 'ethnographic reason' from one of the most interesting voices writing today.\" --Michael Lambek, University of Toronto; editor of Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action\u201cThe rise of a field of humanitarian action accompanies cultural transformations in the category of the human and the idea of responsibility. In this important book, Didier Fassin addresses the nature of obligation to strangers and solidarity amid inequality, and connects these themes to the question of whether to think of global moral community as an attractive ideal, a problematic fantasy, or both.\u201d --Craig Calhoun, President of the Social Science Research Council and author of Nations Matter
Chapters incl: Race and culture; The diversity of cultures; The ethnocentric attitude; Archaic and primitive cultures; etc **
The concept of Anthropocene has been incorporated within a hegemonic narrative that represents 'Man' as the dominant geological force of our epoch, emphasizing the destruction and salvation power of industrial technologies. This Element develops a counter-hegemonic narrative based on the perspective of earthcare labour \u2013 or the 'forces of reproduction'. It brings to the fore the historical agency of reproductive and subsistence workers as those subjects that, through both daily practices and organized political action, take care of the biophysical conditions for human reproduction, thus keeping the world alive. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel and timely contribution to the environmental humanities. **
What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of \u2018resilience\u2019 that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence.
\nIn this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end. **
Alchemical Psychology combines all of Hillman\u2019s papers on the alchemical imagination from 1980 to the present. Hillman called the early attempt to present his way of grasping this material, in the 1960s at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, \"Alchemical Opus/AnalyticalWork.\" His intention then as now is to give psychoanalysis another method for imagining its ideas and procedures by showing how alchemy bears directly on psychological life, more clinically immediate and less spiritually progressivist. **
Manifestos and immodest proposals from China's most famous artist and activist, culled from his popular blog, shut down by Chinese authorities in 2009. In 2006, even though he could barely type, China's most famous artist started blogging. For more than three years, Ai Weiwei turned out a steady stream of scathing social commentary, criticism of government policy, thoughts on art and architecture, and autobiographical writings. He wrote about the Sichuan earthquake (and posted a list of the schoolchildren who died because of the government's \u201ctofu-dregs engineering\u201d), reminisced about Andy Warhol and the East Village art scene, described the irony of being investigated for \u201cfraud\u201d by the Ministry of Public Security, made a modest proposal for tax collection. Then, on June 1, 2009, Chinese authorities shut down the blog. This book offers a collection of Ai's notorious online writings translated into English\u2015the most complete, public documentation of the original Chinese blog available in any language. The New York Times called Ai \u201ca figure of Warholian celebrity.\u201d He is a leading figure on the international art scene, a regular in museums and biennials, but in China he is a manifold and controversial presence: artist, architect, curator, social critic, justice-seeker. He was a consultant on the design of the famous \u201cBird's Nest\u201d stadium but called for an Olympic boycott; he received a Chinese Contemporary Art \u201clifetime achievement award\u201d in 2008 but was beaten by the police in connection with his \u201ccitizen investigation\u201d of earthquake casualties in 2009. Ai Weiwei's Blog documents Ai's passion, his genius, his hubris, his righteous anger, and his vision for China. **
Uno degli antropologi pi\u00f9 noti nel panorama italiano riesce a comunicarci il volto sfaccettato e ambiguo della parola cultura in poco pi\u00f9 di cento pagine, con un linguaggio chiaro e appassionato, con rigore metodologico e soprattutto con una grande apertura mentale e una rara empatia nei confronti dell'\"altro\", unico requisito davvero necessario per evitare di cadere in millantate \"guerre tra culture\". Di \"cultura\" nel tempo sono state date definizioni diverse, per tentare di imbrigliare un concetto cos\u00ec deformabile. Eppure viviamo di cultura e la invochiamo spesso. Ma noi europei paghiamo ancora un prezzo molto alto per il modo tutto nostro che abbiamo di considerarci al mondo, da uomini bianchi, occidentali, avanzati e vincenti. Per prendere le distanze da questo eurocentrismo, l'antropologia ha dovuto fare sforzi enormi, in decenni di studi sul campo, per avvicinare e comprendere \"dall'interno\" le migliaia di culture che condividono con noi il pianeta. Ne abbiamo ricavato una lezione di modestia e un arricchimento impensabile anche solo una generazione fa. **
\u201cCities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.\u201d \u2014 from\u00a0Invisible Cities In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo \u2014 Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear. \u201cInvisible Cities\u00a0changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island.\u201d \u2014 Jeanette Winterson
An apprentice writer has an entirely unexpected encounter with literary genius Jorge Luis Borges that will profoundly alter his life and work. A poignant and comic literary coming-of-age memoir. This is a jewel of a book. --Ian McEwan In 1971
\nJay Parini was an aspiring poet and graduate student of literature at University of St Andrews in Scotland; he was also in flight from being drafted into service in the Vietnam War. One day his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, asked Jay if he could play host for a visiting Latin American writer while he attended to business in London. He agreed--and that writer turned out to be the blind and aged and eccentric master of literary compression and metaphysics, Jorge Luis Borges. About whom Jay Parini knew precisely nothing. What ensued was a seriocomic romp across the Scottish landscape that Borges insisted he must see, all the while declaiming and reciting from the literary encyclopedia that was his head, and Jay Parini's eventual reckoning with his vocation and personal fate.
The cultural theorist Iain Chambers is known for his historically grounded, philosophically informed, and politically pointed inquiries into issues of identity, alterity, and migration, and the challenge postcolonial studies poses to conventional Western thought. With Mediterranean Crossings , he challenges insufficient prevailing characterizations of the Mediterranean by offering a vibrant interdisciplinary and intercultural interpretation of the region\u2019s culture and history. The \u201cMediterranean\u201d as a concept entered the European lexicon only in the early nineteenth century. As an object of study, it is the product of modern geographical, political, and historical classifications. Chambers contends that the region\u2019s fundamentally fluid, hybrid nature has long been obscured by the categories and strictures imposed by European discourse and government. In evocative and erudite prose, Chambers renders the Mediterranean a mutable space, profoundly marked by the linguistic, literary, culinary, musical, and intellectual dissemination of Arab, Jewish, Turkish, and Latin cultures. He brings to light histories of Mediterranean crossings\u2014of people, goods, melodies, thought\u2014that are rarely part of orthodox understandings. Chambers writes in a style that reflects the fluidity of the exchanges that have formed the region; he segues between major historical events and local daily routines, backwards and forwards in time, and from one part of the Mediterranean to another. A sea of endlessly overlapping cultural and historical currents, the Mediterranean exceeds the immediate constraints of nationalism and inflexible identity. It offers scholars an opportunity to rethink the past and present and to imagine a future beyond the confines of Western humanistic thought. **
https://mediterranean-blues.blog/2019/10/18/migration-the-mediterranean-and-the-fluid-archives-of-modernity/
From one of the world\u2019s most celebrated moral philosophers comes a thorough examination of the current political crisis and recommendations for how to mend our divided country.
\nFor decades Martha C. Nussbaum has been an acclaimed scholar and humanist, earning dozens of honors for her books and essays. In The Monarchy of Fear she turns her attention to the current political crisis that has polarized American since the 2016 election.
\nAlthough today\u2019s atmosphere is marked by partisanship, divisive rhetoric, and the inability of two halves of the country to communicate with one another, Nussbaum focuses on what so many pollsters and pundits have overlooked. She sees a simple truth at the heart of the problem: the political is always emotional. Globalization has produced feelings of powerlessness in millions of people in the West. That sense of powerlessness bubbles into resentment and blame. Blame of immigrants. Blame of Muslims. Blame of other races. Blame of cultural elites. While this politics of blame is exemplified by the election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit, Nussbaum argues it can be found on all sides of the political spectrum, left or right.
\nDrawing on a mix of historical and contemporary examples, from classical Athens to the musical Hamilton , The Monarchy of Fear untangles this web of feelings and provides a roadmap of where to go next. **
Vuolteenaho, J & Puzey, G 2018, 'Armed with an Encyclopedia and an Axe': The socialist and post-socialiststreet toponymy of East Berlin revisited through Gramsci. in R Rose-Redwood, D Alderman & M Azaryahu(eds), The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 74-97. DOI: 20.500.11820/03a459fd-fd4b-4e29-8d29-572d72408152
Modern thought on economics and technology is no less magical than the world views of non-modern peoples. This book reveals how our ideas about growth and progress ignore how money and machines throughout history have been used to exploit less affluent parts of world society. The argument critically explores a middle ground between Marxist political ecology and Actor-Network Theory. **
Rachel Carson's National Book Award\u2013winning classic effortlessly mingles detailed fieldwork and inspiring prose to reveal a deep understanding of the earth's most precious, mysterious resource\u2014the ocean
With more than one million copies sold, Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us became a cultural phenomenon when first published in 1951 and cemented Carson's status as the preeminent natural history writer of her time. Her inspiring, intimate writing plumbs the depths of an enigmatic world\u2014a place of hidden lands, islands newly risen from the earth's crust, fish that pour through the water, and the unyielding, epic battle for survival.
Firmly based in the scientific discoveries of the time, The Sea Around Us masterfully presents Carson's commitment to a healthy planet and a fully realized sense of wonder.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rachel Carson including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the Beinecke Rare Book and...