Response

Transfers ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-94
Author(s):  
Mimi Sheller
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Mobility Studies ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
Mobile Processes

This special section elucidates intersections between the historiography of mobilities and the interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. The articles highlight relationships between mobilities and stabilization, circulation and place-making, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This response essay seeks to dispel three myths about mobility studies: (1) that it is purely about the contemporary world, rather than the historical dimensions of mobile processes; (2) that it focuses solely on material phenomenon of physical transport (i.e., of things and people) and ignores the movement of ideas, knowledge, and culture; and (3) that it is purely about “flows” and “circulation” and has little to teach us about friction, resistances, blockages, or uneven power relations. The most important intersections of the histories of mobilities and the field of mobility studies can be found in the ways in which each emphasizes power differentials, blockages, friction, and the relation between mobilities and immobilities.

Design, power and colonisation: decolonial and anti-oppressive explorations on three approaches for Design for Sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. TORRETTA ◽  
Lizette REITSMA
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Design For Sustainability ◽  
The People ◽  
Reflexive Practice ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Design Power ◽  
Relational Issue

Our contemporary world is organized in a modern/colonial structure. As people, professions and practices engage in cross-country Design for Sustainability (DfS), projects have the potential of sustaining or changing modern/colonial power structures. In such project relations, good intentions in working for sustainability do not directly result in liberation from modern/colonial power structures. In this paper we introduce three approaches in DfS that deal with power relations. Using a Freirean (1970) decolonial perspective, we analyse these approaches to see how they can inform DfS towards being decolonial and anti-oppressive. We conclude that steering DfS to become decolonial or colonizing is a relational issue based on the interplay between the designers’ position in the modern/colonial structure, the design approach chosen, the place and the people involved in DfS. Hence, a continuous critical reflexive practice is needed in order to prevent DfS from becoming yet another colonial tool.

The Moving Eye

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Exhibition Design ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Mobility Studies ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Film And Video

Once the province of film and media scholars, today the moving image concerns historians of art and architecture and designers of everything from websites to cities. As museums and galleries devote increasing space to video installations that no longer presuppose a fixed viewer, urban space becomes envisioned and planned through “fly-throughs,” and technologies such as GPS add data to the experience of travel, images in motion have captured the attention of geographers and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Mobility studies is remaking how we understand a contemporary world in relentless motion. Media theorist and historian Anne Friedberg (1952–2009) was among the first practitioners of visual studies to theorize the experience of mobile vision. Her books Window Shopping and The Virtual Window have become key points of reference in the discussion of the windows that frame images and the viewers in motion who perceive them. Although widely influential beyond her own discipline, Friedberg’s work has never been the subject of an extended study. The Moving Eye gathers together essays by a renowned international group of thinkers in media studies, art history, architecture, and museum studies to consider the rich implications of her work for understanding film and video, new media, visual art, architecture, exhibition design, urban space, and virtual reality. These nine essays advance the lines of inquiry begun by Friedberg.

Actantial analysis

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong Wang ◽  
Carl W. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Versus Communication ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
Formal Procedure ◽  
The Subject

This paper introduces a formal procedure for analyzing narratives that was developed by the French/Lithuanian structuralist, A. J. Greimas. The focus is on demonstrating the utility of Greimas's ideas for analyzing one aspect of personal narratives: identity-construction. Reconstructing the basic actantial structure from self-narratives is shown to provide cues to power differentials among actants as perceived by the narrator. Distinguishing narrated events along conflict versus communication axes helps the analyst determine whether an experiential or a discursive domain is of primacy for the narrator. Moreover, investigation of communicative outcomes can be used to validate (or invalidate) findings on power relations. Analyses of narrative plots may afford insights into how people engage objects with cultural valuations within the various social contexts recounted in narrative data. Finally, Greimas's theory of modalities can be used to differentiate among these plots within narrative trajectories. This approach to narrative analysis differs from more traditional “denarrativization” and “renarrativization” approaches in that it affords the researcher a language (or discursive structure) according to which the narrator's, not the analyst's, understandings of character relations and reality conditions become the subject matter of one's research.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-136
Author(s):  
Ahmed Kanna ◽  
Amélie Le Renard ◽  
Neha Vora
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Field Site ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Ethnographic Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

This concluding chapter explores the question of what decolonized ethnography and academia can look like. It argues that de-exceptionalizing the Arabian Peninsula as a field site requires deconstructing an idealized vision of Western academia as a presumed site of democracy and liberalism. The projects of anthropology and sociology, as they have been invested in anticolonial and antiracist justice and breaking down binary understandings between East and West, self and other, civilized and savage, are implicated in the continuing use of the exceptional and spectacular as tropes in ethnographic writing, revealing just how much work is yet to be done within their disciplines. Within these disciplines, some have questioned the various hierarchies that are realized through the production of knowledge, not only between the social scientists and their “objects” or “fields,” but also among social scientists themselves, particularly the ways in which power relations in terms of status, racialized identification, class, and gender shape perceptions of their expertise or lack thereof. The chapter then assesses how centering not only the Arabian Peninsula but gender, sexuality, race, household, and other topics that have until now been seen as marginal might provide better information about the societies social scientists study as well as transnational processes, globalization, and the contemporary world.

scholarly journals Activism – Radicalization – Protest: An Introduction to a Special Section

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Jasko ◽  
Tomasz Besta
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Social Causes

Collective action is a topic that is highly relevant to the socio-political dynamics of the contemporary world. Six papers collected in the special section address different aspects of collective action. They cover a diversity of topics, methods, and samples. However, the focus on goals and needs that drive collective action and social context that facilitates commitment to social causes provides a common ground for the research presented in this section.

scholarly journals Special Section Editorial: Toward a Geographical Software Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Burns ◽  
Nick Lally
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Digital Maps ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Software Studies ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Object Of Study

Geographic concepts have always been implicated in calls to study software as a political, cultural, or social phenomena, even if they have not always been named as such. “Software structures and makes possible much of the contemporary world” writes Matthew Fuller in the introduction to Software studies: a lexicon1—a succinct summary of the central problem guiding software studies, gesturing towards the spatial implications of software. So too in the insistence on the materiality of software do we find software studies bringing forth software as material thing that exists in and through space, in sites and scales as diverse as voltage differences in circuits, nation states, digital maps, and networks of computers. As geographic theory has long insisted, space is not just a container for software, but is actively produced by software in its various material, situated, and socio-technical contexts. Influenced in part by the exciting work that has developed in software studies in addition to geography’s own rich history of engagement with technology, a growing number of geographers have turned to software as an object of study, producing theories and methods to understand the relationship between computation and space.This special section emerged from our effort to bring together a group of scholars working on geographical approaches to software studies at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in 2016. Spanning four sessions, presenters expressed a variety of orientations towards software, with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding how software has come to structure the world. This introduction is a brief summary of some of those approaches, but more importantly, it suggests some of the ways that software studies and geography might productively learn from and build upon each other. These cross-disciplinary discussions are important as we come to terms with the growing power of software in our everyday lives and attempt to build critical practices that not only study, but also build other ways of knowing the world through computation. Ultimately, we frame the discussions that follow in ways we hope will encourage software studies scholars to grapple with the spatial implications of software.

scholarly journals Islands, history, decolonial memory

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-200
Author(s):  
May Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Editorial Introduction ◽  
Small Island ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Island Communities ◽  
Social Memories

How do small island ecologies commemorate their disappeared pasts? What are some of the place-making practices that shape the formation of small island collective memories? Through the analysis of five case studies of small island communities in a comparative framework, this editorial introduction to a special section of Island Studies Journal on ‘Islands, history, decolonial memory’ opens up the mnemonic and psychoanalytic challenges facing contemporary island societies and the invention of their social memories. The islands of Balliceaux, Ro, Saaremaa, St. Simon and Dongzhou present competing instances of how memory operates across cultures of remembrance and forgetting.

scholarly journals Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-200
Author(s):  
Aet Annist
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Theoretical Frame ◽  
Insight Into

This introductory article offers a theoretical frame for the current special section, discussing protests’ value for analyzing performance, power, expansion, and exclusion, and contributes its own case study from the ongoing anti-logging protests in Estonia. While arising from power imbalances, protests hold powerful tools for achieving their aims. The introduction considers protests’ ability to expand in space, through time, and beyond topics, and to capture wider support, creating communities in the process. At the same time, considering the contexts of protests, it also demonstrates how such movements get caught up in the normative features of human sociality, reproducing the existing power relations, including those the protests aim to challenge. The Estonian case study enables further insight into this by analyzing dispossessions that protests both aggravate and suffer from.

Power Differentials in Istanbul Redevelopment Practices: Toward a More Collaborative Decision-Making Process

2020 ◽  
pp. 0739456X1989822
Author(s):  
Imge Akcakaya Waite
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Planning Practice ◽  
Life Planning ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
Collaborative Decision ◽  
Regeneration Processes

This article examines two urban redevelopment projects in Istanbul in an attempt to address the gap between literature and real-life planning practice in their understanding of power relations and imbalances in collaborative forums. Based on insights from informed practitioners, residents, and activists, it presents the realities—project stories, actors and their perceptions, motives, influences, and lessons—faced in gecekondu renewal and earthquake-based regeneration processes. It suggests a set of redevelopment strategies and responses that highlight democratic and collaborative criteria to overcome power-related challenges and foster a more just redistribution of power.

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