When Deaths Are Dehumanized: Deathcare During COVID-19 as a Public Value Failure

The COVID-19 pandemic, which is still gripping the world, brought death front and center into many people’s lives. In the United States, however, some of the deaths were treated as “more tragic” than others given someone’s economic use value coupled with dehumanizing language. Using Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, this is understood as a public values failure when economic productivity eclipses public health and humanity. Introducing a conceptual framework, this article explores this death narrative and implores public administrators to think about death management in a humane framing.

Architecture of excess: navigating beyond the superficial

Contemporary architecture has become increasingly superficial as it relies on capricious visual excitement for appeal in the 21st Century. Architectural semiotics have been appropriated to become massively branded images in the urban landscape that aim for instant gratification, lacking experiential depth and qualities beyond visual delight. The aim for iconic and instant appeal in any building typology limits our understanding of architecture’s relationship to use, users, and context. Working both within and beyond the same culture of consumption and excess in the experience economy, this thesis posits that characteristics and values of entertainment architecture provide engaging experiential qualities for architectural design beyond superficial appeal. Entertaining values of educational leisure, themed environments, and consumption can in fact generate a more integrated and authentic relationship between architecture, people, and place in our society of the spectacle.

Architecture of excess: navigating beyond the superficial

Contemporary architecture has become increasingly superficial as it relies on capricious visual excitement for appeal in the 21st Century. Architectural semiotics have been appropriated to become massively branded images in the urban landscape that aim for instant gratification, lacking experiential depth and qualities beyond visual delight. The aim for iconic and instant appeal in any building typology limits our understanding of architecture’s relationship to use, users, and context. Working both within and beyond the same culture of consumption and excess in the experience economy, this thesis posits that characteristics and values of entertainment architecture provide engaging experiential qualities for architectural design beyond superficial appeal. Entertaining values of educational leisure, themed environments, and consumption can in fact generate a more integrated and authentic relationship between architecture, people, and place in our society of the spectacle.

The Integration Spectacle

Migration politics in Finland are centered around “social integration” and “multiculturalism.” While the stated aims of such politics are equality and social mobility, the results are often contradictory, perpetuating the hierarchies and inequalities they propose to overcome. Utilizing Guy Debord’s notion of the “society of the spectacle,” I argue that there is a neoliberal Integration Spectacle that projects the appearance of societal change but is, in reality, an immobilizing force that works to obscure a particular racialized social order. I draw on my fieldwork in and around Varissuo, an international working-class suburb on the edge of Turku, western Finland, to analyze how both migrant residents of the area and the professionals within the so-called integration economy engage with, reproduce, and deal with this discrepancy.

Adolescência, mídia e drogas: O condicionamento do humano através de mecanismos midiáticos

This book presents the influence exerted by the media on children and adolescents in relation to the early experimentation with psychoactive substances. And the pedagogical-theological intervention as a preventive strategy. The influence on the human being through media mechanisms that condition him to the action expected by the conditioning, has been studied for a long time, by several authors such as Aldous Huxley with his book "Admirável Mundo Novo" that already addressed the conditionality of the human since the decade of 30. In the following decades, other theorists such as Edgar Morin and Guy Debord, analyzed how the human being is conditioned through mass culture and the society of the spectacle. The reality presented in relation to the conditioning of children and adolescents through the media has propelled the author, to seek preventive ways regarding the conditionality of human beings through the media. For that, it analyzed theorists like Paulo Freire and Michel Henry and their discoveries about the mediation of knowledge and the analysis of the Words of Christ and how they can contribute in the elaboration of pedagogical-theological interventions.

Seeing is Believing: Special Olympics Events and the Society of the Spectacle

The purpose of this research project is to better understand how one global sport for development agency takes advantage of events to build partnerships. This study demonstrates how the current social context, as theorized in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, facilitates the implementation of what we label as a “seeing-is-believing” strategy. This strategy allows Special Olympics to capitalize on society’s fascination with events to activate partners. Accordingly, a conceptual model that synthesizes and contrasts the aims of commercial spectator sports and sport for development events is provided. This model demonstrates that events are effective partnership-building arenas because, on one hand, they offer opportunities to efficiently evaluate mission attainment. These opportunities exploit our familiarity with events and the unthreatening passivity of watching. On the other hand, events provide pretexts for getting over the initial awkwardness sometimes associated with interacting with athletes identifying with intellectual disabilities. Theoretical and practical implications of the concepts that make the seeing is believing strategy work will also be provided.