The ecological humanities works across the great binaries of western thought. We work in a time of rapid social and environmental change, and are committed to cross-cutting the divides that impede our understanding and action. This commitment has a parallel in our work toward social and ecological justice and the future of life. Those of us settler society scholars have another ethical imperative here: to be responsive to Indigenous people's knowledges and aspirations for justice. The ecological humanities thus engage with connectivity and commitment in a time of crisis and concern.

Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread - to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the "psychoacoustic correction" aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or "sound bombs") over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm.

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"There is a Madonna at the bottom of the crystalline waters off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy, standing guard near a gap where two rocks curve in an unfinished embrace. Dead leaves and fish float above her like drifting feathers, shimmering in the swatch of sunlight that drapes across the mossy cement foundation where she rests. She is alone except for the child she holds, a hand protectively across his chest.

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… a conference about talking rubbish

Program

Saturday 21st January 2012

11.15-1.00pm ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE USED CLOTHING TRADE
Chair: Professor Nicky Gregson, Durham University
‘
Between A and B: Reprocessing Western second-hand clothing for global markets.’
Julie Botticello (Research Associate, SOAS)

‘The World of Calamity Clothing in Mozambique.’
Andrew Brooks (Geography, King’s College London)

‘The making of Unravel.’
Meghna Gupta (Independent filmmaker)

‘Oxfam Frip Ethique – A social enterprise solution.’
Sarah Farquhar (Head of Retail Brand, Oxfam)

2.00-4.00 pm NEW MODELS: RECYCLING, UPCYCLING AND CLOSING THE LOOP
Chair: Lucy Siegle, Journalist & Broadcaster

‘Fashion and the Community; developing community resources for sustainable fashion and recycling.’
Lizzie Harrison (Founder/Antiform and ReMade in Leeds)

‘The potential of the fashion designer to reduce consumer’s textiles waste.’
Jade Whitson-Smith (University of Leeds)

‘A sneak look behind the curtains of a textile merchant.’
Ross Barry (LMB Business Development Manager)

‘Design for Recycling; closing the loop for textiles.’
Kate Goldsworthy (Textile Futures Research Centre, Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design)

‘Closed Loop or Wear Nothing.’
Cyndi Rhoades (CEO, Worn Again)

The talks will be open to the public on a first come,first served basis. The exhibition opens at 11am
– please arrive promptly to ensure a place.

Please contact Lucy Norris for more information
at lucy.norris [at] ucl.ac.uk
Bargehouse
Oxo Tower Wharf
Bargehouse Street
South Bank
London SE1 9PH

Speculative Realism: A One-Day Workshop took place on 27 April 2007 at Goldsmiths, University of London, under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, co-sponsored by Collapse. Rather than announcing the advent of a new theoretical ‘doctrine’ or ‘school’, the event conjoined four ambitious philosophical projects – all of which boldly problematise the subjectivistic and anthropocentric foundations of much of ‘continental philosophy’ while differing significantly in their respective strategies for superseding them.

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"Turning to space, one thing we know is that space cannot be located entirely within the sensual realm. John Locke noted that our experience of space is in some way an illusion. Everything in experience itself is flat and equidistant, as seen from the fact that babies reach with equal confidence for nearby toys, distant doorways, and the moon. Space is not directly accessible to our senses, but inferred, and this skill must be acquired at a specific point in child development. Despite what Leibniz claims, space is not the realm of relation, but of both relation and non-relation.

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"Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda are not entirely unknown to contemporary philosophy. [...] Both authors have large international followings and can safely be described as “famous,” though I have sometimes had to explain their identities to friends otherwise familiar with the latest philosophical trends. Yet even for those who do know their books, Latour and DeLanda are usually regarded as interesting figures who lie somewhere near the fringes of current debate. Neither of them currently leads anything like a school of international philosophy, though others of their generation already do.

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"Although the concept of “projection” is ubiquitous in psychology, political theory, anthropology, sociology, and, thanks to the popularization of psychoanalysis, in colloquial conversation, it is not an obvious choice for a historian of science like myself. Yet I hope to show that the concept of “projection” cannot be fully understood – neither its history nor its hold on modern thought – without recourse to the history of science. This claim has both a specific and a general aspect.

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"Although the concept of “projection” is ubiquitous in psychology, political theory, anthropology, sociology, and, thanks to the popularization of psychoanalysis, in colloquial conversation, it is not an obvious choice for a historian of science like myself. Yet I hope to show that the concept of “projection” cannot be fully understood – neither its history nor its hold on modern thought – without recourse to the history of science. This claim has both a specific and a general aspect.

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Among the many astonishing claims that Barack Obama made in his recent speech opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood was that ‘peace will not come through statements and resolutions.’ This is, at best, an odd thing to say for a president whose ascendancy to power itself depended on the compelling use of rhetoric. Indeed, his argument against the power of statements and resolutions at the United Nations to achieve peace was a rhetorical ploy that sought to minimise the power of rhetorical ploys.

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Christoph Keller will elaborate on some of his works in the context of the relation of art, research and sciences and present a kitchen table analysis of a German science film on Hypnosis from 1936 that reemerged from from a lake bed in Berlin after lying there since 1945.
Attached are:
- a short bio;
- "Archives as objects...", text-image montage;
- "Cloudbuster project", text with Sharon Ben-Joseph;
- "Aether" exhibition at centre pompidou poster and reader.

Friedrich (2002/2006) elects to begin his account of the air war on the ground in Germany, but I hope these last pages have shown that it is also necessary to take the measure of the ground in Britain—in its conventional, geographical sense and in the sense of a conceptual order—where German cities were busily being transformed into targets. The bomber stream was the advancing edge of a process of abstraction that reached right back to that exhibition of a Lancaster and its payload in Trafalgar Square, which represented bombing as a domain of pure objects (aircraft and bombs).

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"The systematic connections between neo-liberalism and late modern war have become something of a critical orthodoxy.

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Much of the discussion of 9/11 has debated its historical significance, but it is equally important to explore the geographical dimensions of the wars that have been conducted in its shadows. Subsequent transformations in the American way of war have played a major role in the increased militarisation of the planet. Most attention has been focused on Afghanistan and Iraq as the principal theatres of the ‘war on terror’, but one of the characteristics of late modern war is the emergent, ‘event-ful’ quality of military, paramilitary and terrorist violence that can, in principle, occur anywhere.

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Since the end of the Cold War two modes of ‘new war’ have been distinguished. One, the Revolution in Military Affairs, transforms advanced state militaries (particularly in the global North) through an emphasis on stripped-down, highly specialised forces deploying cutting-edge technology with unprecedented precision. The other is waged by non-state militias and guerrilla forces (particularly in the global South) and relies on light, even improvised weapons, focuses its violence on civilians and is implicated in the criminal circuits of a shadow globalisation.

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The Exchanges Seminar Series provide a common forum of discussion between PhD and MA level members of the Centre for Research Architecture. It is designed to enable material and theoretical crossovers and to promote the development of horizontal, autonomous, p2p-based forms of critical pedagogy.

crosspost from: http://www.mara-stream.org

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Reflections on the relationship between universities and public audiences and communities are widely reflected in discussions of what I would call ‘Public Research’ — here’s one:

Wednesday, November 09, 2011, from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM, Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street, Room 119

Community Development Graduate Collaborative Program Seminar Series

What does it mean to do community-driven research?   This seemingly innocuous question is overlain with conflicting politics, tensions and ethics along with the potential for social change that attracts many activist-scholars to this form of research in the first place. During this seminar, I will attempt to conceptualize a reflexive assessment of praxis by drawing on five years of participatory action research with community groups, organizations and residents in the inner suburban region of Southeast Scarborough.

My entry to this community, and to this talk, begins with a failed struggle to prevent the demolition and displacement of public space through policy-supported demolition of a community mall. But next I tell the story of how this loss has segued into a grassroots attempt to re-spatialize the barriers of inequality between city and inner suburbs in response to processes of gentrification and suburban decline. With an emphasis on change, I focus on the imbrications between politics, research and activism through exploration of three key questions: How do we, as researchers, maintain long-term commitment to an evolving community development project? How do we build and maintain effective relationships with communities that support residents as experts? How do we deal with struggles, conflict and transition? Through reflection on shared struggles, successes and failures over the course of a long-term community development project, I hope to spark discussion over how we can best position ourselves and evaluate our work as scholar-activists.Vanessa Parlette is a doctoral student in urban geography at the University of Toronto. She has been involved in participatory planning and community projects in Southeast Scarborough for the last five years and has drawn on these experiences to question and contest ongoing processes of inequality that perpetuate the racialization and segregation of poverty in Toronto’s inner suburbs.

via Univ. of Toronto Cities Centre.

Peterson, Marina. 2010. Sound, Space, and the City. Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia: University of Pennsylvannia Press.

Reviewed by Catherine Scheelar, University of Alberta.

In Sound, Space, and the City, anthropologist Marina Peterson explores the process of center-making in Los Angeles through multicultural performance in public space. Positing her work as an ‘anthropology of the center’, of the city rather than in the city, she traces how meaning is made in and around public performances. Based on ethnographic research from 2001 to 2003, her study observes embodied musical practices that constitute the imagining and making of a multicultural city. A free concert series, Grand Performances is situated in the contexts of historical and contemporary urban planning, artistic programming, and the city as lived and imagined.

Acknowledging that ideas of the social sciences seep into everyday life, she challenges the situatedness of disciplinary knowledge and the locations in which anthropological theory has been developed and applied. Grand Performances came into being as a multicultural arts and music project including ethnicity (but excluding class and political affiliations) for the construction of a general, neutral ‘public’, an audience as both a representation and a synecdoche of the city. She draws links between international performance and downtown development, exploring the politics of multiculturalism as part of wider social and political frameworks enacted on municipal, state, and national levels. In recounting her personal experiences of working in the organization and performing onstage with the DaKAH hip hop orchestra, she uses personal narratives and sensual descriptions of experiencing California Plaza.

The concerts are representations of a city imagined and made in practice, as Los Angeles has been perceived as a city lacking real civic life and a central space where people can come together as a public. The history of the space highlights the dynamics of gentrification; the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project removed unruly bodies, replacing particular people with a general public, both activating and cleansing the urban space. California Plaza now exists as private property on public land, the area’s former blight covered with modern sculptures. With ethnicized neighbourhoods surrounding it, the purported neutrality of downtown is brought into being through practice which supports diversity as a normative feature of city. As a civic institution, Grand Performances creates audience members as civic subjects as spaces of belonging are created through inclusion and exclusion. Peterson cites Lefebvre in discussing the urban public as both sonic and spatial processes of the city, as social and musical rhythms are heard and felt in the body.

Are the arts integral to urban growth in the twentieth century? Pederson places Grand Performances in the context of historical American debates about art as an educational medium for the public good and worthy of state support. In analyzing the practice of centre-making through the arts, she acknowledges the imagined public of the city, the interests of the corporate plaza, and the reality of government grant guidelines. Defining the free concerts as nonprofits for the education of the public good shapes meanings of art through intersections of programming, funding, and marketing. Performances are always planned, wavering between a public openness and fear of the public. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is invoked to discuss the disciplining of bodies, construction of consensus, and exclusion of class necessary for a multicultural audience watching a performance of ethnicity. Political performances are also generally excluded for divisive potentialities in the civic space of consensus.

The global city is sounded through media with translocal media spaces acting as motivators of activities, allowing ethnic media to market international programming. The city is in motion, as people and sounds circulate within and between neighbourhoods. Neighbourhood names act as code for social groups in an ethnicized geography, and the success or failure of performances is largely based on the range of ethnic diversity in the audience.

In looking at the tenents of democracy such as representation, recognition, and participation, Peterson explores the relationship between performance and politics, as the neoliberal trope of diversity shows openness to difference, helping to alleviate violence and tensions. While music is a medium for belonging, signifying race, politics, age, etc., cosmopolitanism allows for shifting affiliations in identity-in-process. Modernist notions of neutrality allow for multiple interpretations and claims to higher abstractions. Peterson devotes much space to hip hop orchestra DaKAH, which she purports exists as a musical and social mixture, embodying Los Angeles through the diversity of its members. She asserts that the musical group fosters intergenerational understanding through combining hip hop and orchestra. Civic performance aims to foster spatial and social proximity through music. Genre is negotiatied over musical and social boundaries, with identification understood as mobile processes of becoming.

In a movement from the self to the collective, an audience is constituted through an embodied experience of listening and dancing together, fulfilling urban ideals of diversity through affective, participatiory, and sensory channels. Through sound engineering, sonic and spatial intimacy and proximity are felt in the body. Durkheim’s theory of ritual designates the body as the subjective site where experience generates a collective. Peterson asserts that utopic versions of society are drawn from and necessary for the social; the ideal society is not outside of society but rather already a part of it. Foucault is mentioned in the discussion of the individual body as the locus of aspirations, through which beliefs must be continually performed in order to sustain social beliefs. At Grand Performances, a dancing audience is a sign of approval, as individuals engage in the public performance of a private, affective response.

In concise and accessible language, Peterson successfully highlights parallels between actual multicultural performances and the ideal global city. While she briefly mentions that Grand Performance’s events are outside of everyday life and time, an ideal, ephemeral state counter to the norm, she makes no mention of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s anthropological theories of liminality. Overall though, this work is beneficial to both students and scholars interested in social relations and diversity, public space, urban revitalization, civic life, privatization, suburbanization, and economic and cultural globalization.

- Catherine Scheelar

Wifi 'measuring rods' thanks to Oslo School of Architecture (click on image for their article)

Noteworthy articles on cities, the urban commons and sustainability, Georg Franck Die urbane Allmende and an issue on Central Europe’s urban identity from Eurozine, an online selection from several European magazines.

Franck argues for a new urbanism that focuses on the middle ground of sustainable, compact neighbourhoods rather than focusing only on architecture as individual green buildings, or the city at an metropolitan scale.  I’ve heard this urban commons recently called the “middle landscape”, not detached sprawl, not the hyper-urban central business district but  livable, mid-scaled sets of buildings that demand less energy while remaining functional and convivial.  These example of Asian cities, however, suggests that as the planet moves toward an uban population of around 4.5 billion, it will be in the style and density of cities such as Jakarta, Hong Kong and Shanghai rather than the European ideal of Parisian cityscapes of 6 to 8 storeys.

– Rob