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Off Book
In the theatre world ‘off book’ signifies a deadline in the creative process: the date by which performers are to have memorised their lines and will no longer be allowed to carry their play script – the ‘book’ – on stage. As such Off Book makes a strangely appropriate title for a book about devised performance in higher education. In its usual context ‘off book’ captures the tension between ephemeral live performance and durable author-ized literature: in one sense the book – the written play – is the essential core the seed that gives the performance life and meaning. Yet the opposite could be equally true: an ‘on book’ performance would not really be a play at all and an actor reciting lines out of a script in hand is not really acting. A play is only realised in or through a performance. We cannot really learn or play our part until we can put the book down and enter the stage without it.
Devised performance might be described as ‘theatre without the book.’ Yet devisors also often use books – books like this one practical guidebooks and how-to manuals as well as a myriad of literature outside the discipline mined for inspiration. This is particularly manifest when devising in the context of higher education - a milieu like theatre wherein books traditionally signify authority status and meaning. So to the extent that theatres and campuses are places where one expects everything to be done ‘by the book’ devising on campuses is rebellious even sacrilegious. But on the other hand both the theatre and the university are expected to challenge tradition defy expectations and conduct experiments.
The book is presented in four sections reflecting the range of roles devising plays in higher education. The first section Devising Pedagogy: Teaching Transferable Tools examines how and why practitioners educators and programs conceptualise and plan for devising with adult learners in a range of higher education contexts. The second Devising Friction: Ensembles Individuals and the Institution shifts the discussion to the classroom where abstract pedagogical rubber meets the road of concrete reality. The third Devising (by) Degrees Practice-led postgraduate devising projects features contributions by emerging scholar-practitioners who engage with devising as both an object and method of creative scholarship. Finally the chapters in Devising Bridges: University-Community Engagement explore how devising connects higher education institutions with the public they are intended to serve — particularly in populations and communities that are marginalised within or even explicitly excluded from participating in higher education such as children and people with intellectual disabilities.
A valuable and unique resource for drama educators in universities university students in education drama and arts managements graduate students conducting research theatre historians practicing devised theatre artists.
Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear
Tribal Streetwear is lifestyle streetwear brand that seeks to represent a variety of southern California sub-cultures that includes graffiti street art skateboarding surfing tattoos hip hop breakdancing punk lowriders and custom culture. Based in San Diego California Tribal has strong Chicano roots in its aesthetic and spans the globe with retail stores on several continents.
The text presents a series of articles essays and personal reflections that explore the various dimensions of Tribal Streetwear and how the impact of their designs continues to balance the precarious act of being relevant and responsible with their resources.
The book is divided into four sections.
Section 1 features essays that set a context for the text. This includes a history of Tribal and where it fits within the history of streetwear a personal narrative of the founding of Tribal and lastly an essay on the uniqueness of southern California aesthetics and the fascination with this southern California inspired fashion.
Section 2 is a series of interviews with notable artists musicians and cultural tastemakers that have contributed toward street culture and Tribal. These include Mr. Cartoon (tattoo artist) RISK (graffiti artist) PERSUE (street artists) Mike Giant (tattoo artist) Dyse One (graffiti artist) Craig Craig Stecyk III (skateboard culture) Bob Hurley (surf culture) and the Beastie Boys (hip hop).
Section 3 includes a series of invited and peer-reviewed academic articles on distinct subjects within the street culture genre that further dive into the inputs and influences of Tribal Streetwear. They include breakdancing surfing skateboarding graffiti street art tattooing music (hip-hop/punk) lowriders custom culture and Chicano Studies.
Section 4 is a series of photo essays that capture the three decades of Tribal Streetwear and serves as a visual history of the brand and the evolution of its graphics.
Performing Institutions
Performing Institutions: Contested Sites and Structures of Care builds upon scholarly work rooted in the social and cultural histories of education self-organization activist practices performance design and artistic research (at)tending to the ways that institutions are necessarily political and performed.
By evoking the idea of Performing Institutions it foregrounds all kinds of ‘actors’ that engage with (re)imagining creative practices - social artistic and pedagogical - that critically interact with institutional frameworks and the broader local and global society of which these institutions are part.
With case studies and critical reflections from Denmark Ireland Finland the UK Canada the USA Chile Asia and Australasia contributors show how they envision or pursue performing artistic cultural social and educational practices as caring engagements with contested sites addressing the following questions. How do current institutions perform – academically spatially custodially and structurally? How might we stay engaged with the ways that institutions are inherently contested sites and what role do care and counter-hegemonic practices play in rearticulating other ways of performing institutions and how they perform on us?
These are the questions central to this book as it stages a productive tension between two main themes: structures of care (instituting otherwise) and sites of contestations (desiring change).
Some of the texts in this collection stage a productive tension between ideas about caring contestations and contestation as a caring engagement in practice with a view towards institutional transformation. Other contributors investigate the idea of caring contestations as a critical concept that draws attention to questions of power and to the exclusions produced and reproduced in and through specific institutional practices. As such this collection of writing puts forward caring contestations as a critical mode for (re)enacting institutional engagements. This also brings forward questions of agency and how for those of us who perform within institutional structures we care to engage and/or contest those institutional engagements.
It is primarily aimed at scholars educators research-practitioners and postgraduate students in the fields of performance studies theory creation and design those working at art institutions and art schools Also relevant to researchers working across various fields of organizational as well as educational approaches to performance culture.
Art from Your Core
This book guides artists through the discovery and development of the art that they alone were born to create. Through real-life examples and exercises we tear down the cultural educational and psychological obstacles to finding authentic visual voice stripping away years of assumptions external and self-imposed limiting parameters.
We learn how to listen to the Universe and get out of the way when work wants to come through us. We construct a core foundation unique to each artist one that will grow along with them in their artistic
practice. Artists will discover their own singular visual vocabulary by mining their personal history psyche and world view to reveal new creative directions and learn how to intensify and develop their core ideas to make them more resonant and complex. We explore methodologies to tap into the subconscious cultivate breakthroughs create environments to maximize the gestation of ideas instill bravery and do meaningful research to produce deeply layered works of art.
While designed for college students professional artists will also find it allows them to get to that illusive
“next level” in their work; the one that calls to them haunts them in their dreams yet remains unarticulated in their practice.
In addition to helping undergraduate and graduate students who are looking to identify articulate and hone their vocabulary it can serve as a tool for more established artists to step up or refresh their practice. It is the kind of book that artists will keep on the studio shelf to pick up time and time again as their responses to the exercises will change throughout the course of their career.
There are extensive lists exercises and questionnaires anecdotes of art-historically significant artists and detailed descriptions of the methodologies they employ to tap into the subconscious various types of research on creative breakthroughs (and how to apply it to your own process) helpful suggestions to create an environment / lifestyle to maximize the gestation of ideas and how to do meaningful research to produce deeply layered works of art. While the tone of the book is often earnest and spiritual (in an “art is religion” kind of way) Kretz is aiming for a straightforward accessible kind-but-no-nonsense tenor with some humor and nurturing “tough love” when needed to say some of the things that artists need to hear but few people have the guts to tell them.
Fashion Knowledge
This new edited collection assembles academic essays and intellectual activism equally next to visual essays and artistic interventions and proposes a different concept for fashion research that eschews the traditional logic of academic fashion studies. It features acclaimed designers artists curators and theorists whose work investigates the multi-faceted debates on the rise of practice-based research in fashion.
The book sets out to explore current issues in fashion research with a particular focus on both methodology and expansion of the field to encompass overlooked voices and narratives. It has a particular concern with the relationships between theory and practice and with how knowledge is created and disseminated in fashion studies. It is an excellent and really valuable contribution to the field at a point both when fashion studies is expanding and when the fashion industry is at a crucial point of change.
Some of the contributions were originally presented at a symposium hosted by the Austrian Center for Fashion Research ‘TALKSHOW: The politics of practice-based fashion research’ at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts curated by Wally Salner. The symposium brought together a group of fashion scholars designers educators and practitioners to explore critical contemporary fashion (research) practices and to investigate critical fashion knowledge between theory and practice beyond assumed disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. Many contributions in this volume were initially presented at that symposium while others are testimonies of international debates that were part of the research activities of the Austrian Center for Fashion Research a research project funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science Research and Economy led by Elke Gaugele.
The book is structured into three sections: Fashion Knowledge Practice-Based Fashion Research and Sites of Fashion and Politics. Contributions look at new forms of fashion knowledge that are forming with and along shifting fashion practices practice-based fashion research and sheds light on different sites and entanglements of fashion and politics in distinctive contemporary and historical moments of de/colonization anti/racism and anti/globalization.
Elke Gaugele is cultural anthropologist and professor of fashion styles and contextual design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna Austria. Monica Titton is a sociologist fashion theorist and senior scientist at the fashion design department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Austria. Other contributions are from Elke Bippus Astrid Engl Jojo Gronostay Ruby Hoette Bianca Koczan Priska Morger NCCFN Wally Salner Andreas Spiegl José Teunissen Lara Torres Carol Tulloch and Maria Ziegelböck
Readers will be academics practitioners designers artists curators museums theoretical scholars lecturers practice-based researchers students and practitioners at all levels in the fields of fashion textile art and design.
This new book with its original focus on practice-based research will be useful for a general and academic readership alike and to all those working within the field of fashion studies including those with a theoretical focus fashion practitioners and those working within innovative pockets of the fashion industry.
Theatre for Lifelong Learning
Theatre for Lifelong Learning is a step-by-step guide for anyone interested in teaching theatre courses and creating theatre with older adults.
This book provides instructors with syllabi discussion questions classroom management strategies resource lists and activities to teach courses from beginning to end. Special topics include Playwriting Play Development Storytelling Theatre Appreciation Theatre Criticism Theatre History and Theatre Theory.
This book helps readers become confident informed instructors of older adult learners. Theatre for Lifelong Learning is a tool for anyone who wants to build theatrical communities and support the emotional well-being of older adults through education practice and experimentation while also having fun.
Theatre for Lifelong Learning is a complete guide to navigate the theatre classroom from beginning to end. Anyone can become a theatre expert and educator with practice. If you already have a background in performing arts this book provides strategies that are useful for you as well. If you have experience as an educator this book will enrich your current skill set with interdisciplinary approaches. Tips and examples throughout assist you in creating and maintaining an accessible environment and making courses your own.
So how can teaching and learning about theatre help us live in the moment? When we are not engaged it’s easy to forget that we are capable curious creative people who can expand our knowledge and experiences every day. Theatre encourages finding meaning in small things chance encounters and the tapestry of life. All the material provided in this book will motivate instructors and students to get involved.
It will be most useful for arts practitioners participatory practitioners institutional educators and community outreach officers independent theatre instructors. Of potential interest to scholars and researchers in age studies or in teaching and learning. May also be useful for community arts organizations regional theatres and non-profit organizations working with older adults.
Art, Sustainability and Learning Communities
By engaging with education contemporary art and global sustainability goals this book connects the artistic way of communication with ecological obligations and social issues and promotes a sense of active citizenship. International empirical and curricular research presents a case for strong learning communities that take a clear political stand in favour of socially engaged art pedagogies.
The main aim of is to show how shared spaces for exchange in the fields of art education and continuous professional development can reflect inspire and integrate sustainability principles that are becoming crucial in today’s world. The authors propose the idea that coordinated action can lead to a more sustainable future by promoting a sense of community lifelong learning and confidence in the possibility of changing current conditions.
Its three parts combine expertise in visual arts education education for sustainable development contemporary art practice and sustainability activism. While Part I focuses on literature in the field and the interrelation of different disciplines Part II provides concrete examples of professional learning communities and pedagogies that can be used to enrich the field of art education. Finally Part III presents brief case studies illustrating international projects by contemporary artists curators environmentalists and others providing educators with several inspirational models of concrete and creative action.
The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood
This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self which far from being a stable marker of urban liberal millennial Indian identity has a schizophrenic quality one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion optimism and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book however belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.
The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies popular culture analyses and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star the urban space web series YouTube videos and social media content.
Data Dating
What does it mean to love with technology? Does data improve our emotional interactions? The collection approaches the query with critical essays and works of new media art to look into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships. With expertise coming from recognized researchers critics and artists in the field of media and cultural studies it analyses relationship trends and affect cultures that have emerged from technological acceleration.
Data Dating: Love Technology and Desire is a comprehensive study of love and intimacy under digitalism that reflects on the structure of feeling(s) and libido environments in the high-tech and media-bound landscapes of contemporary technocracies. Organized around ten chapters and ten works of new media art the collection offers an extensive critical analysis of technologized romance (and other emotional relations) as well as provides an insight into the codification execution deployment and evolution of the patterns of togetherness in the so-called Tamagotchi era.
The chapters engage in the problems of new material planes that have emerged from the abstraction of networked communication and dispersion of traditional notions of physicality. They close-read the templates of contemporary fantasy fetish and eroticism as shaped by platform capitalism datafication and new commodity cultures in which self-promotion for bonding relies on the new possibilities that are coming in with new media self-mediation formats. Central to the analysis is the carbon-silicon dynamics of love’s contemporary DNA and libidinal techne – practiced in the environment where screens interfaces algorithms data protocols and non-organic objects of affection and affect delineate organize and program the trajectories of encounter limerence and erotic pleasure. All the chapters are authored by recognized researchers in the field of love emotion media technology and cultural studies and they critically explore various aspects of love/intimacy under technocracy approaching them with expertise the goes beyond the typical high-modernist and post-structural reading of the media-ridden life practices and environments.
More importantly the collection includes landmark works of new media art coming from prominent new media artist gathered around 'Data Dating' – new media art exhibition curated by Valentina Peri (co-editor of the collection) and presented in Paris Tel Aviv and London. As such the collection proffers a unique and original critical approach – one that combines artistic practice and cultural criticism – to comment upon the transformation of human relationships and emotional standards under technological development with reference to the social change and cultural condition.
The collection of essays each accompanied by a work of media art that provides a comprehensive insight into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships.
Primary readership will be among educators researcher and students in disciplines including cultural studies media and communications philosophy sociology psychology and gender LGBTQ+ and sexual studies. It will be an extremely valuable resource for those in these fields.
It will be of interest to other groups including art curators online platform designers social media content managers and designers and data specialists.
The Urban Refugee
The presence of the refugee in the contemporary metropolis is marked by precarity a quality that has become a characteristic feature of the neoliberal urban milieu. Bringing together essays from diverse disciplines from architectural history to cultural anthropology and urban planning this collection sheds light on both the specificities of the contemporary urban condition that affects the refugees and the multi-dimensional impact that the refugees have on the city. The authors propose investigating this connection through three interlinked themes: identity (informality imagination and belonging); place (transnational homemaking practices); and site (the navigation of urban space).
In recent years there has been a significant growth in scholarship on forced migration particularly on the relationship between displacement and the built environment. Scholars have focused on spatial practices and forms that arise under conditions of displacement with much attention given to refugee camps and the social and political aspects of temporariness. While these issues are important the essays in this volume aim to contribute to a less explored aspect of displacement namely the interaction between refugees and the cities they inhabit. In this respect the volume underlines the specificity of the urban refugee as well as their spatial agency and investigates the irreversible effect they have on the contemporary urban condition.
The authors argue that viewing urban refugees solely as dislocated individuals outside the camp-like spaces of containment fails to understand the agency of the urban refugee and the blurred boundaries of identity that result. The term "refugee crisis" objectifies and denies active agency to refugees homogenizing dislocated individuals and groups. The neoliberalization of the past four decades has led to the precarization of labour and the displacement of refugees who frequently blend into the urban environment as hidden populations. Refugees are subjected to constant surveillance and the state's attempts to control them. However these attempts are not uncontested and the involvement of activist interventions further politicizes the urban refugee.
LIFE
LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry examines nature cognition and society as an interwoven tapestry across disciplinary boundaries. This volume explores how information and communication are instrumental in and for living systems acknowledging an integrative account of media as environments and technologies.
The aim of the collection is a fuller and richer account of everyday life through a spectrum of insights from internationally known scholars of the natural sciences (physical and life sciences) social sciences and the arts.
How or should life be defined? If life is a medium how is it mediated? Viewed as interactions transactions and contexts of ecosystems life can be recognized through patterns across the sciences including metabolisms habitats and lifeworlds. The book also integrates discussions of embodiment ecological values literacies and critiques with bioinspired synthetic and historical design approaches to envision what could constitute artful living in an ever-evolving interdependent world.
The volume foregrounds systemic approaches to life drawing on a wide range of disciplines and fields including architecture art biology bioengineering chemistry cinema studies communication computer science conservation cultural studies design ecology environmental studies information science landscape architecture geography journalism materials science media archaeology media studies philosophy physics plant signalling and development political economy sociology and system dynamics.
This is the second volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. It follows and builds upon the 2021 collection MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry ISBN 9781789382655
An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Performance Art
This original and unique new book takes an integrated approach to interrogating the experience and location of the self/s within the context of performance art practice. In its framing and execution of practical exercises and focused snapshots of internationally recognized performance practice Bacon situates their argument within the boundaries of specialism in the critical curation of performance art praxis as well as contemporary phenomenological scholarship.
Introducing the study and application of performance art through phenomenology for radical artists educators and practitioner-researchers; this exciting new book invites readers to take part explore contemporary performance art and activate their own practices.
Applying a queer phenomenology to unpack the importance of a multiplicity of Self/s the book guides readers to be academically rigorous when capturing embodied experiences featuring exercises to activate their practices and clear introductory definitions to key phenomenological terms. Includes interviews and insights from some of the best examples of transgressive performance art practice of this century help to help unpack the application of phenomenology as Bacon calls for a queer reimagining of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’
This is an important contribution to the field and will be welcomed by performance artists and academics interested in performance. It may also appeal to those teaching concepts of phenomenology.
It will be relevant to students of performance as well as to artists audiences and museum goers. The approachable layout and clear authorial voice will add to the appeal for students early career researchers and mean that it has strong potential for inclusion in undergraduate and postgraduate syllabi within the field.
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre
Critics and fans alike often mistake theatrical song and dance as evoking a sweeping sense of simplicity heteronormativity and traditionalism. Nothing drove home this cultural misunderstanding for Kelly Kessler as when a relative insisted she watch the Clint Eastwood-Lee Marvin cinematic transfer of Paddy Chayefsky’s Paint Your Wagon (1969) with a young niece and nephew because it was a ‘sweet movie.’ In the relative’s memory good old-fashioned singing and dancing—matched with the power of an assumed hegemonic embrace of social norms—far outweighed the whoremongering alcoholism wife-selling and what appears to be narratively sanctioned polyamory.
This collection seeks to trouble such an over-idealized impression of musical theatre. Tackling Rockettes divas and chorus boys; hit shows such as Hamilton and Spring Awakening; and lesser-known but ground-breaking gems like Erin Markey’s A Ride on The Irish Cream and Kirsten Childs’s Bella: An American Tall Tale.
Gender Sex and Sexuality in Musical Theatre: He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night takes a broad look at musical theatre across a range of intersecting lenses such as race nation form dance casting marketing pedagogy industry platform-specificity stardom politics and so on. This collection assembles an amazing group of established and emergent musical theatre scholars to wrestle with the complexities of the gendered and sexualized musical theatre form. Gender and desire have long been at the heart of the musical whether because ‘birds and bees’ (and educated fleas’) were doing it a farm girl simply couldn’t ‘say no’ or one’s ‘tits and ass’ were preventing them from landing the part.
An exciting and vibrant collection of articles from the archives of Studies in Musical Theatre with contributions from Ryan Donovan Michele Dvoskin Sherrill Gow Jiyoon Jung David Haldane Lawrence Stephanie Lim Dustyn Martinich Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers Deborah Paredez Alejandro Postigo George Rodosthenous Janet Werther Stacy Wolf Elizabeth L. Wollman Bryan Vandevender and Kelly Kessler brought together with a newly commissioned piece by Jordan Ealey. All set against the backdrop of Kelly Kessler’s scene-setting introduction.
Excellent potential for classroom and course use on undergraduate and graduate courses in theatre studies musical studies women’s and gender studies.
Performance Art in Practice
Performance Art in practice – pedagogical approaches opens up a variety of philosophies that explore explain and challenge Performance art and introduces a range of practices used in higher level education.
The book is a collection of nine independent essays. All the writers have several years of practice as artists curators teachers professors researchers and in establishing performance art education in Finland. The essays explain challenge and deconstruct performance art from various angles: the body as a tool and a base of identity self as material pedagogic acts of dissidence challenging societal questions without politicing art building sustainable artwork based on emotions intuition and research using Fluxus scores in contemporary practices etc. are all topics dealt by the writers of Performance Art in practice – pedagogical approaches.
The essays are written from a practical point of view: how do we concretely teach performance art why have we chosen these ways and what are the outcomes. Teaching the experimental art form that doesn’t wear a uniform and relies on ever changing time and space isn’t all evident. Deconstructing performance art and reconstructing pedagogy springs out ideas that are relevant also elsewhere in the contemporary society.
The book challenges art school institutions: Individuality bound to collegiality fruitful dialogue that bases on trust and sharing with a sociologically and politically challenging curricula come out in texts written by Aapo Korkeaoja Eero Yli-Vakkuri Jussi Matilainen Pia Lindy and Tuomas Laitinen that refer to the remote countryside campus of SAMK Kankaanpää school of art. More urban perspective with philosophies research interests and pedagogic practices at The University of Arts Helsinki are opened up by Tero Nauha Annette Arlander Pilvi Porkola and Leena Kela in their essays.
A/r/tography
The focus of this edited book is to evoke and provoke conceptual conversations between early a/r/tographic publications and the contemporary scholarship of a/r/tographers publishing and producing today. Working around four pervasive themes found in a/r/tographic literature this volume addresses relationality and renderings ethics and embodiment movement and materiality and propositions and potentials.
In doing so it advances concepts that have permeated a/r/tographic literature to date. More specifically the volume simultaneously offers a site where key historical works can easily be found and at the same time offer new scholarship that is in conversation with these historical ideas as they are discussed expanded and changed within contemporary contexts. The organizing themes offer conceptual pivots for thinking through how a/r/tography was first conceptualized and how it has evolved and how it might further evolve.
Thus this edited book affords an opportunity for all those working in and through a/r/tography to offer refined revised revisited or new conceptual understandings for contemporary scholarship and practice.
Part of the Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education series.
A/r/tography
The focus of this edited book is to evoke and provoke conceptual conversations between early a/r/tographic publications and the contemporary scholarship of a/r/tographers publishing and producing today. Working around four pervasive themes found in a/r/tographic literature this volume addresses relationality and renderings ethics and embodiment movement and materiality and propositions and potentials.
In doing so it advances concepts that have permeated a/r/tographic literature to date. More specifically the volume simultaneously offers a site where key historical works can easily be found and at the same time offer new scholarship that is in conversation with these historical ideas as they are discussed expanded and changed within contemporary contexts. The organizing themes offer conceptual pivots for thinking through how a/r/tography was first conceptualized and how it has evolved and how it might further evolve.
Thus this edited book affords an opportunity for all those working in and through a/r/tography to offer refined revised revisited or new conceptual understandings for contemporary scholarship and practice.
Part of the Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education series.
The Making of Modern Muslim Selves through Architecture
This collection seeks to explore alternative definitions of bounded identities facilitating new approaches to spatial and architectural forms. Taking as its starting point the emergence of a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-19th century dissolution of large heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of boundaries has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship but also redefines relationships between the nation citizenship cities and architecture.
It brings critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies and within the global Muslim diaspora. Essays in this book seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define enable obstruct accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities.
More generally the book explores how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implication of defining modern self. The essays in this volume collectively address how the construction of self is primarily a spatial event and operated within the crucial nexus of power-knowledge-space.
Contributors investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implications for how we define the modern self.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.
Fighting for the Soul of General Practice
This collection of stories from two practising GPs describes the reality of working within a failing and highly bureaucratic system where there is a balancing act: regulation versus relationships; autonomy versus standard practice; algorithm versus individual attention.
We aren’t suggesting a return to a ‘better’ time. We don’t object to being bureaucrats embedded within and accountable to the systems we are in. But we do want to consider how and with what the gap left by the old-fashioned GP has been filled. We use stories based on our experience to describe the effect of different facets of bureaucracy on our ability to maintain a nuanced individualised approach to each patient and encounter; and to question the prominence and effect of protocol. We are interested in the way professional relationships are influenced by protocol: between and within organisations; and most importantly with patients/clients/service users..
We are accustomed nowadays to automated telephone lines chatbots website FAQs- the frustration of being unable to connect with another human being who will listen to our particular question and give us something other than a generic answer. The same issues that are facing society at large have changed the way in which we work as GPs and the care we give.
Drawing, Well-being and the Exploration of Everyday Place
Over 200 observational drawings created every day from the same window reveal life in an ordinary English street in extraordinary times.
This visual record and accompanying prose is a unique meditation on place nature community time and mental well-being. Through this qualitative work we gain insight into the individual and collective experience and place-specific impacts of the pandemic as opposed to the quantitative statistics of mortality and infection rates that characterise daily media soundbites and scientific discourse surrounding lockdown.
Five themes are central to the drawings highlighting the environmental and social factors influencing daily life and how these can be perceived and recorded via observational drawing: ‘framing space’ foregrounds the importance of widows as an interface between interior and exterior worlds; ‘observing nature and the built environment’ celebrates the street and garden as sites of human-nature relations that support well-being; ‘watching people’ focusses on the activities typify living under lockdown including isolation socially distanced interactions and working from home; ‘drawing’ reflects on the multiple professional and personal benefits of drawing; and mindful awareness is discussed throughout affirming the value of appreciating everyday life through drawing practice.
Throbbing Gristle
In 1976 the British band Throbbing Gristle emerged from the radical arts collective COUM Transmissions through core members Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti joined by Hipgnosis photographer Peter Christopherson and electronics specialist Chris Carter. Though having performed previously in more low-key arts environments their major launch coincided with the COUM retrospective exhibition Prostitution at London’s ICA gallery showcasing and contextualising an array of challenging objects from COUM’s various actions in performance art and pornography. In a deliberately curated strategy inviting press civic and arts dignitaries extravagant followers of the nascent punk scene and music journalists the band created an instant controversy and media panic that tapped into the restrictive climate and encroaching conservatism of late 1970s Britain. Any opportunities that were being explored by a formative punk ethos and movement around sex censorship and transgression were amplified and exposed by Throbbing Gristle and Prostitution. An outraged Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn took the bait and called the ensemble the ‘wreckers of civilisation’ providing the suitable newspaper headline that would be followed a month later by ‘the filth and the fury’ as the Sex Pistols uttered strong profanities on live television.
The switch from COUM to Throbbing Gristle encompassed a primary mode of expression in making music as opposed to art to further coincide with the energy of the nascent punk scene. The band quickly developed a radically deviant and challenging reputation through pushing the punk format past its strictures in terms of lyrical themes amateurism and considerations of what constitutes music. Through a handful or record releases on their own label Industrial Records and a sporadic string of live performances the band nurtured a strong and devoted following including key journalists and fanzine editors of the punk and post-punk scenes such as Jon Savage and Sandy Robertson. The band’s style of exploring harsh pre-recorded sounds samples of disconcerting narrative and conversation and feeding all sounds through messy electronic processing devices gave rise to the title industrial music. This was further buttressed by performing a strictly timed set of one hour and adopting a non-rockstar mode by appearing disinterested and preoccupied with electronic devices. Having given a name and impetus to the industrial music scene many of their followers and fans formed bands in later years.
Drawing on works such as Andy Bennett’s When the Lights Went Out this book looks at late 1970s Britain before during and immediately after the Winter of Discontent to situate the activism of Throbbing Gristle in this time. It explores how the band worked in and against the time and how they worked in and against punk as punk worked in and against the time and place. Punk acts as a mediating factor and nuisance value as Throbbing Gristle emerged with punk in late 1976 seemingly grappled with it through 1977 and then went on to create and eventually criticise a number of post-punk scenes that had flourished around 1979. Trowell narrates the story through a series of live performances as this is a point where Throbbing Gristle interact with the various city-scenes around England during their original period of operation (1975-1981). The band reflected (and incorporated into their live music) key tropes form the time both ‘mainstream’ and fringe (subcultural avant-garde art counter-culture taboo subjects extremes) such that Throbbing Gristle events had an impact and affect and Trowell traces these as a series of impressions and reverberations amongst fans who went on to do their own music and projects.