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Inert Cities
We usually associate contemporary urban life with movement and speed. But what about those instances when the forms of mobility associated with globalized cities - the flow of capital, people, labor and information - freeze, or decelerate? How can we assess the value of interruption in a city? What does valuing stillness mean in regards to the forward march of globalization? When does inertia presage decay - and when does it promise immanence and rebirth? Bringing together original contributions by international specialists from the fields of architecture, photography, film, sociology and cultural analysis, this cutting-edge book considers the poetics and politics of inertia in cities rangin...
Less Is Not Enough
Examining the rise of minimalist self-help, Miriam Meissner shows how it depoliticizes middle-class frustrations with capitalist exploitation, and proposes a cultural strategy to channel minimalist desires into a more radical, postgrowth politics. In the past decade minimalist self-help has exploded, from tidying guides to media detoxes which promise to help affluent middle classes navigate a world of excess - too much clutter, stress, and distraction. Less Is Not Enough exposes the limits of minimalism in addressing both middle-class overload and the environmental crisis. Through a critical analysis of self-help books, TV shows, and online communities, it argues that while minimalism is wel...
Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities
This volume, the first of its kind, launches a conversation amongst humanities scholars doing fieldwork on the global south. It both offers indispensable tools and demonstrates the value of such work inside and outside of the academy. The contributors reflect upon their experiences of fieldwork, the methods they improvised, their dilemmas and insights, and the ways in which fieldwork shifted their frames of analysis. They explore how to make fieldwork legible to their disciplines and how fieldwork might extend the work of the humanities. The volume is for both those who are already deeply immersed in fieldwork in the humanities and those who are seeking ways to undertake it.
Beijing Garbage
Why do central and local government initiatives aiming to curb the proliferation of garbage in Beijing and its disposal continue to be unsuccessful? Is the Uberization of waste picking through online-to-offline (O2O) garbage retrieval companies able to decrease waste and improve the lives of waste pickers? Most citizens of Beijing are well aware of the fact that their city is besieged by waste. Yet instead of taking individual action, they sit and wait for the governments at various levels to tell them what to do. And even if/when they adopt a proactive position, this does not last. Official education drives targeting the consumers are organized regularly and with modest success, but real solutions are not forthcoming. Various environmental non-governmental organizations are at work to raise the level of consciousness of the population, to change individual attitudes towards wasteful behavior, but seemingly with little overall effects.
The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume II
Architecture and the urban are connected to challenges around violence, security, race and ideology, spectacle and data. The first volume of this handbook extensively explored these oppressive roles. This second volume illustrates that escaping the corporatized and bureaucratized orders of power, techno-managerial and consumer-oriented capitalist economic models is more urgent and necessary than ever before. Herein lies the political role of architecture and urban space, including the ways through which they can be transformed and alternative political realities constituted. The volume explores the methods and spatial practices required to activate the political dimension and the possibility...
Unequal Neighbors
San Diego and Tijuana are the site of a national border enforcement spectacle, but they are also neighboring cities with deeply intertwined histories, cultures, and economies. In Unequal Neighbors, Kristen Hill Maher and David Carruthers shift attention from the national border to a local one, examining the role of place stigma in reinforcing actual and imagined inequalities between these cities. While the details of the book are particular to this corner of the world, the kinds of processes it documents offer a window into the making of unequal neighbors more broadly. The dynamics at the Tijuana border present a framework for understanding how inequalities that manifest in cultural practices produce asymmetric borders between places.
Metagraffiti
This innovative visual ethnography examines diverse forms of self-reference and metareference that appear in Latin American graffiti art. Focusing on graffiti scenes from São Paulo, Brazil and Santiago in Chile, Chandra Morrison Ariyo shows how practitioners use metagraffiti features to influence public perceptions about this artform and its effect on the urban environment.
Performing America Abroad
What happens to 'America' when it does not coincide with the geographical and institutional boundaries of the U.S. nation-state? What does 'America' mean when it is performed abroad and circulates among populations and publics outside U.S. national contexts? 'Performing America Abroad' explores an unlikely American studies archive: contemporary cultural performances in Austria and Germany which refer to the American cultural imaginary, but enact it with a 'transnational difference.' The book discusses the ambivalent cultural politics of these enactments in the context of neoliberal capitalism; specifically, it looks at several cross-racial performances of 'Indianness' on various Austrian stages, it examines queer political demonstrators on Vienna's central Ringstrasse, who celebrate the legacy of the 1969 New York Stonewall riots, and it discusses the 'Americanness' of a series of theatrical adaptations of Arthur Miller's 1949 play 'Death of a Salesman' in Germany and Austria.
Narrating the Global Financial Crisis
This book analyzes how the Global Financial Crisis is portrayed in contemporary popular culture, using examples from film, literature and photography. In particular, the book explores why particular urban spaces, infrastructures and aesthetics – such as skyline shots in the opening credits of financial crisis films – recur in contemporary crisis narratives. Why are cities and finance connected in the cultural imaginary? Which ideologies do urban crisis imaginaries communicate? How do these imaginaries relate to the notion of crisis? To consider these questions, the book reads crisis narratives through the lens of myth. It combines perspectives from cultural, media and communication studies, anthropology, philosophy, geography and political economy to argue that the concept of myth can offer new and nuanced insights into the structure and politics of popular financial crisis imaginaries. In so doing, the book also asks if, how and under what conditions urban crisis imaginaries open up or foreclose systematic and political understandings of the Global Financial Crisis as a symptom of the broader process of financialization.
