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Developing a phenomenology of the animal other through contemporary art
This photography-driven fiction about coming of age in the creep show of south Florida's swamps and strip malls is "unlike any book I've ever read . . . A completely original and clearheaded voice" (Ira Glass, host of This American Life) Out of South Florida's lush and decaying suburban landscape bloom the delinquent magic and chaotic adolescence of And Every Day Was Overcast. Paul Kwiatkowski's arresting photographs amplify a novel of profound vision and vulnerability. Drugs, teenage cruelty, wonder, and the screen-flickering worlds of Predator and Married . . . With Children shape and warp the narrator's developing sense of self as he navigates adventures and misadventures, from an ill-fated LSD trip on an island of castaway rabbits to the devastating specter of HIV and AIDS. This alchemy of photography and fiction gracefully illuminates the travesties and triumphs of the narrator's quest to forge emotional connections and fulfill his brutal longings for love.
What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.
The concept of chiasm has played major role in continental philosophy, where it has referred to various phenomenological and hermeneutic structures of reversibility, intertwining, and encounter. In Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics, fourteen international contributors representing various fields of expertise analyze this central concept and its significance for contemporary cultural theory. The authors discuss the work of major philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Habermas, Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze, adapting their ideas of chiasmatic relations to cultural analysis. As the internal and external horizons of perception and experience are intertwined and reversed, various cultural texts, like a Vermeer painting, a symphony of Sibelius, a David Lynch movie, or a young girl walking in her summer dress, are seen from new and unexpected angles. The book also addresses the chiasmatic crossing between ethics and politics-- between unconditional ethical responsibility and always conditional political choices. Representing the cutting edge of contemporary cultural theory and interdisciplinary thinking, Chiasmatic Encounters is essential reading for anyone working in continental philosophy, aesthetics, or political theory.
Every day we share encounters with others as we inhabit the space around us. In offering insights and knowledge on this increasingly important topic, this book introduces a range of empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of shared encounters. It highlights the multifaceted nature of collective experience and provides a deeper understanding of the nature and value of shared encounters in everyday life. Divided into four sections, each section comprises a set of chapters on a different topic and is introduced by a key author in the field who provides an overview of the content. The book itself is introduced by Paul Dourish, who sets the theme of shared encounters in the context of technological and social change over the last fifteen years. The four sections that follow consider the characteristics of shared encounters and describe how they can be supported in different settings: the first section, introduced by Barry Brown, looks at shared experiences. George Roussos, in the second section, presents playful encounters. Malcolm McCulloch introduces the section on spatial settings and – last but not least – Elizabeth Churchill previews the topic of social glue. The individual chapters that accompany each part offer particular perspectives on the main topic and provide detailed insights from the author’s own research background. A valuable reference for anyone designing ubiquitous media, mobile social software and LBS applications, this volume will also be useful to researchers, students and practitioners in fields ranging from computer science to urban studies.
This topical and conceptually innovative book proposes new perspectives on the theme of materiality which, since the 1980s, has animated work across and within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The particular focus of the chapters in this volume is the materiality of knowledge produced through embodied encounters between people, places, and things in the Pacific Islands, New Guinea, Australia, and Myanmar. The authors consider how materiality mediates the ways in which knowledge is generated or acquired in encounters and becomes expressed through things and material forms of inscription – charts and maps; journals, letters, and reports; drawings; objects; human remains; legends, cartouches, captions, labels, marginalia, and notes; and published works of all kinds. The essays further address processes whereby materialized knowledge is archived, conserved, distributed, restricted, or dispersed – through serendipity, excess, loss, silence, absence, and suppression. This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in History, Anthropology and Oceania Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.
Ever since a native American prepared a paper "charte" of the lower Colorado River for the Spaniard Hernando de Alarcon in 1540, native Americans have been making maps in the course of encounters with whites (the most recent maps often support land claims). This book charts the history of these cartographic encounters, examining native maps and mapmaking from the earliest contacts onward.
Provides a collection of essays on modern art covering such artists as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Robert Mapplethorpe
The complaints that patients bring to their doctors often have roots in social issues that involve work, family life, gender roles and sexuality, aging, substance use; or other problems of nonmedical origin. In this book, physician/sociologist Howard Waitzkin examines interactions between patients and doctors to show how physicians' focus on physical complaints often fails to address patients' underlying concerns and also reinforces the societal problems that cause or aggravate these maladies. A progressive doctor-patient relationship, Waitzkin argues, fosters social change. Waitzkin provides a pathbreaking analysis of medical encounters, applying perspectives from structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical literary theory to transcripts of recorded conversations between doctors and patients. He demonstrates how doctors unintentionally maintain dominance in their dealings with patients, encourage conforming social behavior and attitudes, and marginalize patients' concerns with social problems. Waitzkin urges physicians to attend to the social as well as the medical problems that emerge from patients' narratives and suggests ways to restructure the manner in which patients and doctors communicate with each other. Physicians and patients, for example, should work together to demystify medical discourse, should refrain from medicalizing social problems through medications or reassurances that dull socially caused pain, and should be prepared to call on advocacy organizations seeking to change the social conditions that create personal distress. This book will influence and challenge physicians scholars, and students in the social sciences and humanities, as well as anyone concerned about the present problems and future direction of medicine.
"The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group...Wood speaks with non-Islamic State Muslim scholars and jihadists, and explores the group's idiosyncratic, coherent approach to Islam...Through character study and analysis, Wood provides a clear-eyed look at a movement that has inspired so many people to abandon or uproot their families.