Hospicing Modernity
The book “Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism” was published in September 2021. If you are in Canada, you can purchase the book …
We Are Civic Media
A discipline-crossing introduction to civic media via accounts from grassroots practitioners “Civic media” is the use of contemporary technologies to connect communities, inspire action, build civic capacity, and sustain social change efforts. Written by artists, creators, storytellers, organizers, and others working at the intersections of technology, social justice, and culture, this book summons civic media through the lived experiences of its contributors. Latoya Peterson delves into the therapeutic power of gaming; Akilah Hughes discusses identity and community through the lens of her campaign to change her high school's racist mascot; and Tyree Boyd-Pates emphasizes the potential power of museum curation to challenge power dynamics and bridge digital and physical realms. Through the experiences of these grassroots practitioners and many others, We Are Civic Media offers accessible insights for those interested in understanding, respecting, and practicing civic media.
The role of literature as the key to personal freedom | Aeon Essays
Stripped of easy moralising, literature makes us relish the search for truth in an age when many believe truth to be dead
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…
Does modernisation erase cultural difference – or amplify it? | Psyche Ideas
We understandably fear the flattening effect of modernity. But global data from China to Peru tells a hopeful story
Oakland is a Vibe: Blackness, Cultural Framings and Emancipations of The Town
Author(s): Heitz, Kaily | Advisor(s): Scott Lewis, Jovan | Abstract: In this dissertation, I examine the ways that developers and Black community organizers in Oakland, California, utilize a situated concept of Black culture to produce value in the city. This value is constituted by a politics of Blackness rooted both in racial capitalism, shifting structures of community care, and their affective articulations. The affective qualities of Black Oakland – which includes a sense of relationality, creativity, and resistance – are understood colloquially as “vibe.” While representations of vibe are mobilized by both developers and community organizations to respectively advance and resist gentrification, I argue that the vibe of the city is constituted by a Black sense of place that cannot be reproduced through capitalist representations of cultural value alone. This study of vibe presents an opportunity to take seriously the invitation of Black geographic scholarship to work at the intersection of poetics and historical materialism by exploring relationality as a site that coproduces racialized space and experience. Where developers leverage notions of vibe to generate value through private investment, Black organizers utilize such representations in order to reclaim the physical space necessary to the very production of vibe. The latter strategy is, I suggest, an enactment of what I call “emancipatory framing,” in which hegemonic framing is mobilized in order to create alternative spaces for liberatory praxes. This dissertation explores vibe and emancipatory framing at three different scales: the Black body, the independent business, and the grassroots collective. I conclude that vibe as a material and metaphorical asset of Blackness, is at the root of contestations over place, and sometimes contradictory imaginaries of freedom.
Why Storytelling Matters When Changing Company Culture
A conversation with the University of Utah’s Jay Barney about how leaders who successfully drive cultural change communicate through authentic, compelling stories.
Libra Season: iPhone Modernism by Travis Diehl
The shock-of-the-new is back in literature, rebooted for screen time – and with it, the question: To what end should writing reflect our networked selves?
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
Our Overfitted Century
Cultural stagnation is because we're stuck in-distribution
xii, 253 pages ; 22 cm