Richard Sennett: The Architecture of Cooperation
"The theme of the lecture addresses a question: how can we design spaces in the city which encourage strangers to cooperate? To explore this question, I'll draw on research in the social sciences about cooperation, based on my book, and relate this research to current issues in urban design."
(Harvard Graduate School of Design, 28 February 2012)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The dialogic perspective accentuates social multiplicity and dynamic processes
"The dialogic perspective originates from literary theorist Bakhtin (1981, 1965/1984, 1986). His works on literary texts have been appropriated into the social sciences (van Loon 1997; Gardiner and Bell 1998; Ooi 2002). The dialogic perspective accentuates social multiplicity and dynamic processes. It offers a set of concepts and vocabulary to present social phenomena in a dynamic and yet systematic manner, with the emphasis on social multiplicity and interplay. Just as importantly, the dialogic perspective accentuates the tensions of order and disor-der in the social environment. "
(Can-Seng Ooi, 2010, p.347-364)
1). Ooi, C.-S. (2010). 'Cacophony of Voices and Emotions Dialogic of Buying and Selling Art.' Culture Unbound 2, Article 20: 18.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Critical Pedagogy
"'Critical pedagogy considers how education can provide individuals with the tools to better themselves and strengthen democracy, to create a more egalitarian and just society, and thus to deploy education in a process of progressive social change. Media literacy involves teaching the skills that will empower citizens and students to become sensitive to the politics of representations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and other cultural differences in order to foster critical thinking and enhance democratization. Critical media literacy aims to make viewers and readers more critical and discriminating readers and producers of texts.
'Critical media pedagogy provides students and citizens with the tools to analyze critically how texts are constructed and in turn construct and position viewers and readers. It provides tools so that individuals can dissect the instruments of cultural domination, transform themselves from objects to subjects, from passive to active. Thus critical media literacy is empowering, enabling students to become critical producers of meanings and texts, able to resist manipulation and domination.'"
(Douglas Kellner)
Douglas Kellner, "Multiple Literacies and Critical Pedagogies" in Revolutionary Pedagogies - Cultural Politics, Instituting Education, and the Discourse of Theory, Peter Pericles Trifonas, Editor, Routledge, 2000
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Iranian popular theatrical forms through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of carnival
"[Mikhail] Bakhtin's concept of carnival as a subversive, disruptive world-upside-down event in which the repressive views, lies, and hypocrisy of the officially run and dominated everyday world are unmasked provides a powerful theoretical concept for any study of Iranian popular theatrical and related musical forms. Bakhtin was concerned with polyvocality and the fact that from the onset of the European Renaissance the voices of the common people were increasingly not heard. The Islamic Republic's ban on the performance of improvisational comic theater would seem to support this theoretical stance with empirical evidence of official reaction. In the European context analyzed by Bakhtin, a writer, exemplified by Rabelais, enacts an important role because he or she reflects the voices of the low, the peasant, the outcast. In Bakhtin's view, the healthy voice of the low, which questions the high-the church and the state-is an important check on oppressive officials in a healthy society.
A full-fledged carnival—such as those in Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans—does not exist in the Iranian culture sphere. By carnival I mean a massive demonstration of excessive eating, drinking, and sexual and bodily exposure, popularly associated with Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, that does not occur within an Islamic/Iranian context. Threads and themes of carnivalesque and grotesque subversion, however, can be found woven through the fabric of the Iranian world. Here the needle that pricks the official religious, social, and political powers most is the traditional comic theater in its many guises.
In many ways siyah-bazi and ru-howzi embody Bakhtin's notions of the grotesque and the carnivalesque. Gholam-siyah, the blackface clown, the 'low Other,' always wins over his master: the world upside down. Gholam-siyah's extravagant clothing, movements, speech, and lower-class language demonstrate Bakhtin's dictum, 'the grotesque...cannot be separated from folk humor and carnival spirit' (Stallybrass and White 1986, 43). Gholam's bright red costume and conical hat, for example, are probably the closest thing to carnival costume in the entire Middle East. William O. Beeman, a scholar of Iranian linguistics, discusses the blackface clown: 'The clown distorts normal physical movement by jumping, running, flailing his arms, and twisting his body into odd shapes' (1981, 515). This is, of course, part of his repertoire, for sight gags make up much of the comedy of traditional comic theater. This grotesque twisting of the body is also part of the dancing that occurs in the comic theater, especially by the male characters."
(Mass Mediations)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Google Wave: real-time communication and collaboration
"Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation
and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."
(Google)
Fig.1 Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
