Postcards from the Underground
14 Nov 2019-Iss: 4
TL;DR: In this paper, a walkshop was organised to better understand the tensions around groundwater and extraction in Australia, where participants walked through a park dedicated to former coal-based infrastructures to arrive at the Lithgow mining museum.
Abstract: This article draws lessons from a walkshop organised by the authors to Lithgow, NSW, where participants walked through a park dedicated to former coal-based infrastructures to arrive at the Lithgow mining museum. The aim of the walkshop was to better understand the tensions around groundwater and extraction in Australia. This article focuses on two key elements of the walkshop: (1) First, they interrogate an attempt to engage bodily with an elemental phenomenon—groundwater—that is for the most part inaccessible to human experience. The authors thus draw on the practice of posthuman phenomenology (Neimanis) to explain how bodily attunement to our own wateriness, alongside the “proxy stories” of arts and sciences expertise, can aid in bringing groundwater into lived experience. (2) Second, they ask how walkshopping—as a coming together—can nonetheless hold onto the ambivalences, tensions, and glitches that are part of sharing space in the face of fraught issues such as mining. Here, the authors turn to Lauren Berlant’s recent writing on the commons. They suggest that their walkshop was what Berlant would call ‘training’ in living with the awkward and complicit relations of being in common.
Funding acknowledgement
This research was supported by the FASS (University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) and Artsource Global City AIR - State Government of WA funding.
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TL;DR: In what case do you like reading so much? What about the type of the wanderlust a history of walking book? The needs to read? Well, everybody has their own reason why should read some books as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In what case do you like reading so much? What about the type of the wanderlust a history of walking book? The needs to read? Well, everybody has their own reason why should read some books. Mostly, it will relate to their necessity to get knowledge from the book and want to read just to get entertainment. Novels, story book, and other entertaining books become so popular this day. Besides, the scientific books will also be the best reason to choose, especially for the students, teachers, doctors, businessman, and other professions who are fond of reading.
251 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Morrissey looks at both spatial and locational evidence when connecting the marine economy, which has traditionally been seen as part of the peripheral economy, to urban areas.
Abstract: economy. There is also a spatial element to all of the proposed social and economic indicators recommended in the book. It is argued that the focus cannot be solely at the national level as the development of ‘national economic indicators’ are not adequate to represent a comprehensive picture and there is a need to take regional and local level into account (44). In the remaining chapters, these concerns are negotiated and suggestions given on how improvements can be made. Morrissey looks at both spatial and locational evidence when connecting the marine economy, which has ‘traditionally been seen as part of the peripheral economy’, to urban areas (70). The work of Porter (1990) is used to re-examine the idea of ‘marine clusters’ and the context within which we use them, and Morrissey looks at understanding competitiveness from a ‘collective result’ of sectors rather than ‘individual processes’ (109). The Irish Maritime and Energy Resource Cluster is used as an example to explain how appropriate methods can be used to ‘evaluate the relative strengths of the cluster’, which highlights holistic ways of dealing with the multifaceted sector (111). In the chapter ‘From National to Regional to Local: A Spatial Microsimulation Model for the Marine’ a definitive way of incorporating scale and spatial referencing into the scenario is discussed and how this might inform policy is examined. Indicators aim at bringing the focus from the national to regional to ‘local level analysis’ and supporting the importance of understanding the impact of policies not only at the macro level but also at the local level is highlighted (140). A positive of the book, is that it recognises the weaknesses within certain models and applications and that one indicator may not be enough to answer these. Each chapter builds on the next, and by the end, tools with which to deal with ‘Blue Growth’ and the ‘Blue Economy’ effectively have been gained (43). In this evolving field of research, certain approaches are not perfect but identifying these voids and determining how to rectify them can help to improve future projections about the marine sector. As there is no definition of what ‘constitutes a national marine sector’ Morrissey does a capable job of helping to define it and taking it to different levels of analysis (7). Informing policy and managing marine resources in a sustainable way are what underpin the book. Each chapter highlights how policy makers and practitioners might be able to apply the information for future application. This interdisciplinary book is of use to those who are interested in developing and supporting the marine economy in a sustainable manner.
62 citations
26 Mar 2020
6 citations
References
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TL;DR: The authors argue that the alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.
Abstract: Recent social studies of science and technology, for example, have made available a very strong social constructionist argument for all forms of knowledge claims, most certainly and especially scientific ones. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. “Passionate detachment” requires more than acknowledged and self-critical partiality. Positioning is, therefore, the key practice in grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision, and much Western scientific and philosophic discourse is organized in this way. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.
6,090 citations
"Postcards from the Underground" refers background in this paper
...After all, as Donna Haraway (1988) taught us many decades ago, all vision is prosthetic; all knowledge is mediated....
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05 Aug 2009TL;DR: Sensory Ethnography as discussed by the authors introduces the concept of sensory embodied learning and introduces the idea of sensory ethnography as a way to understand and communicate about sensory cultures and cultures.
Abstract: Introducing Sensory Ethnography Understanding Sensory Cultures Preparing for Sensory Research Participant observation: sensory embodied learning Interviewing (Audio)Visual Methods Combining methods Analysing sensory materials Representing and communicating about sensory ethnography
1,765 citations
"Postcards from the Underground" refers background in this paper
...Sensory ethnographer Sarah Pink (2009) points out that walking is thus part of the ways in which ethnography (which we would link to a larger group of in situ field methods) can experiment in alternative ways of coming to knowledge—that is, through a range of sensory experience....
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TL;DR: Gilbert et al. as mentioned in this paper provide a concept of structure for transitional times, which is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission, and also the revelation of an infrastructural failure.
Abstract: This essay comes from my forthcoming book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, which has three broad aims. The first is to provide a concept of structure for transitional times. All times are transitional. But at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure. (1) The repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is, in this book's argument, necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself: but my interest is in how that extension can be non-reproductive, generating a form from within brokenness beyond the exigencies of the current crisis, and alternatively to it too. But a few definitional problems arise from this observation. One is about what repair, or the beyond of glitch, looks like both generally and amid a catastrophe; the other is defining what kind of form of life an infrastructure is. These definitional questions are especially central to contemporary counternormative political struggle. Infrastructure is not identical to system or structure, as we currently see them, because infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure. Roads, bridges, schools, food chains, finance systems, prisons, families, districts, norms all the systems that link ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation. Paul Edwards (2003) points out that the failure of an infrastructure is ordinary in poor countries and countries at war, and people suffer through it, adapting and adjusting; but even ordinary failure opens up the potential for new organizations of life, for what Deborah Cowen (2014) has described as logistics, or creative practicality in the supply chain (see also Masco, 2014; Rubenstein, 2010). So the extension of relations in a certain direction cannot be conflated with the repair of what wasn't working. In the episode of a hiccup, the erasure of the symptom doesn't prove that the problem of metabolizing has been resolved; likewise, the reinitializing of a system that has been stalled by a glitch might involve local patching or debugging (or forgetting, if the glitch is fantasmatic), while not generating a more robust or resourceful apparatus. All one can say is, first, that an infrastructure is defined by use and movement; second, that resilience and repair don't necessarily neutralize the problem that generated the need for them, but might reproduce them. At minimum resilience organizes energies for reinhabiting the ordinary where structure finds its expression: but that's at minimum. The glitch of the present that we link to economic crisis, for example, threads through other ongoing emergencies involving the movement of bodies into and out of citizenship and other forms of being-with, occupation, and jurisdiction: so contemporary antiausterity politics point not only to new ties among disparately located and unequally precarious lives, but also mark the need for a collective struggle to determine the terms of transition for general social existence. (2) Terms of transition provide conceptual infrastructures not only as ideas but also as part of the protocols or practices that hold the world up. To attend to the terms of transition is to forge an imaginary for managing the meanwhile within damaged life's perdurance, a meanwhile that is less an end or an ethical scene than a technical political heuristic that allows for ambivalence, distraction, antagonism and inattention not to destroy collective existence. Jeremy Gilbert adapts Georges Simondon's concept of provisional unity or metastability for this matter, allowing us to see transitional structure as a loose convergence that lets a collectivity stay bound to the ordinary even as some of its forms of life are fraying, wasting, and developing offshoots among types of speculative practice from the paranoid to the queer utopian (Gilbert, 2014: 107-118). …
375 citations
"Postcards from the Underground" refers background or methods in this paper
...Here, we turn to queer feminist theorist Lauren Berlant. In her recent work on ‘the commons’, Berlant (2016) eschews a conception of the commons where ambivalence or tension might be magically resolved, in favour of “the common of awkwardness, complicity, and intimacy” (p....
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...The tensions and incommensurabilities that swirl in the politics of mining and groundwater were also experienced at various points during the walkshop itself—leading us to suggest that the temporary public or “commons” that the walkshop activates must eschew, as Berlant (2016) suggests, the promise of belonging, and instead take up the task of providing a “training ground” in ambivalence, awkwardness and complicity....
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...But for the suspended and ephemeral timespace of the walkshop we taste what it means to all breathe together—to find commonality in the fact that we are “everyone with—and without— lungs,”—“moving towards each other to make new forms of approach from difference and distance” (Berlant, 2016, p. 408)....
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...As Berlant (2016) says, if scenes of collective being are “graceless, absurd, or wilful, the risk of not trying for the common of awkwardness, complicity and intimacy would be even more ridiculous and deadly” (p. 407)....
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...As Timothy Choy (2016) writes, “breathing together rarely means breathing the same” (para....
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TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors argue that comparative literature in China is still very energetic playing a leading role in Chinese-Western cultural and academic exchange and communication, and they also argue that even in the age of globalization, comparative literature studies in China are still flourishing as it is closely related to or even combined with world literature into one discipline, with many of the internationally discussed theoretic topics "globalized" in the Chinese context.
Abstract: Starting with questioning Gayatri Spivak's controversial book Death of a Discipline, the present article tries to argue that unlike the case in the United States, comparative literature in China is still very energetic playing a leading role in Chinese-Western cultural and academic exchange and communication. Although, to the author, comparative literature in China did not become an independent discipline until the 1980s, it has been developing so rapidly that it was soon involved in international comparative literature scholarship and has become an important member of the International Comparative Literature Association. Since comparative literature became an independent discipline in mainland China in the 1980s, it has been both combined with “area studies” with its focus on Chinese-Western comparative studies and with the strategy of “crossing borders” and more topics from other disciplines or branches of learning. Even in the age of globalization when many of the other disciplines of the humanities are severely challenged, comparative literature studies in China is still flourishing as it is closely related to or even combined with world literature into one discipline, with many of the internationally discussed theoretic topics “globalized” in the Chinese context.
283 citations
"Postcards from the Underground" refers background in this paper
...The concept of planetarity was developed by Gayatri Spivak (2003) to suggest that the planet “is in the species of alterity”—its phenomena are not exchangeable, fully knowable (p. 72)....
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TL;DR: In what case do you like reading so much? What about the type of the wanderlust a history of walking book? The needs to read? Well, everybody has their own reason why should read some books as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In what case do you like reading so much? What about the type of the wanderlust a history of walking book? The needs to read? Well, everybody has their own reason why should read some books. Mostly, it will relate to their necessity to get knowledge from the book and want to read just to get entertainment. Novels, story book, and other entertaining books become so popular this day. Besides, the scientific books will also be the best reason to choose, especially for the students, teachers, doctors, businessman, and other professions who are fond of reading.
251 citations
"Postcards from the Underground" refers background in this paper
...This walkshop joins a lineage of walking methods that have been the implicit and explicit subject of scholarly literatures for some time—anticipated in traditions as different as the writings of 19th century French flâneurs, the songlines of Australia’s traditional owners, and in walking artists of modern and contemporary art (e.g. Evans, 2012; Hind & Qualmann, 2015; Solnit, 2000)....
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...…subject of scholarly literatures for some time—anticipated in traditions as different as the writings of 19th century French flâneurs, the songlines of Australia’s traditional owners, and in walking artists of modern and contemporary art (e.g. Evans, 2012; Hind & Qualmann, 2015; Solnit, 2000)....
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