Showing papers on "Performativity published in 2018"

Materializing 'Competence': Perspectives from International STEM Scholars.

Abstract: Applied linguists have been exploring approaches to second language acquisition and competence that move beyond a prioritization of cognition and grammar that was derived from the foundational structuralist legacy in linguistics. Recently, for example, they have collaborated in putting together an integrated alternative model (Douglas Fir Group, 2016) to move theory and pedagogy forward. Shifting further yet toward the material locus and spatiotemporal conditioning of communication, this article reports on the communicative practices of international STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) scholars. Its data analysis uses a spatial orientation informed by schools such as new materialism, post‐humanism, and actor network theory, influenced largely by scholars in material and spatial sciences. The article calls for a fuller materialization, embodiment, and performativity in theorizing language competence than currently conceptualized in applied linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making accountable teachers: the terrors and pleasures of performativity

Abstract: This article draws from Stephen Ball’s work on markets, managerialism, and performativity to frame a comparative study that examines the reconstitution of the teacher–subject across a pivotal decad...

Youth work, performativity and the new youth impact agenda: getting paid for numbers?

Abstract: A growing policy emphasis on measurement and outcomes has led to cultures of performativity, which are transforming what educators do and how they feel about themselves in relation to their work. W...

Models as speech acts: the telling case of financial models

Abstract: This paper intends to bring Austinian themes into methodological discussion about models. Using Austinian conceptual vocabulary, I argue that models perform actions in and outside of the academic f...

Men Doing and Undoing Gender at Work: A Review and Research Agenda

Abstract: While research on gender in organizations has not only documented sustained gender inequality, it has also offered an understanding of how gender is enacted through doing and undoing gender An underexplored aspect concerns how men can do and undo gender to support or hinder gender equality processes in organizations Doing gender is then understood as creating gender difference while undoing gender would conversely mean to reduce gender difference The former is supporting gender inequality while the latter means moving toward gender equality This article therefore provides a systematic review of empirical articles that discuss how men are doing and undoing gender within an organizational context It is shown that undoing gender practices of men in organizations are under-researched and a research agenda of how men can undo gender at work is thus developed This article makes a two-fold contribution: first it offers a refinement of doing and undoing gender approaches and second, it develops a research agenda for exploring how men can undo gender at work

The democratic rejection of democracy: Performative Failure and the Limits of Critical Performativity in an Organizational Change Project

Abstract: ‘How do we introduce democracy democratically to people who are not sure they want it?’ This question was posed to us at the outset of what became a three-year experiment in seeking to implement mo...

Gender trouble in the workplace: applying Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to news organizations

Abstract: Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, introduced in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, has significantly shaped individual and collective understandings of gender. This essay examines performativity as a framework for critically assessing gender performances in patriarchal workplace environments, including the institutional rules and norms that shape behaviors and interactions. Specifically, we suggest that performativity offers a valuable lens for critiquing women’s experiences in newsrooms, spaces where expectations for gender can significantly shape professional experiences and success. We provide an overview and evaluation of the development and existing applications of Butler’s performativity theory, including its use in organizational contexts. We also propose methodological and topical approaches through which performativity can be used to study newsrooms and the experiences of female journalists in particular.

A performative framework for the study of intellectuals

Abstract: This article introduces a new, performative framework for analysing intellectuals and intellectual interventions. It elaborates on the strengths of this theoretical perspective vis-a-vis rival appr...

Ideology in the age of mediatized politics: a study on the aesthetics and politics of charisma, ordinariness, and spectacle from the 2015 election advertising campaigns in the UK and Greece

Abstract: This thesis seeks to explore the place and role of ideology in political communication under conditions of mediatization. Exploring the place of ideology, as I will argue, involves exploring the ways political meaning is produced through the mediatic practices of personalisation, conversationalisation and dramatisation, while exploring its role involves exploring the ways political power is exercised through these practices. Particularly, the thesis builds upon an analytics of mediatization according to which ideology lies in, the textually-discursively organised and ordered, performative capacity of mediatic practices to recall and rework institutional symbolisms from the past serving the institutional exercise of power in the present, or the recontextualizing dynamic of media performativity. To operationalise this analytical approach, the thesis employs a paradigmatic case study; the study of political advertisements produced by the two major political parties in Greece and the UK in the run-up to the January and May 2015, respectively, General Elections. The empirical analysis seeks to demonstrate that central to all the ideological mediatic practices is the fusion of the private with the public through different aesthetic regimes, such as the authenticity of charisma, the intimacy of ordinariness, and the ritualism of spectacle, each emerging invested with its own recontextualizing dynamic – the politics of mission, everyday life and belonging. Each, in other words, has its own capacity to emotive-cognitively and spatiotemporally rework institutionally symbolic meanings from the past enacting different forms of institutional agency (e.g. partisan or cross-partisan) and ordering (e.g. displacement, temporalisation or eternalisation) in the present. The overarching contribution of this analysis is to argue/establish that we cannot gain a full understanding of how political parties’ ideology is renegotiated nowadays without a critical interrogation of the recontextualizing dynamic of mediatic performances. Nor can we gain a full understanding of how parties and other political institutions ideologically deal with the pragmatic challenges of the present without a critical interrogation of the aestheticity and affectivity of (mediatized) political discourse.

The performativity of leadership talk

Abstract: Leadership-as-practice holds great promise for the re-theorization of leadership in ways that reflect the dynamics of ongoing practice in the day-to-day realities of organizing. However, in order to progress this agenda there is an urgent need to develop more dynamic theories and complementary methodologies that are better able to engage with the continuities of leadership practice. This paper responds to this need firstly by teasing out the conceptual implications of the practices/practice duality, differentiating between leadership as a set of practices, and leadership in the flow of practice. Then, drawing theoretical insights from Austin and Mead, the performative effects of turning points in the flow of ordinary conversation are examined in the context of the leadership talk of a senior management team. The paper makes contributions to both theory and methodology, which are elaborated empirically to show how different types of talk relate to different phases of leadership practice.

Risky business: Reflections on critical performativity in practice:

Abstract: Critical scholars in the business school are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of their research beyond the confines of academia. This has been articulated most prominently around th ...

Oppressive Curriculum: Sexist, Racist, Classist, and Homophobic Practice of Dress Codes in Schooling

Abstract: In this paper drawing on a study about school dress code policies and related issues—such as multiculturalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, in the professional discourse—I show how similar the two patriarchal and White supremacist structures of education (school) and law enforcement (police) work. I argue that sexism, racism, homophobia, and classism in formal and hidden curriculum could be as mortal and brutal as it happened in cases of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and others. Dress codes convey sexism with a male center gaze and racism with White middle-class norms that serve as a hidden curriculum with inherent biases. That is, not acting White, not being lady-like, wearing butch-tomboy or ragged clothing, is disruptive to academic success. Discussing a dress code in a high school in a working-class Black community, I argue that like police officers, educators tend to make dangerous judgments about bodies. Finally, to stop the harmful reproduction of such judgments, I suggest what Judith Butler calls “subversive repetition” and “subversive citation” (Butler 1990, p. 147) which allows resisting the everyday experiences that produce oneself to address the question that how can we, as teachers, school administrations, and teacher educators, resist those practices that produce our bodies as vulnerable and potential victims and others’ bodies as dangerous and potential violators. To problematize, to conceptualize, and to enhance the above-mentioned argument, I will draw on several feminist frameworks such as performativity (Butler 1990), intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989), and objectification (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997).

Sounding Expanded Affinities : A Polytemporal Approach to Reconceptualizing Egalitarian Social Relations

Abstract: My doctoral submission, Sounding Expanded Affinities, examines how strides toward gender equality might be made, but it postulates that this is too difficult while marriage remains at the core of our patriarchal value system. This patriarchal system is one which oppresses women by manipulating subjects into its preferred roles often in subtle, chronic ways, using repetition and pairing as its tools. The doctoral submission then formulates a synchronous model of time to critique and disturb the operation of convention, to evaluate alternative forms of relationships, and finally, to propose a new relationship form with egalitarianism as its aim.I approach the doctoral project as an artistic practitioner first. Therefore, I have extracted a methodology from my sound installation work that I refer to as “polytemporality”. I borrow this musical term to bring together thinking from different historical moments about how women might achieve greater equality. The project focuses on the United States context, specifically the period between the nineteenth century and now. I ultimately build on this research into earlier utopian proposals for gender equality to develop an idea that I call “expanded affinities”: this is a proposal for a more egalitarian form of relationship. The two terms are both method and subject of the artworks, dissertation, and writing that comprise my doctoral submission, Sounding Expanded Affinities. I see the two as linked since I believe that gender inequality is reinforced by notions of linear time. “Polytemporality”, which I define as a synchronous sense of the past, present, and future, is therefore meant to disrupt the normative ideas about gender within relationships. The word “polytemporal” further serves as a conscious nod to the politics of polyamory, or, non-monogamy, taken up in this text. The notion of expanded affinities builds on my research into earlier historical attempts to form more egalitarian types of relationships in intentional communities or through experimenting with different modes of relating. It is a concept that contributes to feminist and queer critiques of heteronormative constructs insofar as it decenters marriage and biological kinship, and redistributes the state’s economic investments in those forms of belonging to the individual instead of the couple. Expanded affinities is ultimately a way of relating that exceeds present-day restrictions and hierarchies within love relations.The first two installations that are part of Sounding Expanded Affinities are Utopians Dance and A Reeducation. Together, these two installations take up the initial terms of gender identity, feminism, sexuality, utopian communities, and alternative economics. The third installation includes the radio play ReCast: LIVE ON-AIR in which feminist voices from across 200 years are brought together in an omnipresent radio station to discuss relationship forms. Polytemporality is not only the method of writing, but the form too, as ReCast: LIVE ON-AIR aims to create a hybrid sense of time in the physical and aural space of installation. The dissertation appendix includes reprints of my script and book from the above mentioned installations.I use the polytemporal method in my dissertation as well. Chapter one introduces the concept, and chapter two offers an historical analysis of the patriarchal nature of marriage that also identifies the residual asymmetrical power structures from the past that still exist today. The third chapter evaluates the egalitarian potential of ethical non-monogamies for women, in part by examining earlier historical communities where non-monogamy was practiced in order to create more egalitarian modes of relating. The fourth chapter introduces the concept of expanded affinities as my alternative to ethical non-monogamy that is intended to be a more inclusive and more equal relationship form.Together, the concept of expanded affinities and polytemporality allow the personal register to speak across time to create bonds beyond the constraints of the present, of the couple, and of gender roles. The installations provide an element of embodiment and performativity; the dissertation offers analysis and scholarship; and the artistic writings contain fractured narratives. It is my hope that such an interdisciplinary approach to form and expression will work to forward the frames within which feminist art and discourse can take place today.

Negotiating Performances of “Real” Marriage in Chinese Queer Xinghun

Abstract: This article explores how marriage is negotiated by Chinese queer subjects who face tension between the heteronormative expectations of their families and their desire to maintain a same-sex relati...

The performative power of (non)human agency assemblages of soft governance

Abstract: This article addresses recent transformations of European education governance, in particular, the ways in which the parliamentary steering chain has been supplemented with an incentive-based mode of soft governance. The article argues that this new soft governance makes use of technologies that are designed to measure performance. In order to capture the impact of these tools, the article suggests that new performativity-based approaches to policy and reform studies have been introduced that take inspiration in the turn to materiality. The article seeks to provide a theoretical overview of these performative approaches and examines the performative effects of data visualizations and the way the governing through (data) visualizations become a governing through affects. The article explores how affects, such as shame, may be seen as an effect of certain modes of soft governance that may operate by concealing their own traces by making people and nations voluntarily co-opt themselves into the gover...

Between “this” side and “that” side: On performativity, youth identities and “sticky” spaces:

Abstract: In this article, I investigate the performativity of everyday practices – doings and sayings – that work to constitute identities and spaces through different affective intensities. In doing so, I ...

Economic Imaginaries Across the Public Sphere:an empirical exploration into economic understandings and representations across four sites in the UK

Abstract: This study explores how people understand and represent the economy in different spaces across society. It draws on over 120 semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation across four sites: the civil service, the financial sector, the financial press, and one of the UK’s largest housing estates. The multi-sited empirical study builds on and contributes to two bodies of literature. First, through looking at the representations and understandings of the economy across a number of sites it explores how the economy is anchored in different registers of meaning across society. This brings the notion of the economy into the same theoretical framework that has been used to theorise the fragmentation of the public sphere, which has mainly focussed on political, cultural and media fragmentation, but ignored the economy. The second intervention comes in the field of economic sociology. The multi-sited framework allows for an investigation into different forms of agency in socioeconomic praxis. The sites are explored as both internal localised networks of interaction and as spaces situated within broader societal relationships of power. The findings and the argument constructed emphasise the importance of broader structural relationships. In doing so they contribute towards undermining the influential recent trend inspired by Michel Callon's notion of economic performativity, and the localised networked conception of agency at its core. Beyond these theoretical contributions, the thesis also provides a snapshot of contemporary society in the UK. The elite institutional sites looked at are found to generate a self-serving abstract economic discourse grounded in the politics of knowledge representation. This elite economic discourse does not resonate at spaces on the periphery of the public sphere, and in the lack of rational pluralised discourse on the economy many people turn to explanatory frameworks that harness an anti-elite sentiment and appear to fit with their immediate lifeworlds. The result is a fragmented economic imaginary across society that holds little hope of bringing much needed positive economic change.

Beyond Performativity: A Pragmatic Model of Teacher Professional Learning.

Abstract: The intent and content of teacher professional learning has changed in recent times to meet the demands of performativity. In this article, we offer and demonstrate a pragmatic way to map teacher professional learning that both meets current demands and secures a place for teacher-led catalytic learning. To achieve this, we position identified characteristics of performative professional learning on intersecting continua modelled on Bourdieu’s mapping of social capital, which we have called a Pragmatic Model of Teacher Professional Learning. The continua are labelled (after) as: domain of influence, sphere of action, and autonomy-transformation. While the pragmatic model is illustrated through three examples of teacher professional learning in use in Australia and its characteristics have been drawn from Australian regulatory requirements for teacher registration, it will be applicable in other national jurisdictions. The model aims to move ‘beyond performativity’ and to define a systematic and pr...

Living on the Edge?:Professional Anxieties at Work in Academia and Veterinary Practice

Abstract: Through empirical research on academics and veterinary surgeons, this article focuses on identity and how it is reflected in, and reproduced by, anxiety and insecurity at work. Three analytical themes – perfection, performativity and commodified service – each of which generates anxiety indicates a loss of autonomy as academics and vets are subjected to competitive market forces as well as an intensification of masculine managerial controls of assessment, audit and accountability. We see these pressures and their effects as reflecting a commodification of service provision where the consumer (student or client) begins to redefine the relationship between those offering some expertise and those who are its recipients, partly achieved through the performative gaze of constant and visible rating mechanisms. Our empirical research also identifies sources of anxiety concerns in their attempts to achieve perfection against this background of uncertain knowledge and precarious contexts of the performative nature of professional expertise.

The Things of the Parliament

Abstract: Over the past few decades, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has become a popular approach in the social sciences. Instead of providing a general overview, this chapter shows how ANT might be put to use when it comes to the empirical study of democratic politics. More precisely, drawing on historical and ethnographic research conducted on the Hungarian Parliament between 2006 and 2010, the chapter demonstrates how an ANT-inspired reading of representative democracy may open up new spaces of political engagement within a seemingly coherent political reality. Following ANT’s early insights, the first section examines how paying close attention to the materiality of parliamentary politics may help us better understand this political reality as a historically specific development. The second section argues that this political reality consists of multiple ‘modes of doing’, which suggest that there is politics going on not only within, but also between different organising logics associated with representative democracy. Finally, the third section invokes the concept of performativity in order to explore in how we, as researcher-citizens, are implicated in this political reality, and how we may interfere with it.

From “I’m Never Having Children” to Motherhood: A Critical Analysis of Silence and Voice in Negotiations of Childbearing Face

Abstract: Women who once communicated themselves as permanently childless/childfree by choice but then became mothers must negotiate a drastic shift in childbearing identity. To study this identity work, the present study adopts performative face theory, a critical interpersonal and family communication theory that places Goffman’s theory of face in conversation with Butler’s theory of performativity. In this theorization, negotiations of face sediment oppositional identities through the reiterative power of discursive and bodily acts. Critical-qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with mothers who once told others they never wanted to have children demonstrates how the facework strategies of voice and silence allow women to perform the “sincerely childfree” face and then the “good (future) mother” face. These negotiations of face are enabled and constrained by relations of power that define identity categories. Although these negotiations of face are often relationally harmonious, they also reify pow...

Mapping the Sisyphean Archives: Archival/AnarchivalPerformativity of Repetition and Failure in ContemporaryArchival Art

Abstract: Exploring a distinctive archival turn in art, this study investigates where the archival impulse comes from and why and how artists, as performative researchers, are obsessed with issues relating to the archive. In order to answer for these questions, this thesis displays a dynamic geography of archival/anarchival performativity in contemporary archival art since, primarily, the 1960s. The artist as Sisyphus detects the aporia of the archival impulse being simultaneously archival and anarchival and activates a Sisyphean loop of repetition and failure in their own artistic archives. Inspired by the myth of Sisyphus, this project is therefore given the title “mapping the Sisyphean archives”. Using a methodology of mapping, diverse case studies of archival art are interwoven to unveil the reconfiguration of the physical and conceptual conditions of the archive. The meaning of mapping here is varied – doing, undoing, performing, failing, and queering, polymorphously facilitated by two key wheels of Sisyphean performativity. A critical capacity of repetition and failure is thus crucially credited as it brings resistant and alternative modes of being, thinking, and knowing to undermine any idealisation and totalitarianism embedded in normative archives. Referring to Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the archive and Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts on rhizomatic creativity, the first half of the thesis examines multifaceted aspects of repetition as being pathological, self-evolving, creative, and differentiated each time. In the second half, with reference to Aaron Williamson’s performance, The Collapsing Lecture, staging the idea of failure, polyphonic potentiality of failure is addressed as a particular attitude of Sisyphean artists to experiment with unusual, irregular, fallible, and purposeless yet permissive, rebellious, and emancipatory rhythms from within the archive. Such a destructive yet generative force of Sisyphean performativity ultimately contributes to subverting the negative connotation of repetition and failure against the ideas of banal sameness and of success. Above all, a performative and processual multiplicity that Sisyphean archival art maps out demonstrates how any overdetermined social consensus and power inscribed in archives can be dismantled and how the stagnant site of archives can be transformed into an imaginative, fluctuating platform for infinite future stories to come.

Restaging place : performativity and the camera : Parliament Square recast through social media photography

Abstract: This practice-related study of a politically charged public place, Parliament Square, London is led by an examination of social media photographs that have been taken there and posted online. The photographs have been removed from the fast flow of social media, transposed to analogue film, slowed and analyzed. During this physical process four social activities emerge: tourism, protest, state occasion and the everyday. An investigation into each of these areas is instigated by a close examination of one related photograph. This investigation occurs theoretically and in the realm of performative sculptural, photographic and film practice. As well as being a study of the actual place, the Square offers a public location from which to reflexively examine its virtual equivalents online. Through performative practice, my study highlights commonalities between the role of photographs, monuments and public places as methods of representing historical understandings and their democratic potential: the ‘everyday’ of the Square and photography. The study investigates the role of photography in the construction of place – deconstructing how tourists pose and gaze into the camera to return to the singularity of the individual experience. The enquiry continues to look at Parliament Square as a place of political protest counter to the dominant state narrative of the past and the present. It is a place where particular narratives are embodied and celebrated, often misrepresenting the complexity of the past. The four photographs are restaged in the studio. Here they become a distorting mirror of both actual and virtual places revealing an absence that arguably occurs within all photographs. This absence might allow the viewer to relate to the subject depicted, find common ground, as well as develop a critical self-awareness and openness to the views of others.

Gender-reveal parties: performing community identity in pink and blue

Abstract: The gender-reveal party has become the latest trend to publicize and commoditize what was once a private, intimate moment in parenthood. As this trend has grown in popularity, it has sparked a divisive discourse and reasserted normative ideals of gender. This article explores the representations and conversations surrounding this trend across newspapers, magazines and Internet sites. Approaching this phenomenon through performance and performativity illustrates how these parties highlight issues of liminality, gender, communitas and visibility. The gender-reveal party offers a performative space at the threshold of life, a liminal moment drawing on the power of communitas while creating a sense of permanence and security in the categorization of sexual and gendered difference. Uniting a community permits a collective reshaping of the now-sexed/now-gendered baby through rituals linked to binaried perceptions of identity. It allows adults to recuperate what they have learned from their own gendered ...

Issues of power and control in STEM education: a reading through the postmodern condition

Abstract: STEM, or the integration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, has rapidly become a dominant discourse in political, economic and educational spheres. In the U.S., the STEM movement has been boosted by global economic-based competition and associated fears, in terms of STEM graduates, when compared with other nations. However, many critiques question the nature and goals of this competition, as well as, the possibilities to improve STEM talents through the current dominant conceptualizations and practices of STEM education. In addition, the apparent lack of significant and coherent embracement of (and sometimes silence about) socioscientific and socio-political issues and perspectives renders STEM education incapable of preparing learners for active citizenships. Building on these critiques, I argue that these problems are possible consequences of STEM as a construct of power. My arguments are based on Lyotard’s conceptions of knowledge in postmodern society (as reported in The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge, University Press, Manchester, 1984), which I use to analyze some aspects of the STEM educational movement. Throughout the paper, I explore the construction of STEM education within competitive frames that place prime value on high performativity. There seem to be two characteristics of current STEM education that support performativity; these are an increased focus on technological and engineering designs, and a tendency for interdisciplinary education. At the same time, the eagerness for performativity and competition seems to drag STEM education into selectiveness, thereby jeopardizing its possible benefits. Recommendations are also discussed.

Gendered places: Place, performativity and flânerie in the City of London

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the relationship between gender performativity and organizational place, taking the City of London as the focus for the empirical research, and extending a Lefebvrian understanding of space through the practice of flânerie. The paper explores how the City is imagined, constructed and experienced in and through gender performativity. This is explored with reference to fieldwork including photographic and interview data, as well as through an embodied, immersive methodology based on the observational tradition of flânerie, showing how this can help to both sense and make sense of organizational place, particularly in terms of how such places can compel feelings of belonging or non-belonging. The research looks beyond the spatial configuration of a single organization to encompass the wider geographical location of multiple organizations, in this case the City. The analysis highlights the interplay between two dominant forms of masculinity, emphasizing how the setting both reflects and affects this interplay. In this way the paper contributes to scholarship on organizational place and the placing of gender performativity, and extends Lefebvre’s theories of space as socially produced by (re)producing the City through peripatetic practice based on the tradition of the flậneur.

Popular music and politics : in, against and beyond identity

Abstract: The research establishes radical modes of theorising for an explicitly anti-capitalist musicology able to celebrate music’s enactment of post-capitalist desire and to understand how music helps to ‘make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable’. Adopting a sharp focus on the 1960s to the 1990s this thesis combines popular musicology and autonomist Marxism to argue that music functions as politics in transforming consciousness and shifting domains of acceptability in thought and feeling. Emancipatory politics must destroy the appearance of a ‘natural’ order and the thesis develops perspectives on ‘popular music and politics’ that can account for past struggles against capitalism, demonstrating how and why these struggles are naturalised with the discontinuity they signify necessarily erased or appropriated. Music performs emotional work of political significance such as in the embodiment of hope and confidence necessary for political mobilisation. The capacities of music to articulate the emotions that empower people are deployed here to suggest contradictions contained in, against and beyond identity bear utopian orientation. This statement is developed to ask what it means to counter hegemony and break social cohesion. ‘Insubordination’ forms the macro-arguments of the research. These arguments are around the roles of politics in popular music experience in the translation of mid-twentieth century revolution to capitalist realism and neoliberal modernity. Flows of rebellion are drawn out carefully in discussions of non-subordination, listening and identity. Hidden structures of rationality undermine the power of the imagination and therefore hinder possibilities for enacting non-capitalist futures. The research takes its cue from new trends which are cultivating different habits of thinking for post-capitalist politics and defining political action. It sets frames for the subversive potential of music as affording liberatory experience. Many of the concepts and ideas, such as psychedelic consciousness and punk performativity, used to discuss artists from Jimi Hendrix, to Patti Smith and John Cage (Destiny’s Child, Pussy Riot and Tupac) do not have recourse to assured theoretical principles. The reader should expect to access the work of a wide range of authors, not least Mark Fisher.