Stream - Inspiring Critical Thought (E-Journal)
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‘Whiteness’ vs ‘Otherness’: A Conceptualization of Race Through an Affective Lens
No full textFeelings and emotions are an intrinsic part of our everyday life and racialized bodies experience them profoundly and continuously. Through the skin and through the senses, race evokes an affective response. From anger to sadness, fear, and shame for both the dominant culture and the racialized minority, affect has shaped their interactions, dynamics, and relationships. Today, the separation between ‘us’ and ‘the other’ is still palpable within the context of social and political life. By understanding how bodies become racialized, the role of the skin as a visual representation of difference, the duality of melancholia and the concept of disidentification against dominant ideologies, this paper aims to demonstrate that affect and race are constitutive of each other. When looking at racial history through an affective lens, we see that it has been bound by emotions that happen in our daily existence; in instances, moments and encounters that leave a somehow permanent mark. Affect flows and gets stuck, it reveals stories of happiness and stories of trauma. It discloses other ways of knowing and other ways of learning. It helps us look at the past, dwell and learn from it to open new pathways in the lives of marginalized communities. It calls for an urgency to express unconformity toward racial formations and to understand how emotions circulate and move through our own bodies and through the world
Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in China: The Construction of the Chinese Identity on Television Show Singer
Get PDFEven though the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is known as a culturally unified state with a nationalism propensity, it has a long multicultural history, 56 ethnic groups, a globalized economy, and a modern and cosmopolitan lifestyle. China demonstrates the qualities of a cosmopolitan country in naturalizing the cultural variety and digesting social and cultural conflicts within the nation-state. Firstly, the cultural differences in China come from not only ethnic groups but also customs from various regions. Hence, the emphasis on Chinese history and traditional culture, especially Confucius ideology, are critical factors in constructing a unified Chinese identity. Moreover, Greater China and the pan-Chinese nation are used to include people from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and all ethnic Chinese around the globe. Meanwhile, under the influence of globalization, China becomes home to people who are not ethnic Chinese. The modern Chinese community represents the value of cosmopolitanism, naturalizing the existence of foreign visitors and multiracial Chinese.
As one of the most popular programs on Chinese television, under the direction of the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), the production of winners on Singer (also known as I am a Singer) reflects the construction of an imaginary modern Chinese community. Through analysis on performances, interviews and comments related to the finals of three key winners (the Mongols Chinese winner Han Lei, the Chinese American winner Coco Lee, and the British winner Jessie J), this paper will discuss the confluence of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the construction of an imagined Chinese identity. The representation of Singer depicts an open, modern, and diversified cultural sphere, in which multiethnic, multinational, and multiracial appearances are naturalized
Mr Interdiction, the 1980s War on Drugs, and Building Future Infrastructure for Facial Recognition Technologies
No full textBy the late-1980s, human-centric facial recognition technologies (FRTs) were fast becoming obsolete; the increase in global mobility of goods and populations put increasingly greater stress on human-centric identification systems. The accompanying biopolitics of flow and control, grounded in securitization, demanded monitoring of continuous movement and the idea of stopping each face for sustained human observation quickly grew outmoded. This paper examines the shift from human-centric FRTs to automated FRTs, characterized by the establishment of the Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) database (1993-96) and the later Face Recognition Vender Tests (2000-present). This trajectory is defined by the aforementioned shift from technologies rooted in disciplinary biopolitics to those based in flow and control, that is paralleled by the turn from Cold War ideological battles towards the War on Drugs as the central truth regime justifying the establishments of improvement of FRTs into the turn of the millennium.Sponsored by the American Counter Drug Technology Program, in partnership with DARPA, construction of the FERET began in 1993. Not only was this database essential to the later Face Recognition Vendor Tests (FRVTs), but it also provided incredibly influential and expansive documentation and methodologies for the creation and deployment of future facial recognition technologies (FRT). Such infrastructure remains deeply relevant in a post-9/11 world, in particular during the ongoing crisis of the global Covid-19 pandemic and the near future of climate catastrophe and mass migration
L’écriture d’une/comme Infrastructure
No full textOn a typical afternoon on Zoom, a few months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a colleague of Hubert’s interrupted the conversation to share that he had purchased the same office chair as him—an Ikea chair, which they had both chosen because of its respectable price-quality ratio. In the weeks that followed, that chair seemed to multiply from one Zoom screen to the next, gradually taking over the uncertain material conditions of the remote university. While sharing this anecdote with Monica as we began editing this issue, we realized that this moment of mutual recognition was emblematic of the situation’s configurations. This movement of replacing kitchen chairs of questionable quality into ergonomic work furniture seemed a banal testimony to the strange ambivalence of the transition of our academic activities online, prompting us, at rhythms somewhat synchronized, to reimagine the material and aesthetic configurations of our daily lives. Lors d’un après-midi comme les autres sur Zoom, quelques mois après le début de la pandémie du COVID-19, un collègue d’Hubert interrompt la conversation afin de partager s’être procuré la même chaise de bureau que lui – une chaise Ikea, qu’ils avaient tous deux choisie en raison de son rapport qualité-prix somme toute respectable. Dans les semaines qui suivirent, cette chaise lui a semblé se multiplier d’un écran Zoom à l’autre, s’emparant progressivement des conditions matérielles incertaines de l’université à distance. En partageant cette anecdote à Monica, alors que nous commencions l’édition de ce numéro, nous en sommes venus au constat que ce moment de reconnaissance mutuelle parlait bien des configurations de la situation. Ce mouvement de remplacement des chaises de cuisine de qualité discutable en chaises de travail ergonomique témoignait banalement de l’étrange ambivalence de la transition de nos activités universitaire en ligne, nous incitant, à des rythmes somme toute synchronisés, à revoir les configurations matérielles et esthétiques de nos quotidiens
'Fit for the Job': A Programmatic Inquiry on Style and Aesthetics in the Workplace
Get PDFThis article showcases a few main points of the theoretical frame in organizational communication I have been working on for my doctoral research on the aesthetic notion of “style”. Maxwell (2013) in his book on qualitative research methodology proposes to initiate a research design by considering the personal motivations that push us to work in the direction we designate ourselves. For my part, the moment that triggered my scientific interest in style is concretely certain experiences that I had in the restaurant business where I worked for several years, those of a form of selection of workers that seemed to be operated on the level of aesthetics. I present a brief autoethnographic overview of those experiences, then turn to theoretical approaches potentially helpful in making sense of them
Sonic Difference: Reflexive Listening and the Classification of Voice
Get PDFListening is not a passive practice, but an active response and construction of the exterior world. Although categorizing voices with identity markers helps self-orientation, it can perpetuate false distinctions between “us” and “other” due to the voice’s continually changing, multi-faceted sound and resulting meanings. Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) argues that “listening operates as an organ of racial discernment, categorization, and resistance in the shadow of vision’s alleged cultural dominance” (p. 4). Attaching a physical or mental image to a sound produces a sense of intimacy and reassurance that we understand the world. But these are false understandings due to the voice’s ability for alteration. Listening does not dismiss racial essentialism, but culturally reconstitutes it. Difference exists, what matters is how we classify these differences. Listening is important to review because it helps people reflect on their own listening practices that may be taken for granted. By philosophically theorizing listening, we as scholars may come to an understanding of aurality as offering new ways of perceiving and interpreting the world sonically. This article examines how the sound of the voice has discriminatorily been valued and how listening to sound in different ways can help address these discriminatory practices of essentialism that have become standardized. People can begin reflecting on how their listening influences their understanding of sound and voice as markers of identity by practicing “pausing” (Eidsheim, 2019) and “listening out” (Muscat, 2019), two reflexive modes of interpretation challenging dominant listening practices grounded in Western thought and value
Humanitarian Communication Through the Lens of Feminist Ethics of Care
Get PDFEthics are the driving force of the humanitarian field, a domain that has been governed by general and universal ethical principles. Researchers have largely focused on studying the organizational commitment to these principles, paying less attention to the role-specific ethics of this field. Moreover, researchers who consider the humanitarian field from a media studies lens have often focused on media representation, while questions about communication as practice are sidelined. In this paper, I approach humanitarian ethics with a particular focus on role morality and communication practices. With a particular focus on the role of a humanitarian communications specialist, I argue, in this paper, that the feminist ethics of care is a useful ethical framework that can guide communication specialists to better practices when they are in the field of operation. I also answer the following research questions: What are the main ethical principles that humanitarian communication specialists are expected to observe as humanitarians? Why are these principles insufficient? How might feminist ethics of care fill the gap left by current humanitarian principles and what would be the added value of this framework for practicing humanitarian communication? To answer, I ground my approach in an experiential understanding built from my personal experience as a humanitarian communications specialist. Second, I offer a literature review to highlight the common ground between humanitarian ethics and the feminist ethics of care and the added value of the feminist ethics of care why applied by humanitarian communication specialists. Third, I provide some examples of communications practices that may follow the feminist ethics of care model.
 
Introduction to the Simon Fraser – University of Calgary Special Issue
Get PDFWith this year’s graduate student conferences hosted separately at the University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University, our goal was to encourage discussion and debate around the topic of crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has been at the forefront of public attention; even forcing our respective conferences into the disembodied safety of virtual space. However, it is important to remember that COVID-19 is not the only crisis faced in recent years; the overdose crisis, crisis of the corporatization of universities, economic crisis, crisis of truth and misinformation, and the looming environmental threat of the Anthropocene, have been with us and will continue to be grappled with into the foreseeable future.
Crises echo through the past to the present, such as those experienced by our Indigenous communities. They re-emerge, still to be grappled with and struggled against. As individuals and researchers, we may assume any number of these crises are out of scope or outside our area of expertise. We often fail to consider them. However, crises defy temporality and spatiality as easily as disciplinary borders; both squeezing and stretching, accelerating, and suspending notions of the like. The contributors of this special issue consider an array of crises as they collide with diverse fields and disciplines, encouraging us to reflect on how they intersect our own. Ultimately, we aspire to trouble the notion of crises themselves. Questioning our understanding and reapplying it where we had not previously considered. In these general ‘times of crisis,’ what counts as such? How is it communicated and miscommunicated? What are the effects on resilience, recovery, and possibility? Where can we seize opportunity following a crisis?
The Chinese symbol for crisis is composed of two parts: opportunity and danger. Where the Simon Fraser University conference focused on resilience in a crisis, the University of Calgary conference expanded on potentials of opportunity. As invited editors to this special edition, we viewed contributors, not as tackling separate entities of the term ‘crisis,’ but instead, as a framework to building back stronger, seizing an opportunity, and practicing resiliency as we maneuver through this danger to a better future. As Zhang and Li (2018) have argued, it is in a co-creation of both sustainable and resilient development which can lead to assurances of overcoming and withholding a community’s vulnerabilities, or their potential crises. This development may use standards setting as an opportunity to ensure resiliency (Thompson, 1954), encouraging democratic participation for an equal seat at the table, and taking the lessons learned during a crisis to apply to a better future (Brundtland, 1987).
In the field of communication, we are oftentimes stretched to an incohesive front based on the competing discourses of the canons of our field (Carey, 1997, 2009; Peters, 1999). The study of communications then is not a discipline, but a field of fields, perhaps a crisis of definition in our own knowledge community. In these competing views we see the beauty of this interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, as reflected in how graduate students across Canada thrive in their specializations. Emerging as a new group of scholars who, as the world was faced by crises all around, produced these articles in the pages which follow for this special edition; we as the invited editors see the ways in which graduate students practice resiliency in their work, seizing opportunities, and overcoming the crises which surround.
危机
Crisis
Boom and Bust Archaeology: Examination of Discourses of Historical Value in the Alberta Historical Resource Value System
Get PDFAs a discourse analysis of historical resource assessment documents and interviews with professional archaeologists, this study aims to inspect and critique the production of value in the Alberta historical resource value (HRV) system. The system of evaluation for historical value creates what can be described as a presence-absence model of archaeological significance that limits the ability for archaeologists to interpret and subjectively determine the historical value of materials. In addition, current systems often rely on a contractual relationship between archaeologists and industry to produce these reports, and rarely incorporate indigenous perspectives of significance. With a focus on the assumptions and functional result of HRIA assessments, we can examine the repercussions of the contemporary archaeological evaluative model within Alberta. A goal of this nascent assessment is to provide the opportunity for evaluation of a system that largely exists below the surface of public interest but has vast implications for future access to shared historical resources
Women Without a Nation: Deromanticizing Humanitarian Photography and Exploring Self-Representation
Get PDFPhotography has the ability to provoke ethical reflection and to provide an emotional connection to the reality of individual suffering (Hariman & Lucaites, 2016). Therefore, given the remarkable importance of visual communication in covering humanitarian crises, this short paper aims to problematize humanitarian photography practice and reflect on alternative ways of framing representations of refugee women’s life experiences outside mainstream media. Thus, I propose here an initial conversation regarding my doctoral research that focuses on self-representation of refugee women. I aim to investigate how self-representation can challenge the way to document refugee women’s life experiences by constructing through visual narration their identities and exiled memories. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to deromanticize the humanitarian discourse by reflecting on the photographer’s role in the field and by exploring alternative photography practices that frame nations affected by crises. The word crisis governs my work not only because refugee women are victims of a global refugee crisis resulting from armed conflict, natural disasters, and diseases, but also because of the daily subjective crises that these women face in lands that they now call home. Through self-representation, they can construct their stories beyond the problematic of conflicts. Thus, by reflecting on the activist potential of self-representation in framing of refugee memories it is possible to think of new opportunities to make their struggles visible in times of crisis.