Journals an der JLU Gießen (Justus-Liebig Universität)
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Prototypes as Future Artifacts of Today: Towards Prototyping Alternative Futures
Full text linkThe design of sociotechnical futures relies on institutionalized visions but also on material artifacts. In this context, prototypes are a materialized means of exploration of potential futures. This article explores interdependencies between irritations by prototypes and critical/speculative design and argues that prototypes problematize a balance between feasibility and their potential for irritation, i.e. being incited to act differently by a prototype that does not fit into familiar practices (e.g. flying cars). We investigate the significance of the feasibility-irritation tension, first, by analyzing two case studies of prototypes from urban mobility as examples of technical feasibility in marketing and testing environments, and second, by contrasting them to the notion of prototypes as deliberately irritating artifacts within critical and speculative design practices. We offer a perspective for understanding their transformative potential. Our discussion shows how prototypes, as they are used in speculative design, might open new negotiation spaces instead of limiting futures to what seems feasible. New, irritating prototypes highlight a contingency, which is necessary to openly discussing feasible and fictional futures together. 
Reading for Distance: Form, Memory, and Space in Contemporary Novels of Migration
Full text linkThis essay proposes a reading ‘posture’ for fictions of migration that focuses on the concept of distance. By ‘posture,’ I mean an awareness of representations and uses of distance, in both form and content, through which the reader will gain a different perspective on socio-political and ethical questions emerging in fictions of migration. After an overview of approaches to the meanings of distance through philosophical, narratological, and mobility studies, I examine distance in contemporary novels of migration. This analysis considers representations of digital and surveillance technologies and reflects on their ability to “compress” distances. It also deals with distance as a temporal concept affecting memories. Two case studies are examined by paying attention to the role of distance in their formal and thematic characteristics. Exit West compresses the distance between countries and problematizes our understanding of borders and states through the literary device of the portals. The autodiegetic narrator in Open City explicitly and often lingers on distance and his understanding of it. As a character he chooses to put distance between himself and his home country, between his past and his present life. As a consequence, distance between the character-narrator and the reader is created and remains unresolved
When Bourdieu Meets the City : Approaching Trialectics of (Urban) Space
No full textIn Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory verbindet Loïc Wacquant die topologische Soziologie Pierre Bourdieus mit den grundlegenden Untersuchungen der Urbanistik und verdeutlicht die potenziellen Synergien zwischen den beiden Bereichen. Ausgehend von einer grundlegenden Darstellung des theoretischen Rahmens von Bourdieu bis hin zu seiner Anwendbarkeit in den spezifischen Kontexten zeitgenössischer Städte entwickelt Wacquant den neo-bourdieuschen Ansatz innerhalb der Stadtsoziologie. Das Buch bietet eine innovative Anwendung einer klassischen Theorie, was es zu einer wertvollen Quelle für Städteforschung macht.In Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory, Loïc Wacquant synthesizes Pierre Bourdieu’s topological sociology with the fundamental inquiries of urban studies, elucidating the potential synergies between the two domains. Progressing from a foundational exposition of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to its applicability within the specific contexts of contemporary cities, Wacquant develops the neo-Bourdieusian approach within urban sociology. The book offers an innovative application of a classical theory, rendering it a valuable resource for urban research
Producing Trash: The Labor of Difficult Theory in the University
Full text linkScholarship often regards theory as a passive object of human agents: composed by an author with an intention, assigned to a student by a teacher for a purpose, and used by a student to understand, explain, or predict something. And yet, at some point in the academy, depending on the disciplinary context, both students and researchers will encounter ‘difficult’ theory. Such theory is difficult on two levels, in that both its content and its form of expression resist straightforward understanding. Instead, such theory excels in the production of different forms of knowledge and the exploration of new ways of producing knowledge. Encounters with difficult theory frequently produce knowledge that either doesn’t meet the university’s quality standards, or that the author simply discards. From the vantage of institutional epistemology, there’s something ‘wrong’ with such theory because it doesn’t function, yet the university continues to engage with such theory, for its difficulty provides cultural capital by means of habitual distinction. Though the university coerces difficult theory to provide understanding and methodical knowledge, such theory doesn’t do what it should do but slows down knowledge production and/or produces unintelligible gibberish: theoretical trash
"History, but normal!" : On the Derailment of the Present from the Tracks of History
No full textIn der soziologischen Studie Rechte Zeitverhältnisse befasst sich Philipp Rhein mit rechtspopulistischen Zeitvorstellungen. Mittels narrativer Interviews untersucht er die temporale Handlungsorientierung von AfD-Wähler_innen. Seine Kernthese: Der Rechtspopulismus ist eine Reaktion auf die Zeitkrise der Spätmoderne. Handlungsleitend ist dabei nicht der Verlust von Vergangenheit, sondern von Zukunft, was sich in der Figur des rechtspopulistischen Chiliasmus kristallisiert. Rheins Analyse bietet damit einen tiefgreifenden Einblick in die zeitliche Wahrnehmung der rechten Wählerschaft.In the sociological dissertation Rechte Zeitverhältnisse, Philipp Rhein examines right-wing populist concepts of time. He analyzes interviews for the temporal orientation of AfD voters. His core thesis is that right-wing populism is a reaction to the time crisis of late modernity (Spätmoderne). The guiding principle is not the loss of the past, but of the future, which is distilled in the figure of right-wing populist chiliasm. Rhein’s analysis thus offers an important insight into the temporal perception of the right-wing electorate
The Power of Things: The Material Turn in Neo-Victorianism
No full textNeo-Victorian Things bietet materielle Lesarten populärer neo-viktorianischer Multimedien, die das Konzept des Neo-Viktorianismus erweitern und neue Einblicke in unsere zeitgenössische Faszination für die viktorianische Vergangenheit bieten. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Dinge, die in den neo-viktorianischen Multimedien auftauchen, eine zentrale Rolle bei der Wiederentdeckung der viktorianischen Kultur, Identität und Geschichte spielen. Durch die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Alltagsgegenständen, von der Teekanne bis zum Geisterhaus, leistet das Buch einen zeitgemäßen Beitrag zu diesem Thema.Neo-Victorian Things offers material readings of popular neo-Victorian multimedia that broaden the concept of neo-Victorianism and provide new insights into our contemporary fascination with the Victorian past. Each essay in the edited volume favors a particular ‘thing’ studied through the emerging strands of material culture. The book demonstrates that the things that appear in neo-Victorian multimedia play a central role in the revival of Victorian culture, identity and history. The volume makes a timely contribution to the field by critically examining ordinary objects, from a teapot to a haunted house
Feminist Traces of Memory Studies in Latin America and the Caribbean
No full textDas Buch Memoria y Feminismos: Cuerpos, sentipensares y resistencias leistet einen Beitrag zu den Debatten über Erinnerung in Lateinamerika und der Karibik. Es reflektiert Körperlichkeit und politische Praktiken der Erinnerung. In einer Reihe von dreizehn Artikeln werden die Postulate der Körperpolitik und der feministischen Standpunkttheorie als theoretischer Rahmen verwendet. Der Band präsentiert einen kritischen Ansatz und hinterfragt die Rolle der eurozentrischen Wissenschaft, während er gleichzeitig Einblicke in die lokalisierte und erfahrungsorientierte Forschung gibt.The book Memoria y Feminismos: Cuerpos, sentipensares y resistencias is a collective effort of different authors to contribute to the debates on memory in Latin America and the Caribbean. The texts reflect on corporality and political practices of memory. Across thirteen articles the authors deploy the postulates of corpo-politics and feminist standpoint theory as a theoretical framework. The volume presents a critical approach and questions the role of Eurocentric academia while giving insights into localized and experience-oriented research
Doing Seminar Reading: Ways and Detours of Reading/Not-Reading Seminar Texts and Papers as Actors
Full text linkReading scholarly articles is a core practice in academic seminars, which proceed under the assumption that seminar participants have read assigned texts and will incorporate the knowledge acquired from these texts into seminar discussions and train reading techniques. However, this seemingly self-evident situation perhaps only represents an ideal rather than actual seminar practices. This Science and Technology Studies-oriented contribution based on qualitative empirical research (participant observation, self-study, short interviews, forum theater experiments) will show how, where, when, and why students and lecturers do read texts, and what tactics they use when they have not read the texts ‘properly’, ‘fully’, or at all. How do they perform reading/not-reading; how does reading/not-reading bias knowledge circulation? In this hybrid process of collective and individual reading, reading and discussing seem to be intertwined, and texts become effective as actors, for example as digital scans or piles of paper. Reading and text-based discussions are material knowledge practices that entangle and are entangled in hegemonial arrangements. My aim is to make visible and negotiable an often self-evidently accomplished performativity of collective and individual reading, in its concrete and diverse practices, in order to work productively with the epistemological and didactic consequences
Landscape Entrusted: Depositing Nuclear Waste in Geologic Time
Full text linkThe Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, USA, the world’s first operational geological repository for transuranic waste, represents a planetary shift in human interaction with the natural environment. Mined 655 meters below the earth’s surface in ancient salt strata, the WIPP is designed to exploit ecological processes, unfolding over geological timescales, to contain the radioactive byproducts of the nuclear weapons development. Nuclear waste, especially that contaminated with plutonium-239, entraps human action for 241,000 years because of its lethal nature and long half-life, posing a temporal challenge beyond human comprehension. In addition to the New Materialist term entanglement and its derivative entrapment, I propose the term entrustment which I define as an attempt to re-situate the human within the natural realm by offloading its own entrapping/entrapped responsibilities onto ecology’s self-healing capacities. By anticipating that salt formations will shift over time to encapsulate radioactive waste, nature is being used as a reliable participant in solving a human-made problem. This _Article argues that the WIPP situates the human and its effort within geological timescales, entrusting the landscape with the responsibility of containing and mitigating its nuclear legacy
Obsolescence and Extinction in Mike Nelson’s Installation Artworks
Full text linkObsolescence presents an opportunity to reflect on the impermanence of human presence. The ontological unpredictability of the obsolete means that objects relegated to social peripheries can unexpectedly solicit attention. Building off of a personal encounter with a discarded shoe sole jutting out of sand on the beach, this perspective examines how the obsolete objects that appear in Mike Nelson’s installation artworks are changed by their reappearance in his 2023 survey at the Hayward Gallery, a brutalist art gallery at the Southbank Centre in Central London. Nelson is a contemporary British installation artist who constructs large-scale dreamlike environments out of the very real detritus of post-industrial ruins. By forcing an encounter between trashed objects and spectators passing through gallery space, Nelson troubles the ocular habit that keeps waste out of sight (and out of institutional site). This perspective traces Nelson’s practice of forming and later reforming trash into sculptural installations, and considers how the obsolescence of his chosen materials can frustrate fixed categorizations of site, spectator, and sculpture