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The Complexity of Human Space: Multi-layered Networks and the Relativity of Distance
Full text linkThis article characterizes the human space as reflecting the architecture of interdependencies within it, which may generate alternative identifications of external boundaries and internal divisions. After introducing how human actors and activities are arranged according to relative positions belonging to different dimensions and leading to multi-layered networks, the article illustrates the multi-dimensionality and multi-layeredness of the human space by considering the production space as a network of interdependencies in which division of labour and the mutual fitting of activities take place along plural dimensions (here identified with tasks and productive functions, capacities, and materials-in-process) and give rise to hierarchical patterns of interdependence along each dimension. The article shows that it is possible to visualize relative positions in different ways depending on the actors’ or the analyst’s point of view, which may draw attention to a particular dimension of interdependence rather than others. Such open-endedness leads to the relativity of distance. At the same time, the actors’ (or the analyst’s) point of view, by fixing the focus of attention on specific dimensions and layers, may lead to closure, in the sense that relative distances become associated with the dimension and layer of interdependence that are central to a given context. The article goes on to propose a theoretical framework to study distance and proximity in the human space, and applies it to the problem of how to identify possible definitions of collective interest in a space of interdependent actors
Determinants of Anxiety, Depression and Subjective Wellbeing among Musicians in Denmark: Findings from the ‘When Music Speaks’ Project
Full text linkIntroduction: Some studies have suggested that professional musicians may suffer from elevated levels of mental ill-health compared to both non-professional musicians and the general public. The aim of this study was to explore the levels of anxiety, depression and subjective wellbeing among musicians in a country famed for high levels of wellbeing: Denmark. More specifically, we sought to evaluate the impact of age, gender, income and subjective career status (SCS) – that is, seeing music as one’s main career - on these variables.
Methods: 986 musicians from a range of career stages and genres (both popular – or rhythmic as it is referred to in Denmark – and classical) completed a survey measuring anxiety and depression using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and measuring subjective wellbeing using Cantril’s self-anchoring scale. Multiple regression models were used to explore the relationship between the four independent variables and our three outcome measure scores. Additionally, the sample was split on the basis of their respective significant predictor variables combined in order to observe between-group differences.
Results: Firstly, we found that age, gender and SCS – but not income - significantly predicted anxiety scores. Being younger, being female, and viewing music-making as one’s main career all predicted higher levels of anxiety. Demographic group comparisons confirmed that younger female musicians who viewed music-making as their main career were particularly at-risk in comparison to other groups. Secondly, age (younger) and gender (female) were also predictors of higher depression scores, but SCS status and income category were not. Lastly, age (younger), gender (female) and income (membership of the three lowest income categories) predicted lower scores on the subjective wellbeing measure. The fact that income did not significantly predict anxiety or depression scores suggested that elevated levels of either of these experienced by career-orientated musicians might not relate to income, or at least may not be solely income-related.
Conclusion: Our findings contribute towards literature which seeks to better understand the determinants of elevated levels of mental ill-health among musicians, and towards research into mental health and wellbeing in Demark more generally
Ocean as Metaphor and Embodiment
Full text linkIn a climate of increasing political instability and social transformation, scholarly discourses have started to foreground the fluidity of form as essential for human and inter‐species co‐existence. There is a pervasiveness in contemporary society of what Zygmunt Bauman, in his analysis of “liquid,” software‐based modernity, refers to as form immersed in and affected by conditions of uncertainty, insecurity, and unsafety. Many anthropologists and sociologists have argued that the efficacy of such a form is grounded in its state of emergence, that is, in the ways it both exceeds and is continuous with its constitutive parts. Artists expressing this contingent fluidity often draw our attention to the ocean as a site of emergence and creation. Today, much of this artistic reimagining of ocean life is executed digitally and dramatised by liquefying solid objects that morph into other, less familiar shapes. New environments are being generated, particularly by means of AI, that are freed from the burdens of the present. The association with the ocean’s currents frames the liquefaction of unmoored, drifting, and blurred entities as an opportunity for change and a metaphor for the world to come. Discussing the work of media artists such as Refik Anadol, this article situates the agency of artistic production within a broader shift towards the conditions of liquid modernity and suggests ways to confront aesthetically pleasing sensations with art that recognises the inequitable impacts of societal transformation. It argues for an ocean that is both metaphorical and embodied, liquid, and more than wet
Leak
Full text linkThese Keywords come out of the research exchange project Affective Noise: Atmospherics of the State of the Nation between the NOVA University of Lisbon (ICNOVA-FCSH) and Queen Mary University of London. They emerged during two workshops held in London (QMUL‚ 25-26 October 2024) and in Lisbon (UNL‚ 15-16 November 2024)‚ gathering artists‚ researchers and postgraduate students interested in how sonic and affective atmospheres shape the current political and theatrical present. This ebook is a way of sharing our intense and lively debates with a wider community. We hope it can somehow begin to build a critical cartography that plots and traces the atmospheres of our particularly charged political times‚ and in thinking them through affect and sound come to listen to and feel a renewed sense of cultural community
Recasting the history of Venetian rule in Greece
No full textThis chapter examines the Greek experience of Venetian rule (1204-1797). The first section discusses recent historiographical trends in the late medieval and early modern history of the Greek-speaking territories of the former Byzantine empire and assesses their connection to the broader history of the Republic of Venice. The second section focuses on key historical themes, such as warfare and colonization, the management of ethnic and religious difference, information and communication networks, mobility and migration, and cross-cultural encounters and exchange. In doing so, it takes Venetian Greece as a point of departure to revisit fundamental questions that lie at the heart of Mediterranean history. The chapter suggests that Venetian Greece should be seen as a crucible for understanding complex historical processes that shaped the emergence of the ‘modern world’. Overall, the analysis applies a critical imperial studies perspective that speaks to both historians of modern Greece and Venice and to scholars of early modern empires
An Honest Conversation, Hard to Hold: “Does It Come in Another Colour?” and “Racing Desire” at London’s ICA
Full text linkThis short article was commissioned for ‘Instituting Queer Art in Britain,’ a conversation piece convened by Laura Guy and Theo Gordon as part of an issue of the Journal of British Art Studies on queer art in the UK that they co-edited with Fiona Anderson and Flora Dunster.
In the piece Helena Reckitt reflects on an artist film programme and symposium exploring inter-racial desire curated by poet and filmmaker Ian Iqbal Rashid for the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1993, a time when she worked as Deputy Director of ICA Talks.
Recalling the programmes and their discursive context was especially meaningful to do as both screening programme, ‘Does it come in Another Colour?’ and symposium ‘Racing Desire’ have all but disappeared from institutional memory. Drawing on conversations with Rashid, as well as with Tim Highsted, who commissioned the film programme for ICA Cinema, the piece touches on taboos of sexuality and desire and their cultural representation
Changing modes of public connection: an essay on TikTok and the social affordances of personalized social media
Full text linkThe short-video app TikTok has become one of the most used social media platforms globally. Its affordances are distinctly different from those of prior apps and platforms—specifically due to TikTok’s algorithm-centric design. This essay critically reflects on the consequences of this design logic, especially in relation to modes of public connection, resistance, and social change. Reflecting on ethnographic fieldwork on TikTok, it opens three perspectives: (1) on the modes of disconnected sociability that TikTok’s “For You” page affords, (2) the forms of infrapolitical resistance that materialize within the textual structure of the “For You” page, and (3) the importance of creativity as an element of the consumption process shaping its social meaningfulness. Across these three perspectives, the essay argues that TikTok affords relatively unique modes of public connection which, ultimately, can only be understood in their real consequences when viewed as integrated parts of the micro-social world where people’s day-to-day lives unfold
All the rage – and other feelings: Young women, sexual harassment and media
Full text linkFeminist anger and rage have taken on a new visibility in the post-#MeToo moment, after decades of muting and prohibition related in part to the dominance of a postfeminist sensibility, and the ongoing force of normative femininity with its renunciation of anger. In this article, we extend a body of research on #MeToo and rage which has centred on ‘feminist flashpoints’, the cultural products of #MeToo and digital feminist activism. Our focus is on the experiences of ‘ordinary’ young women living in Aotearoa New Zealand, reflecting on whether, to what extent and in what ways #MeToo has made a difference in their lives. We contend that the existing literature has furnished us with a good understanding of the hashtag's value, limitations and exclusions, but going beyond this there remain urgent questions about whether it has actually changed anything in young people's lives – their understandings of sexual harassment, their experiences of it, their practices in relation to it. The article contributes to discussions of the prohibition on feminist anger and whether/how this may be changing; the continued force of affective injustice in the ways that anger may be authorized, expressed and read; theoretical and methodological questions about the (il)legibility of rage; and questions about the value of focussing on anger in isolation from other feelings or affective experiences. We show that not only are young women angry, and able to express this powerfully and eloquently, but they are also enraged by what happens when they express their anger: it is dismissed, they are disparaged, attacked or trolled or their anger is appropriated in a hollow and cynical manner. This operates in a context marked by ongoing affective injustice, including the long shadow of settler colonialism and other classed and racialized, as well as gendered, power relations. Finally, the article shows that young women's anger co-exists with a range of other emotional experiences, including fear and shame and despair, and thus argues for the value of exploring anger in situ through live research as well as theoretical and textual explorations
The Corps-à-corps of Queer Love
Full text linkFor Hegel, sex is fundamentally an issue of rationality, one in which the manifestation of the seed or semen becomes the phenomenal substance par excellence for the sublation of life itself. Man’s ability to relate to himself, as a form of internal mediation, is similar to the generative work of the seed, which manifests in order to produce himself again as another kernel of self-relation. Spirit, as it is described in Philosophy of Right, is the filiation between father and son, the expression of rational ‘love’ that binds the family structure together and which concretises the father’s position as its head. There is no deviation from this according to Hegel, no queer divergence from the family unit or its understanding of love as the substantive feeling which unites members together under the auspice of one spiritually endowed sex which privileges male power, authority and sexuality. Queer love, it seems, has no possible place in Hegelian thinking. In Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, however, resides a love story that departs from Hegel’s idealised notion of filiation, a corps-à-corps that engages with the formidable work of sublation and its attempt to rationalise sex as such. Corps-à-corps, from the literal French “body-to-body”, is a phrase that invokes “a dual,” “handto-hand combat,” “wrestling,” but also “intercourse,” “love-making,” or “a sexual embrace.” For Derrida, this corps-à-corps correlates with an intimate struggle or relationality that exists at the heart of translation itself, an operation that is always mediated by the violent threat of self-interruption and the irrevocable loss of meaning. Watching Queer, we are invited to contemplate Derrida’s corps-à-corps alongside Hegel’s notion of love, to consider the queer differences that ‘fall away’ as the remainders or excrements of desire which cannot be synthesised by sublation as such