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Yugoslav pop, female artists and the emergence of feminist agency
Get PDFYugoslavia, a single party state, built on the legacy of the anti-fascist partisan struggle, principles of solidarity, egalitarianism, self-management and a strong sense of internationalism due to its founding role in the Non-Aligned Movement, was, at the same time, a country immersed in what has been termed “utopian consumerism.” A burgeoning media landscape and the westernization of Yugoslav culture, phenomena which were ideologically at odds with the country’s own socialist principles, set the stage for a multifaceted encounter with Pop in the late 1960s and 1970s in the form of what Lina Džuverović, Yugoslav Pop’s chief researcher, identifies as two local variants of equally political Pop: “Yugoslav Pop Reactions” and “Yugoslav Countercultural Pop.”
While representing two diametrically opposed conceptual positions, both, she argues, turned to popular culture and cheap everyday materials as an alternative means with which to critically respond to socialist modernism and to growing instrumentalisation of artists in Yugoslav society. Yugoslavia’s founding principles, formed as a legacy of the People’s Liberation Struggle (1941 – 1945), were based upon self-management and the introduction of social property, with art being a democratizing force with a central emancipatory role in the building of the new socialist state. But socialist modernism gradually relegated culture to a more illustrative role, as a form of ‘soft power’ for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Conversely, an engagement with popular culture and materials offered an oxymoronic site of resistance to the decline of Yugoslavia’s founding principles.
Setting the stage for an understanding of Pop in Yugoslavia, Džuverović focuses on the work of several women artists, putting the intersection of gender and Yugoslav Pop under a feminist lens, while continuing the feminist revision of Pop in the former east. Džuverović contextualizes Pop within the changing gender relations in postwar Yugoslavia, in light of the uncomfortable negotiation of the postwar legacy of the female emancipation achieved by the Antifascist Women’s Front, and the gradual postwar placement of women in charge of the domestic sphere after the war. The spread of popular culture offered ready material for women artists but at the same time it cemented cultural sexism. Focusing on the work of Katalin Ladik (1942) and Sanja Ivekovic (1949) who both embraced Pop techniques and materials, she theorizes their Popness while tracing the resistive inscription of gender in their work, contextualizing it within the proliferation of objectified female bodies in Pop in light of the work of various artists, including the artists of the ‘Ekspresivna Figuralika’ group.
Book synopsis: A decade of revisionism has challenged the entrenched view of Pop Art as a largely Anglo-American movement and exposed its international reach. Pop Art and Beyond is the first scholarly exploration of the role of gender, race and class, and their intersection in the production, reception and politics of global manifestations of pop during the Long Sixties.
Edited by post-war art scholars Mona Hadler and Kalliopi Minioudaki, the book features an array of rigorous chapters written by acclaimed international experts and emerging scholars who explore the work of over twenty artists. These include practitioners of different cultural, racial and social origins and sexual orientation, including numerous female artists from around the world. By transgressing the borders of individual and national contexts and forsaking Cold War dichotomies and the dominant definition of pop art, Hadler and Minioudaki create a space in which pop can be opened up and a new appreciation of its heterogeneity and politics achieved
Walter Benjamin's legacy - Esther Leslie and Stuart Jeffries
No full textTo celebrate Verso’s new edition of The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin, Esther Leslie (writer and translator of many books including The Storyteller, and Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, London) and Stuart Jeffries (journalist and author of many books including Grand Hotel Abyss) discuss the life and legacy of Walter Benjamin. From his relationship with his peers, the other members of the Frankfurt School, and his cultural heritage, to his use of, and feelings about, technological advancements, to his approach to storytelling, writing and language more broadly, join Esther and Stuart for this fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of one of Western Marxism's most important philosophers
Politics of international advocacy against the death penalty: governments as anti–death penalty crusaders
Get PDFTwo-thirds of the countries worldwide have moved away from the death penalty in law or in practice, with global and regional organisations as well as individual governments working towards universal abolition. This article critically examines the narratives of these abolitionist governments that have abolished the death penalty in their country and have adopted the role of ‘moral crusaders’ (Becker 1963) in pursuit of global abolition. In 2018, the Australian Government, while being surrounded by retentionist states in Asia, joined the anti–death penalty enterprise along with the European Union, the United Kingdom and Norway. Using the concepts of ‘moral crusader’ (Becker 1963) and ‘performativity’ (Butler 1993), this article argues that advocacy must be acted on repeatedly for governments to be anti–death penalty advocates. Otherwise, these government efforts serve political ends in appearance but are simply a self-serving form of advocacy in practice
Autonomy and mental health
No full textThe topic of mental health presents a distinctive set of problems for discussions of autonomy. First, there is a great deal of variation in the way autonomy is understood in the discussions of mental illness, disorder or incapacity. Second, on many of the standard ways of understanding autonomy it is at best unclear how the concept applies in the context of mental illness, disorder or incapacity. Third, with respect to ways of understanding autonomy that clearly do apply in the context of mental illness, disorder or incapacity it is at beast unclear why autonomy, so understood,
should be thought of as being as important as it often is. In this chapter these problems are addressed by explicitly connecting questions about the value of autonomy to questions about what interests people have in virtue of their capacities to act and interact among ethically significant others.
Book synopsis: The question of autonomy is fundamental to understanding some of the most important questions and debates in contemporary political and moral life, from freedom of the individual, free will and decision-making to controversies surrounding medical ethics, human rights and the justifications for state intervention. It is also a crucial concept for understanding the development of liberalism.
The Routledge Handbook of Autonomy is a comprehensive survey and assessment of the key figures, debates and problems surrounding autonomy. Comprising over forty chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into five clear parts:
Autonomy through History
Foundations of Autonomy
Threats to Autonomy
The Significance of Autonomy
Autonomy in Application.
Within these sections all the essential topics are addressed, making The Routledge Handbook of Autonomy an outstanding reference source for those in political philosophy, ethics, applied ethics and philosophy of law. It is also highly recommended reading for those in related subjects, such as politics, social policy and education
Tilt adaptation aftereffects reveal fundamental perceptual characteristics of tactile orientation processing on the hand
Get PDFOrientation information contributes substantially to our tactile perception such as feeling an object’s shape on the skin. For vision, a perceptual adaptation aftereffect (tilt aftereffect; TAE), which is well explained by neural orientation selectivity, has been used to reveal fundamental perceptual properties of orientation processing. Neural orientation selectivity has been reported in somatosensory cortices. However, little research has investigated the perceptual characteristics of the tactile TAE. The aim of the current study was to provide the first demonstration of a tactile TAE on the hand and investigate the perceptual nature of tactile TAE on the hand surface. We used a two-point stimulation with minimal input for orientation. We found clear TAEs on the hand surface: Adaptation induced shifts in subjective vertical sensation toward the orientation opposite to the adapted one. Further, adaptation aftereffects were purely based on orientation processing given that the effects transferred between different lengths across adaptor and test stimuli and type of stimuli. Finally, adaptation aftereffects were anchored to the hand: tactile TAE occurred independently of hand rotation and transferred from palm to dorsum sides of the hand, while the effects did not transfer between hands. Our findings demonstrate the existence of hand-centered perceptual processing for basic tactile orientation information
The effect of narratives on attitudes toward animal welfare and pro-social behaviour on behalf of animals: three pre-registered experiments
Get PDFWe report three randomised and pre-registered experiments examining the effects of narrative fiction (vs. narrative non-fiction vs. expository non-fiction) on concern for animal welfare. In Experiment 1a (N = 363) there was no significant increase in concern for animal welfare or willingness to donate to an animal charity among participants who read a narrative fiction text about a monkey’s plight (vs. narrative non-fiction or expository non-fiction texts about a monkey). In Experiment 1b (N = 121) concern for animal welfare and willingness to donate was greater after reading the narrative fiction text compared to a narrative non-fiction text unrelated to animals. Experiment 2 (N = 184) employed a simplified design and more severe depiction of animal abuse, but showed no beneficial effect of reading a narrative fiction text about a monkey’s plight (vs. a narrative non-fiction text unrelated to animals) on either measure. Experiment 3 (N = 290) compared a narrative fiction and a non-fiction text about a monkey or a lizard; participants who read a narrative fiction text, irrespective of the animal depicted, reported greater concern for animal welfare, monkey welfare, lizard welfare and nature (vs. a narrative non-fiction text). However, participants were no more willing to donate in the narrative fiction (vs. non-fiction) condition. These results suggest that reading a narrative fiction text about an animal’s plight has a limited effect on concern for animal welfare
Opening the Future: How to Implement an Equitable Revenue Model for Open Access Monographs
Get PDFCOVID-19 has thrown many aspects of university research culture into acute relief. As the reality of the virus dawned and campuses worldwide went into lockdown, publishers scrambled to unpaywall their research. Publishers made topical works and more general material openly available, through their own sites and platforms such as Project Muse and JSTOR. Physical collections became inaccessible and demand for openly accessible research skyrocketed. It is unclear that it is desirable to return to the previous systems of scholarly communication in the book publishing world, in which physical copies may remain affordable, even while e-licensing agreements for libraries are not.
This has been recognised in several recent global policy announcements including the cOAlition S/Plan S guidelines, and the recent UKRI consultation on OA. The latter’s proposed measures include the possibility of zero-embargo green OA, more liberal open licensing, and the long- vaunted requirement for funded monographs to be in scope. This last element built on a longstanding policy history in the UK foreshadowing a mandate for OA monographs.
That said, the path to OA monographs is not free of obstacles. Among the many issues, the most frequently raised is the business model of Book Processing Charges (BPCs) and their apparent unaffordability, mostly due to distributional allocation of library resources. Happily, several recent reports have detailed non-BPC OA revenue and business models that presses could use to transition to OA - one of the most recent being COPIM’s Revenue models for Open Access monographs 2020.
That report describes a variation on the journal ‘Subscribe to Open’ model whereby members ‘subscribe to a backlist, with the revenue then used to make the frontlist openly accessible’. This constitutes a new business model for OA monographs that had not previously been implemented. We implemented this model, dubbed ‘Opening the Future,’ in a partnership between the COPIM project, the Central European University Press (CEUP), and Liverpool University Press (LUP). This model presents a potential route for the mass and sustainable transition to OA of many small-to-mid sized university presses.
This document sets out how we implemented this model, including the documentation of challenges, resources, timetables, and activities. It is intended as a roadmap for other presses that wish to implement an ‘Opening the Future’-esque model. Of course, this document is unlikely to cover everything, but the authors are happy to respond to individual queries where this will prove helpful
The Ainu in documentary films: promiscuous iconography and the absent image
No full textImages showing how Ainu physical traits significantly differed from their neighbours in the Far East fuelled the widespread idea in the West that the Ainu had European ancestors. This triggered an exceptional interest in Ainu culture among the European as well as American audiences between the Meiji period and the outbreak of the “Chinese Incident” in 1937. It is in this period when the Ainu were featured in a number of moving images to be screened outside Hokkaido. The aim of this chapter is to assess the standardisation of Ainu iconography during this period and interrogate the role played by cinema in this process. To that end, the relevance of moving images in the early history of the representation of the Ainu people is assessed in relation to a complex process of visual codification that also involved painting, engraving and photography.
Book synopsis: Go beyond Kurosawa and discover an up-to-date and rigorous examination of historical and modern Japanese cinema
In A Companion to Japanese Cinema, distinguished cinematic researcher David Desser delivers insightful new material on a fascinating subject, ranging from the introduction and exploration of under-appreciated directors, like Uchida Tomu and Yoshimura Kozaburo, to an appreciation of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema from the point of view of little-known stars and genres of the 1950s.
This Companion includes new resources that deal in-depth with the issue of gender in Japanese cinema, including a sustained analysis of Kawase Naomi, arguably the most important female director in Japanese film history.
Readers will appreciate the astute material on the connections and relationships that tie together Japanese television and cinema, with implications for understanding the modern state of Japanese film. The Companion concludes with a discussion of the Japanese media’s response to the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the nation. The book also includes:
A thorough introduction to the History, Ideology, and Aesthetics of Japanese cinema, including discussions of Kyoto as the cinematic center of Japan and the Pure Film Movement and modern Japanese film style
An exploration of the background to the famous story of Taki no Shiraito and the significant and underappreciated contributions of directors Uchida Tomu, as well as Yoshimura Kozaburo
A rigorous comparison of old and new Japanese cinema, including treatments of Ainu in documentary films and modernity in film exhibition
Practical discussions of intermediality, including treatments of scriptwriting in the 1930s and the influence of film on Japanese television
Perfect for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students studying Japanese and Asian cinema, A Companion to Japanese Cinema is a must-read reference for anyone seeking an insightful and contemporary discussion of modern scholarship in Japanese cinema in the 20th and 21st centuries
Physical workplace adjustments to support neurodivergent workers: a systematic review
Get PDFDerived from the concept of neurodiversity,
neurodivergence is an umbrella term for various conditions
such as Autism-Spectrum Disorder (ASD),
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD),
Dyslexia, or Dyspraxia, which affect approximately 22%
of the population. Sensory difficulties and overload are
a common symptom. The provision of physical workplace
adjustments for neurodivergent workers, such as
workplace design solutions, has become popular in
practice, yet their utility remains unsubstantiated. This
review evaluates the evidence for physical workplace
adjustments and their link to occupational longevity,
performance and health/well-being in neurodivergent
workers. A systematic review (PRISMA guidelines) of
studies published in English between 2000 and 2021
focused on these inclusion criteria: adult office workers
clinically considered neurodiverse, their families, colleagues,
employers, experts and vocational programme
staff; at least one physical workplace adjustment; and
all types of empirical study designs. The theoretical
framing was based on the ecological model of person–
environment fit supplemented by the International
Classification of Functioning, (ICF) disability and
health and environmental stress theory. Quality assessment and data synthesis were undertaken. Of the
319 studies identified, 20 met the eligibility criteria; the
majority addressed ASD. Most studies described a combination
of adjustments to address different environmental
stimuli. The most frequent adjustments
addressed sound distractions (e.g. single-person offices)
and light sensitivity (e.g. light control), which were
related to occupational longevity, performance and
health/well-being. A range of other adjustments
addressed aspects such as environmental control,
crowding or decompression rooms. There is insufficient
evidence to fully evaluate the usefulness of adjustments,
partially due to methodological shortcomings.
Despite the variety of challenges with the sensory physical
environment acknowledged in the literature for
neurodivergent conditions, there is a paucity of evidence.
Given the potential of physical adjustments to
improve work and health outcomes, we highlight the
necessity for more theoretically driven and methodologically
sound research
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