1,720,985 research outputs found
Singing Security: Representations of State and Non-State Protection in Jamaican Popular Music
No full textThis working paper explores representations of security and policing in popular Jamaican music, offering an initial survey of themes and a preliminary analysis of this music as a creative negotiation of insecurity emerging from some of the Caribbean’s most precarious urban spaces. In the
context of consistently high levels of violent crime, Jamaica has seen a pluralization of security professionals, with private security companies, neighborhood watches and informal “dons” complementing or supplanting state security forces. Drawing on an analysis of reggae and dancehall songs, this paper examines how these different policing agents are represented in reggae and dancehall lyrics, and specifically how their relationship to the urban poor is narrated. I build on previous analyses of urban violence and real or metaphorical gunplay in Jamaican popular music (e.g. Hope 2006; Cooper 2007) by emphasizing representations of security provision and protection rather than of aggression or “badmanism” per se, although these emphases are of course not mutually exclusive
The Rule of Dons
Full text linkRivke Jaffe explains how despite Jamaica’s “dons” are associated with crime and violence, they have become figures of political authority and seen as legitimate leaders
Queer sovereignties: Cultural practices of sexual citizenship in the Dutch Caribbean
No full textThis dissertation examines the reimagination of sexual citizenship by same-sex desiring and trans* subjects in the Dutch Caribbean through cultural practices, focusing primarily on Curaçao. Analysing archival documents, performances, novels, photographs, letters to the editors of newspapers, and erotic lexicons, I propose approaching these subjects' cultural practices through the theoretical lens of what I call 'queer sovereignties'. The concept of queer sovereignties refers to the positions staked out by same-sex desiring and trans* subjects as they reimagine how to achieve collective autonomy within the postcolonial context of the non-independent Caribbean, and emphasises how these positions both disrupt and conform to hegemonic notions of sexuality, gender, and nation
Queer sovereignties: Cultural practices of sexual citizenship in the Dutch Caribbean
No full textThis dissertation examines the reimagination of sexual citizenship by same-sex desiring and trans* subjects in the Dutch Caribbean through cultural practices, focusing primarily on Curaçao. Analysing archival documents, performances, novels, photographs, letters to the editors of newspapers, and erotic lexicons, I propose approaching these subjects' cultural practices through the theoretical lens of what I call 'queer sovereignties'. The concept of queer sovereignties refers to the positions staked out by same-sex desiring and trans* subjects as they reimagine how to achieve collective autonomy within the postcolonial context of the non-independent Caribbean, and emphasises how these positions both disrupt and conform to hegemonic notions of sexuality, gender, and nation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Security technology, urban prototyping, and the politics of failure
Full text linkIn response to broader political and corporate tendencies towards ‘techno-solutionism’, critical studies of security technology highlight the threat that security technologies pose to civil rights and democratic accountability. This article argues for a slightly different perspective: rather than taking claims of technological efficacy at face value, it explores the multiple ways in which security-related technology so frequently fails to deliver its – confidently anticipated or feared – effects. A focus on sociotechnical failure can offer more comprehensive, on-the-ground understanding of the technopolitics of security. We suggest that these politics may lie precisely in the blurring of concepts of failure and success, as ‘prototyping’ and experimentation become an increasingly powerful logic of urban governance. This argument is developed through an analysis of security interventions in Jamaica, a context characterized by high levels of violent crime. The article focuses on three technologies that have been adapted to security-related purposes: a communication channel connecting police and private security guards, a public–private CCTV network, and a smart electricity grid. Drawing on approaches from science and technology studies, the article adopts a process-oriented approach, attending to both the discourses surrounding the introduction of these technologies and their everyday interactions with their social and built environments
Popular Art, Crime and Urban Order Beyond the State
Full text linkThis article engages with current discussions on the politics of aesthetics to theorize the role of popular art in reproducing or contesting urban orders. Specifically, we engage with scholars who have taken up the work of Jacques Rancière to understand how power structures are normalized through ‘the distribution of the sensible’. Building on and critically engaging with debates on the ‘post-political city’, we suggest that all too often scholars fall back on a binary, state-centric approach that depicts non-state popular aesthetics as either revolutionary and disruptive, or as indicative of an alternative form of oppression. Drawing on our work in Kingston, Jamaica, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we argue that sensorial-political, art-based urban struggles shape multiple urban orders that are distinct but not necessarily antagonistic. Applying Stuart Hall’s work on popular culture to contexts of criminal governance, we show how art is often simultaneously supportive and disruptive of urban orders
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