Tag Archives | urban

Modeling Nostalgia

By Aaron Glass on November 4, 2013 in Art, Literature and Poetry, Good Links

Randy Hage, 1/12th scale sculpture of Ideal Hosiery, located at 339 Grand St. New York, NY; 17″ x 15″ x 8″

By Aaron Glass (Bard Graduate Center)

Armed with his camera, Randy Hage explores urban landscapes threatened with eradication through development, gentrification, or other civic improvement schemes. Yet unlike the many other salvage-oriented artists who photographically document such streetscapes lest they vanish, Hage translates his photos into meticulously crafted scale models. Rather than just imaging these places, he materializes them; in some cases, he re-materializes buildings that may have been destroyed since he photographed them. Through the laborious process of simulating structures along with their contents and immediate environs, Hage must develop a particular tactile as well as visual intimacy with the sites and buildings in question.…

Installation – Urban Infrastructure: Obsolescence and Futurity Walking Tour

By Heather Horst on October 16, 2013 in Announcements and Listings, Conference and Event Reports, Objects and visual analyses

American Anthropological Association Meetings 2013

Chicago, Illinois USA

Sunday, November 24th, 10 am – 1 pm

Crucial infrastructures in North America have begun to reach the ends of their lifespan, with malfunctions and their effects increasingly commanding public and political attention. Our installation draws on a burgeoning conversation in anthropology on infrastructure, while emphasizing its aesthetic and material dimensions alongside its practical and functional ones.

This two-part “installation” consists of a tour of infrastructure on Chicago’s mid South Side (sites tbd), followed by lunch and informal discussion at New Projects space (www.new-projects.org). All sites are accessible by CTA transit. Reservations kindly requested by November 1st for details and 2 short discussion texts. Participants are welcome to join after this date, but must contact organizers for location details.…

King’s Cross Bikes, memorials and urban experience

By Haidy Geismar on March 8, 2013 in Notes from the Field, Objects and visual analyses

Matt Voigts, UCL Digital Anthropology

In January 2013, the London Underground marked 150 years of operation; the world’s oldest subterranean railway, it shares the space below street-level with bricked-over rivers, sewers (the two being often quite similar, if not the same), wires, pipes, ruins of eras past and the dead. Two centuries of habitation leave a lot of dead, buried in cemeteries and plague pits, marked and unmarked. At King’s Cross-St. Pancras Station, currently (as ever) in the midst of renovations, previous expansions in 1864 and 2004 necessitated, respectively, the displacement and re-interment of 10-15,000 and 5,000 graves (Arnold 2006, pp.172-173). The roads at the Station’s street level, however, also negotiate the transportation desires of the living with the material memory of the dead, as it did back to the naming of the area.…

CFP: 1st International Visual Methods Seminar: Observing and Visualizing Urban Culture

By Heather Horst on March 6, 2013 in Announcements and Listings, Conferences and other events

25th August – 3rd September 2013, Antwerp, Belgium

Applications can be submitted by completing the online registration form at www.ua.ac.be/VisualMethodsSeminar from January 1st 2013 until April 15th 2013.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
The University of Antwerp announces a 10 day program of study and practice in visual methods research and teaching in the social and cultural sciences. The seminar will primarily focus on conducting visual studies in urban contexts but also will address a broad array of more general research and teaching issues. Seminar activities have been designed (and will be led) by four veteran scholars whose research, leadership and teaching have contributed substantially to the International Visual Sociology Association, the Society for Visual Anthropology, and the ISA Thematic Group on Visual Sociology.…

The City in a Time of Crisis

By Haidy Geismar on March 4, 2013 in From the news, Good Links, Notes from the Field

A note from Dimitris Dalakolgou, Department of Anthropology, Sussex University

“The City at the Time of Crisis” is an urban anthropology project which examines the everyday public socialities and materialities of Athens during the current capitalist crisis. It focuses on urban public spaces in an effort to study ethnographically the rapid transformations and through them to provide a novel understanding of the current capitalist crisis in Europe and its links with urban materialities. The project’s webpage www.crisis-scape.net features ethnographic and theoretical texts, videos, photographs and digital interactive material. The project has been running since October 2012 and it is funded by an ESRC/Future Research Leaders grant.

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Walls of Edukators, Berlin

By Patrick LAVIOLETTE on March 4, 2013 in Announcements and Listings, Good Links, Notes from the Field

3 March, Wall Parade Protest, Berliner Mauer East Side Gallery.

The past few days have seen a peaceful protest in the Ostbahnhof area of the German Capital for the protection of culture, history and the Berliner Mauer East Side Gallery.

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/01/berlin-wall-protests?INTCMP=SRCH

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CFP: Bicicultures Roadshow: The Critical Bicycling Studies Tour de California

By Heather Horst on February 10, 2013 in Announcements and Listings

Image Courtesy of FreeFoto.com

Anthropologists who research bicycling, urban and otherwise, are invited to attend an experimental conference being held April 16-17th in Davis, California. The preferred deadline for submission of abstracts is Sunday, February 10th. More details below and at bicicultures.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/cfp/.

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CFP: Broadway Transect

By Heather Horst on October 19, 2012 in Announcements and Listings

Special Issue of Wildproject: Journal of Environmental Studies

From Sleepy Hollow to Battery Park, Broadway follows the lower Hudson valley down to the New York harbor. Broadway is more than an avenue or a road: it is a fragment of American ground and mythology, and a transect through one of the most urbanized areas of the United States. Its 33 miles of asphalt, culminating at 351 ft. in Yonkers, are an analyzer of the interaction between nature and the city, of the urban diversity of the greater New York area, and of the history of its various communities.

CFP-Broadway-Wildproject explores Broadway from four main vantage points: urban studies, urban ecology, social sciences, and arts & humanities. The editors welcome submissions from urban planners and architects; geologists, entomologists, ecologists and botanists; geographers, historians, sociologists and anthropologists; literature specialists, linguists, artists, curators and fiction writers.…

Pic Nic the Street: public spaces and the materials of the body politk

By Fernando Domiguez Rubio on June 19, 2012 in Topics for Discussion

In a previous post we already discussed the ‘ergonomics of public and political life’, which we defined as the various ways in which our bodies ‘fit’ in the material environments that we inhabit and about how this ‘fitting’ shapes the quality of public and political life.

The post was a way of signaling the increasing precariousness of urban public spaces and how they enable or diable the constitution of effective political bodies.

Well, it seems that we are not alone in this .

A couple of weeks ago, the philosopher Philippe Van Parijs published this opinion piece in which he denounced the increasing pauperization of public spaces in Brussels; their reckless marketization; the dictatorship of the car; and the need to reclaim them back.…