Latinidades 3.0, Renewed Aesthetics of Transculturalism

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Latinidades 3.0, Renewed Aesthetics of Transculturalism

Karine Barbot | This research project aims to enquire how US Latinos make use of hypermedia resources to reconstruct and express their ethno-linguistic identity based on multi-lingual content. Generally of mixed background, their identity emerges out of the dynamic negotiation of a blurred “otherness” from within, rooted in a daily socio-cultural triangulation, i.e. between US cultural standards, Latino pan-ethnicity and their own Latin American heritage (Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican etc.). A century-long process, US Latinos’ struggle for recognition and integration has been waged through a great many types of media and is continually gaining in presence and strength. But can media resources effectively break through and therefore both unfold and intensify a renewed episteme of multiculturalism? The hypothesis orienting this entire project is that this might be, to a certain extent, notably possible on specific hypermedia platforms of communication defined among other things by interactive participation, defragmented multimodal content and seemingly infinite virtual worlds, in particular by being intermingled with multi-lingual representations. What (renewed) pragmatic aesthetics can US Latinos experience from these characteristics? And how can this prove a challenge to monolithic thinking on identity construction based on nationally rigid monolingual terms? Such “Latinidades 3.0” might radically redefine the US melting pot, the concept of “Latinidad” as represented in the past by US Latinos themselves and, more generally, enlighten our Western understanding of the “Self-Other” concern at the advent of the 21st century.

E-mail: kbarbot56@gmail.com
LinkedIn: http://nl.linkedin.com/pub/karine-barbot/a/333/692

 

Emancipation in Postmodernity: Political Thought in Japanese Science Fictional Animation

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Mari Nakamura  |  My PhD research project studies the intersections between animation and political thought. Specifically, it explores the ways in which the philosophical notion of ‘emancipation’, along with its related concepts such as ‘domination’ and ‘resistance’, have been conceptualised in Japanese science fictional animation. Considering animation as an expressive medium, and science fiction as a locus of thought experiments, the project seeks to examine how animation can develop and deploy various innovative ideas about the future of politics, and aims to identify its grammar of expression. The project explores alternatives to contemporary methods of studying political thought in popular culture.

Supervisors Prof. Chris Goto-Jones and Dr. Florian Schneider | Leiden University  | Goto-Jones VICI project: Beyond Utopia – New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge and the Science Fictional Field of Japan

Changing Taste and Technology in Iron Age Satricum

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Changing Taste and Technology in Iron Age Satricum.

Jelsje Stobbe | Supervisors Marijke Gnade and Sebastian Abrahamsson | University of Amsterdam 2009-2013

My PhD research is part of both an excavation project, the Satricum Project, and a pottery studies project, New Perspectives on Ancient Pottery (NPAP). Their joint aim is to set new standards for research on archaeological pottery by exploring two themes in pottery studies: context related design and provenance issues. In addressing these themes, an important role is attributed to scientific research. Trying to develop a sensitivity for the hard sciences has brought me on the path of Science, Technology and Society Studies, often referred to as ‘STS’. Within STS there has been an ongoing discussion on the division between descriptions of practices and the actually ‘constructed fact’, which reminds of the division within archaeology between the ethnography of archaeological practices on the one hand and the facts as a result (or effect) of those practices onthe other hand. In the past 15 years or so several appeals have been made for studying archaeological practices in relation to the facts that archaeologists produce, but examples are still few; possibly because of the ongoing struggle with distant pasts next to reflexive presents, or maybe even because of the archaeologists’ embarassment to talk about their own practices. A way out of the practices/facts divide might be an approach based on realities-in-practice (Mol 2002). Realities-in-practice would be a move away from talking about or above archaeology, and towards situating facts within archaeology. Away from isolated objects that are decorated with many meanings, and towards the multiplicity of objects. Away from purely anthropocentrism, and towards relational thinking which includes the object as well. Realities-in-practice studies from the discipline of STS will thus serve as travelling cases to explore both the combined research topics of the Satricum Project and NPAP, and my concerns in archaeology.

The PhD research will focus on three topics: the classifying archaeologist, the orientalising revolution, and the entangled concepts of scale, resolution and context. Each topic will consist of an overview of the relevant literature followed by a contrasting casestudy of practices. The first topic (‘The classifying archaeologist’) concerns the difference between static classifications in literature and dynamic classifications in practice. The study of practices will include sites such as the excavation, the finds processing, the storeroom and the database in order to stress the politics involved in finding similarities and differences between pottery sherds. This topic is evoked in order to add to the recently emerging reflection on the classificatory imperative within archaeology. The second topic (‘From sherd to revolution’) contrasts the use of the concept of the orientalising revolution in archaeological literature with how it is done in practice. In order to be able to gobeyond deconstruction of both orientalism and revolution in literature, the borrowed concept of multiplicity will be introduced in order to make a case for a multiple oriental revolution and nonrevolution in practice. The third topic (‘Talking scales, doing topics’) addresses the omnipresent perspective of scale and resolution in archaeological literature. By studying two important spaces in archaeology, the excavation context as a starting point for scale and the pottery sherd as a starting point for resolution, I hope to show that in practice archaeologists do topics instead of scales, resolutions and contexts.

 

Critical Identities in the Age of Surveillance

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Critical Identity Formations in the Age of Surveillance Networks

Lonneke van der Velden | Supervisor Richard Rogers | University of Amsterdam 2010-2014

This research project comprises an empirical-philosophical analysis aiming to develop conceptual tools for analysing contemporary surveillance networks and forms of critical identity formations. On the theoretical level it aims to overcome a post-Foucauldian deadlock by reframing surveillance, the impact of contemporary surveillance technologies, and practices of subversion through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour. On a practical level it aims to investigate the way in which evolving methods of surveillance and network-technologies take part in processes of identity formation. More broadly the research will contribute to critical discussions of surveillance that are currently limited to legalistic jargon or dated concepts of privacy. This project aims to shift the debate from a view of surveillance as methods of fear and, as a response, protection of the private self, towards one in which practices of surveillance become part and parcel of identity formation. This standpoint is not only better suited to approach current practices of surveillance, but it also generates new insights in the possibilities and political relevance of creative interventions. The central question therefore is: how to conceptualize critical identity formations in surveillance networks?

Neuroarcheologies of the Present

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Cultural Plasticity: Neuroarchaeologies of the Present

Timothy F. Yaczo | Supervisors Patricia Pisters and Jan Hein Hoogstad | University of Amsterdam 2011-2015

My project aims to intervene in the methodologies, discursive deliveries and implications of cognitive neuroscience. Considering themselves as working between branches of psychology and neuroscience, researchers of cognitive neuroscience scientifically study the biological structures underlying cognition. Propelled by developments in technology (such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), studies and research resulting from employing methodologies of measurability centralize the brain as an apparatus par excellence at the intersection of physiology and psychology. The epistemological implications of such current ‘recognitions’ of the brain are expressed culturally in varied scenes. Characterizations in narratives are susceptible to readings of neurological structures; madness or sincerity, for example, is attributed to trauma or lesions in the brain. Gender expression and construction becomes the scene of a synaptic crime, where platitudes like male, female or trans are explained away as a chemical and electrical reaction through the visual aid of FMRI scans. The brain, too, enters politics, not merely as a vital or biological phenomenon, but as a collection of evidence, vulnerable to management and discipline. What concerns me most about contemporary neuroscience is the seductive apophenia at play; in a quest to capture and predict ‘the brain’, consciousness and affect are annexed— and abbreviated—into patterns of data always already observable and intelligible. Intrigued by this sensation that neuroscience (and the trope of neuroplasticity) is becoming a brute answer to questions of corporeality, cognition and behavior, I will trace how the formation of neurocognition and plasticity implicate cultural practice and expectations.

Beirut in Contemporary Art

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The Urban Experience of Post-Civil-War Beirut in Contemporary Artistic Productions

Judith Anne Naeff | Supervisor Christoph Lindner | University of Amsterdam 2011-2015

This research project aims at analysing contemporary artistic and literary productions as a reflection of the urban experience of post-civil-war Beirut within the framework of the efforts at reconstruction initiated by the Lebanese authorities.  Beirut was and is the focus of a complex configuration of conflicting social, political and economic interests, on a local and a regional level. Before, after and to a lesser extent during the civil wars (1975-1990), the city was a flowering centre of culture. In recent years the cultural productions have increasingly focused on the development of new, critical visions of Lebanese history and society, the effects of traumatic experiences and the preservation of a collective cultural memory. In the meantime, the authorities have started large-scale reconstruction projects within the urban space of Beirut, reflecting a specific vision of past, present and future. This project will investigate the tensions that arise between artistic and political visions of the present cityscape ofBeirut, which has to deal with a conflict-ridden past and a future impregnated with traumatic memories. Within the field of Middle Eastern Studies, this project seeks to contribute to a more refined understanding of post-civil-war Beirut by using new theoretical approaches derived from Cultural Studies, Urban Studies and Memory Studies. The project is important because Lebanon’s small but significant and innovative cultural scene has remained largely ignored by academic research, especially from an interdisciplinary perspective. In addition, the Dutch tradition of Middle Eastern Studies desperately needs input from the field of critical cultural studies.

Freezing Fertility

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Freezing Fertility:  Oocyte Cryopreservation and Ageing

Lucy van de Wiel | Supervisors Mieke Bal, Esther Peeren and Jose van Dijck | University of Amsterdam 2011-2015

The basis of my research is the triangulation of the technology of oocyte cryopreservation, its representation in the popular imagination and a concept that is surprisingly under theorised in the study of culture: ageing.  Reshuffling the abilities of the reproductive body, oocyte cryopreservation reveals the modes of thinking employed to give cultural and political shape to biotechnologies and the bodies they engage with. Given the recent development and implementation of oocyte cryopreservation, I propose a unique and topical project that will be the first book-length study within the humanities of a technology that potentially has far-reaching consequences on contemporary thinking about female fertility and ageing. Taking oocyte cryopreservation and the reproductive body as starting point, my project will approach ‘ageing’ as a cultural construct by positioning it in a media and historical framework, developing it in relation to the theoretical concepts of performativity and corporeality, temporality, spatiality and integrating these notions within globalised techno-human networks.

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NICA archive 2010 – 2020

Read all articles published by Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis 2010 to 2020.

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