« This story serves as an important reminder: by far the largest attack on Indigenous Knowledge systems right now is land dispossession, and the people that are actively protecting Nishnaabewin are not those at academic conferences advocating for its use in research and course work, but those that are currently putting their bodies on the land. »
« Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons. »
« Body, you are the conduit of creation. Through hands we mark our worlds, through tongue we speak and sing. We can reach into the stars and birth worlds here on earth. To be Anishinaabeg is to exist within a continuum of creation, each world creating a web that holds us all, each world just as important as the next. To be Anishinaabeg is to reject hierarchy in all its forms, to exist in multiplicities that cannot be named. »
Ida Baptiste, la mère de Lara Kramer, et sa fille Ruby Caldwell Kramer sont en train de créer des hochets en peau.
« In this context of historical subjugation and contemporary existential threat, ensuring justice in Arctic multilateralism is more relevant than ever to avoid the development of international legal and cooperative frameworks that disproportionately concentrate power in state actors to the detriment of Indigenous sovereignty and the right to self-determination. »
« Face à la triple crise de la perte de biodiversité, des changements climatiques et de la violence sexuelle et sexiste, les femmes et les filles du monde entier sont confrontées quotidiennement à des violations de leurs droits fondamentaux. »
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“Cities today have become portfolios of investment properties with token patches of green. The cost to live in a fortress-like luxury housing complex in London or Manhattan is so high that most of us can’t afford it. As the masses move to the suburbs, the construction industry responds by churning out clusters of the same barracks-style row houses, ensuring that, there too, one can live in utmost privacy and security. But what do these buildings say about us? Do they have anything to do with the way in which most people actually want to live?”
Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore's legendary "Uncommon Places" has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore retains precise systems of gestures in composition and light through which a hotel bedroom or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance.
This highly influential film in architecture and planning circles by William H. Whyte analyzes the success and failures of urban spaces. Observing the natural order of spaces and the way people move through them, Whyte provides an intuitive critique of urban spaces and ways these spaces can be improved.
“L’avènement de l’univers numérique a mis à mal notre rapport à la ville tangible, que nous avons désertée au profit d’une hyperconnectivité qui n’est pas sans conséquences sur l’espace public en tant que lieu de sociabilité. Et l’arrivée annoncée d’un soi-disant «métavers» ne fera qu’amplifier ce phénomène. La dépersonnalisation des relations interpersonnelles et le transfert des décisions humaines à des machines menacent, à terme, la part d’humanité qui nous relie les un·e·s aux autres. Loin d’y voir une fatalité, l’auteur défend l’idée selon laquelle la migration quasi intégrale de notre vie collective vers l’internet serait au contraire une invitation à réinvestir la ville en chair et en os afin de faire contrepoids à nos existences de plus en plus désincarnées. S’inspirant de la technologie analogique, il convoque les formes urbaines du passé pour imaginer la ville de demain, en évitant le piège de la nostalgie.”
“In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.”
Patti Smith quote "The thing that bothered me the most was when I had to return to the public eye in ’95 or ’96 when my husband died. We lived a very simple lifestyle in a more reclusive way in which he was king of our domain. I don’t drive, I didn’t have much of an income, and without him, I had to find a way of making a living. Besides working in a bookstore, the only thing I knew how to do was to make records—or to write poetry, which isn’t going to help put your kids through school. But when I started doing interviews, people kept saying “Well, you didn’t do anything in the 80s,” and I just want to get Elvis Presley’s gun out and shoot the television out of their soul. How could you say that? The conceit of people, to think that if they’re not reading about you in a newspaper or magazine, then you’re not doing anything.
Dans l’imaginaire collectif, la maternité rime souvent avec bonheur et célébration de la vie. Pourtant, la quête de la parentalité, l’expérience de la grossesse, de l’accouchement et du post-partum n’est pas toujours aussi idyllique. La parentalité n’échappe pas aux contradictions de notre société actuelle où liberté, capacité, avancées médicales et productivité s’entrechoquent. Depuis quelques années, de nombreuses personnes osent partager leurs histoires, leurs parcours en procréation médicalement assistée (PMA), leurs vécus d’accouchements difficiles et d’expériences traumatiques comme la fausse-couche ou la mortinaissance. Des voix s’élèvent de divers milieux pour nommer certaines pratiques comme étant des formes d’abus ou de violences gynécologiques et obstétricales, appelant à repenser les approches. Les conditions d’accouchement ont été à nouveau un sujet d’actualité et de débat de société dès le début de la pandémie, durant laquelle des milliers de femmes ont accouché en solitaire : diverses méthodes d’accouchement ont momentanément été empêchées, montrant ainsi que la maternité demeure un terrain de revendications féministes et un terreau fertile de réflexions.
“Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work” -Mierles Ukeles
In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan’s early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.
Chorégraphe active depuis 2015, j’ai à ce jour, présenté mes pièces au Québec et en Asie du Sud-Est, en théâtre (MAI, Tangente, SIDance Corée) et en galerie (L’Arsenal, The Factory Vietnam). J’ai aussi une activité en tant que travailleuse culturelle, interprète et réalisatrice vidéo. Bien que d’apparence dispersée, ces quatre pans sont en réalité combinés et dirigés vers l’accomplissement de ma démarche professionnelle. Ainsi, mon travail scénique et vidéo se concentre sur la création d’onirismes, ancrés dans un passé aux identités colonisées et un futur fictionnel et fantasmé. Ces processus sont la fois vecteurs d’échappées, et de révélations. Un profond souci d’équité, d’antioppression, et surtout de partage et de collaboration, anime l’ensemble de mes actions. En surface, je crée et diffuse mes pièces, puis sous les flots je tisse des projets secrets, dont une chaine souterraine de dialogues entre artistes en danse du Tiers-Monde et un site web éphémère recensant des œuvres censurées.
Founded in 2019, Montreal Steppers is a group that is committed to the art form of step. Stepping is a style of dance that uses the body as an instrument to create rhythms, sounds, beats through foot stomps, claps and chants. Focusing on values of teamwork, discipline, character building, black history and resilience, we allow participants the opportunity to learn step, experience success and use their bodies to tell their own story.
This essay argues that diaspora must be understood as a condition of subjectivity and not as an object of analysis. I propose an understanding of diaspora as first and foremost a subjective condition marked by the contingencies of long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession. In focusing on the problem of subjectivity and subject formation, I am suggesting that diasporas are not just there. They are not simply collections of people, communities of scattered individuals bound by some shared history, race or religion. Rather, they emerge in relation to power, in the turn to and away from power. Diasporic subjects emerge in turning, turning back upon those markers of the self—homeland, memory, loss—even as they turn on or away from them.
A travers deux documentaires et un essai, Amandine Gay montre comment facteurs culturels, sociaux mais aussi économiques pèsent sur les destinées des femmes, de la naissance aux choix de carrière, et plus particulièrement dans l’économie culturelle.
Join us in the Rare Book Room as Ocean Vuong sits down with multi-award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson to discuss his shattering new book.
Dans un Vietnam lointain et fictionnel, se croisent des échos de musique pop sur cassettes et de rap vietnamien actuel. Châu Kim Sanh y traverse des états de corps générés par la présence de néons colorés.
This essay argues that diaspora must be understood as a condition of subjectivity and not as an object of analysis. I propose an understanding of diaspora as first and foremost a subjective condition marked by the contingencies of long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession. In focusing on the problem of subjectivity and subject formation, I am suggesting that diasporas are not just there. They are not simply collections of people, communities of scattered individuals bound by some shared history, race or religion. Rather, they emerge in relation to power, in the turn to and away from power. Diasporic subjects emerge in turning, turning back upon those markers of the self—homeland, memory, loss—even as they turn on or away from them.
Toward What Justice? brings together compelling ideas from a wide range of intellectual traditions in education to discuss corresponding and sometimes competing definitions of justice. Leading scholars articulate new ideas and challenge entrenched views of what justice means when considered from the perspectives of diverse communities. Their chapters, written boldly and pressing directly into the difficult and even strained questions of justice, reflect on the contingencies and incongruences at work when considering what justice wants and requires. At its heart, Toward What Justice? is a book about justice projects, and the incommensurable investments that social justice projects can make. It is a must-have volume for scholars and students working at the intersection of education and Indigenous studies, critical disability studies, climate change research, queer studies, and more.
For a long time now there have been two primary conceptual frameworks through which many of us conceptualize racial embodiment: Frantz Fanon’s “epidermal racial schema”1 and Hortense Spillers’s “hieroglyphics of the flesh.”2 The former denaturalizes black skin as the product of a shattering white gaze; the latter has been particularly instructive in training our gaze on the black female body and the ineluctable matter of ungendered, jeopardized flesh. Yet, has the “epidermal racial schema” hardened for us into a thing of untroubled legibility? To what extent have the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” prevented us from seeing an alternative materialism of the body?
Writer and photographer Teju Cole says he is “intrigued by the continuity of places, by the singing line that connects them all.” He attends to the border, overlap and interplay of things — from Brahms and Baldwin to daily technologies like Google. To delve into his mind and his multiple arts is to meet this world with creative raw materials for enduring truth and quiet hope. Teju Cole is a photography critic for The New York Times and the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. His books are Blind Spot, a book of photography and writing; a collection of essays, Known and Strange Things; and two novels: Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Teju Cole — Sitting Together in the Dark.”
A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history—the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.
In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.
Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game. The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described thief has just tried but failed to commit suicide. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen night-time streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but wilfully blind, citizens who surround him.
Podcast
ŠamaŠ Soleil Noir Soleil was created by Zad Moultaka was exhibited in Beirut Lebanon at the Sursock Museum in June 2018, in Helsinki, Suomenlinna Island from August till October 2018. His project for the Lebanese Pavillon unites visual architecture and sound composition. He combines the artist's musical and visual research in sinergy of forms, materials and sounds.
L’Apocalypse arabe is a book-length poem composed in French by the Arab American poet Etel Adnan. It was published in 1980; Adnan’s English translation first appeared in 1989. The Arab Apocalypse may be read as a hybrid text, visual poetry, surrealism, translation, postcolonialism — it is its nature as a work of witness because it was written in response to and in the immediate context of the Lebanese Civil War (which broke out in 1975).
It is hoped that, by increasing deposits, digital or otherwise, these ideas can contribute to a growing counterculture of thought and action that through time will be found and used in the construction of alternative states of becoming.
Edward Saïd's book ORIENTALISM has been profoundly influential in a diverse range of disciplines since its publication in 1978. In this engaging (and lavishly illustrated) interview he talks about the context within which the book was conceived, its main themes and how its original thesis relates to the contemporary understanding of "the Orient." Said argues that the Western (especially American) understanding of the Middle East as a place full of villains and terrorists ruled by Islamic fundamentalism produces a deeply distorted image of the diversity and complexity of millions of Arab peoples.
Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word “patriarchy” in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly. The word “patriarchy” just is not a part of their normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences. I have been standing at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by it.
Il n’y a pas de définition ou de modèle unique de la mutualisation. Pour moi, il s’agit d’une manière de penser, de travailler en collaboration. Les fondements sont toutefois toujours les mêmes : l’action de partager ou de mettre en commun quelque chose. Bien entendu, dans la mutualisation, il y a l’idée de « mutuel », il faut regrouper plusieurs individus ou organismes dans un projet commun. Chaque partie prenante retire donc des bénéfices de cette collaboration, même si ces bénéfices ne sont pas nécessairement répartis également pour chaque partenaire. L’idée n’est pas de prendre des biens et de les diviser en deux. Il s’agit plutôt de mettre en commun des ressources mutuelles ensemble. La somme des ressources impliquées rend le projet plus fort.
The gig economy has become a hot topic. The term itself derives from the world of entertainment, particularly live music, where performers striving for recognition hope to get a few ‘gigs’ – i.e. short-term and sporadic opportunities for paid employment, with the understanding that such engagements are limited and without any future obligation on either party – employer or employee. This seemingly gives both parties significant autonomy, albeit not in equal measure. I show how key aspects of Zygmunt Bauman’s work prepare us for an understanding and appreciation of the gig economy, and other more extensive ramifications; particularly those exemplified in the success of the Open Source model, and its potential – or not – to provide the basis for new institutional forms appropriate and acceptable for our current context.
Some call it the fourth industrial revolution. The age of the Human-supported assembly line that began with Ford is long gone. This industrial revolution won’t be marked by a monstrous industrial machine supported by a robust middle-class, trained and molded by a public school system. This industrial revolution will be marked by machine learning, big data, and artificial intelligence making it possible for the giants of industry and tech to be bigger and more profitable, while relentlessly squeezing out the need for human labor. If all current trends hold, people will have no choice but to start to re-imagine their place in society. And though it may seem counter-intuitive, the answers to these questions will represent a giant societal leap forward. As the world pushes forward into the age of algorithms with a declining need for human labor, the stage is set for what comes next — a return to what brings us closer to being human; a great resurgence in the arts, entrepreneurship, and creativity; a global renaissance.
What is the mathematical metaphor that dominates us in the post-modern age? How will the math of today affect our cultural future? I propose that the Science of Complexity, also known as Chaos Theory, provides many concepts which help to give insight into the context and direction of contemporary culture, as well as providing new technologies, methodologies, and metaphors for the production of valid work and theory. What tools can it provide us, both practically and intellectually? Perhaps we should first ask what it is that we look would look for in such a paradigm.
Advances in the scientific study of chaos have been important motivators/roots of the modern study of complex systems. There exists some confusion about the relationship of chaos and complexity. Chaos can be more or less strictly defined. A reasonably strict definition is that chaos deals with deterministic systems whose trajectories diverge exponentially over time. This property is expected to be found in the behavior of complex systems. However, how it can be related to various properties of complex systems continues to be an important area of research. Models of chaos generally describe the dynamics of one (or a few) variables which are real (ie represented by a decimal number). Using these models some characteristic behaviors of their dynamics can be found.
"Who exactly are the attention merchants? As an industry, they are relativelynew. Their lineage can be traced to the nineteenth century, when in New YorkCity the first newspapers fully dependent on advertising were created; and Paris,where a dazzling new kind of commercial art first seized the eyes of the person inthe street. But the full potential of the business model by which attention isconverted into revenue would not be fully understood until the early twentiethcentury, when the power of mass attention was discovered not by any commercialentity but by British war propagandists. The disastrous consequences ofpropaganda in two world wars would taint the subsequent use of such methods bygovernment, at least in the West. Industry, however, took note of what captiveattention could accomplish, and since that time has treated it as a preciousresource, paying ever larger premiums for it."
"(...) McLuhan understood that whenever a new medium comes along, people naturally get caught up in the information—the “content”—it carries. They care about the news in the newspaper, the music on the radio, the shows on the TV, the words spoken by the person on the far end of the phone line. The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may be, disappears behind whatever flows through it—facts, entertainment, instruction, conversation. When people start debating (as they always do) whether the medium’s effects are good or bad, it’s the content they wrestle over. Enthusiasts celebrate it; skeptics decry it.(...)"
Facebook’s single-minded focus on accuracy developed after sustaining years of criticism over its handling of moderation issues. With billions of new posts arriving each day, Facebook feels pressure on all sides.
“This book makes the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as “queer time” and “queer space”. Queer use of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institution of family, heterosexuality and reproduction. They also develop according to other logistics of location, movement and identification. If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding of Foucault’s comment in “Friendship as a way of life” that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather then as a ‘way of having sex’...”
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
“1.A body’s material. It’s dense. It’s impenetrable. Penetrate it, and you break it, puncture it, tear it. 2. A body’s material. It’s off to one side. Distinct from other bodies. A body begins and ends against another body. The void itself is a subtle kind of body. 3. A body isn’t empty. It’s full of other bodies, pieces, organs, parts, tissues, knee-caps, rings, tubes, levers, and bellows. It’s also full of itself: that’s all it is. 4. A body’s immaterial. It’s a drawing, a contour, an idea.”
“Can we conceive of blackness as a non-epitaphic discourse? If so, what kind of writing would that entail? What would it mean to make black life into a thing that matters? And lastly, what is this material afterlife that blackness seems to have won for itself in critical theory?”
“Over the intervening decades, inter- sectionality has proved to be a productive concept that has been deployed in disciplines such as history, sociology, literature, philosophy, and anthro- pology as well as in feminist studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and legal studies. Intersectionality’s insistence on examining the dynamics of differ- ence and sameness has played a major role in facilitating consideration of gender, race, and other axes of power in a wide range of political discussions and academic disciplines, including new developments in fields such as ge- ography and organizational studies."
“The world too is inherited as a dwelling. Whiteness might be what is ‘here’, as a point from which the world unfolds, which is also the point of inheritance. If whiteness is inherited, then it is also reproduced. Whiteness gets reproduced by being seen as a form of positive residence: as if it were a property of persons, cultures and places. Whiteness becomes, you could even say, ‘like itself’, as a form of family resemblance. It is no accident that race has been understood through familial metaphors in the sense that ‘races’ come to be seen as having ‘shared ancestry’ (Fenton, 2003: 2).”
A growing literature is emerging on the believability and spread of disinformation, such as fake news, over social networks. However, little is known about the degree to which malicious actors can use social media to covertly affect behavior with disinformation. A lab-based randomized controlled experiment was conducted with 233 undergraduate students to investigate the behavioral effects of fake news. It was found that even short (under 5-min) exposure to fake news was able to significantly modify the unconscious behavior of individuals.
"Images are meant for people to orient themselves in the world. But when they become very strong, people use their experience in the world to orient themselves in the image. The image becomes the concrete reality, and the world is only a pretext."
"As pedagogical and choreographic practices are quickly diversifying, this may be a crucial time to rethink, for example, the composition of the requisite daily technique class. (Do all dancers still “take a daily class”?) Perhaps we are ready to collectively agree on one new idea: that in the wake of globalization and post-colonialism there is no longer the possibility of a single utopian “neutral” or “basic” way of training all dancing bodies (and minds)."
Between television, the movies and top 40 lists, ballroom culture was appropriated by pop culture decades ago. With the spectacular support of a team of dancers, community leader Ronald Murray reclaims the subculture's narrative for queer communities of color.
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