Download or read book Artistic Ambivalence in Clay written by Courtney Lee Weida and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of glimpses into the lives and works of fifteen prominent women artists in contemporary ceramics. Spanning multiple genres, generations, and geographies, these potters and ceramic sculptors describe nuances, contradictions, and tensions surrounding their artworks, artistic processes, and professional lives. Within this text, artistic ambivalences are questioned and analyzed in terms of myriad gender issues. Featured ceramicists include: Maureen Burns-Bowie, Esta Carnahan, Ellen Day, Cara Gay Driscoll, Dolores Dunning, Heidi Fahrenbacher, DeBorah Goletz, Lynn Goodman, Joan Hardin, Beth Heit, Tsehai Johnson, Kate Malone, Norma Messing, Elspeth Owen, and Mary Trainor. The qualitative research summarized within this book draws influence from feminist methodologies and the visual arts methodology of portraiture. Artists, art historians, and art educators interested in ceramics and gender will find detailed discussion of unexpected persistence of gendered associations within ceramic technology, social binaries of gender identity in symbols and traditions of clay, and subtle sexism surrounding ceramics in education. At the same time, this text celebrates women’s work in ceramics as an often neglected set of perspectives, highlighting the intricate complexities of artistic ambivalences and lived experiences of art within a dynamic dialogue.
Download or read book Monumental Ambivalence written by Lisa C. Breglia and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-12-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From ancient Maya cities in Mexico and Central America to the Taj Mahal in India, cultural heritage sites around the world are being drawn into the wave of privatization that has already swept through such economic sectors as telecommunications, transportation, and utilities. As nation-states decide they can no longer afford to maintain cultural properties—or find it economically advantageous not to do so in the globalizing economy—private actors are stepping in to excavate, conserve, interpret, and represent archaeological and historical sites. But what are the ramifications when a multinational corporation, or even an indigenous village, owns a piece of national patrimony which holds cultural and perhaps sacred meaning for all the country's people, as well as for visitors from the rest of the world? In this ambitious book, Lisa Breglia investigates "heritage" as an arena in which a variety of private and public actors compete for the right to benefit, economically and otherwise, from controlling cultural patrimony. She presents ethnographic case studies of two archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula—Chichén Itzá and Chunchucmil and their surrounding modern communities—to demonstrate how indigenous landholders, foreign archaeologists, and the Mexican state use heritage properties to position themselves as legitimate "heirs" and beneficiaries of Mexican national patrimony. Breglia's research masterfully describes the "monumental ambivalence" that results when local residents, excavation laborers, site managers, and state agencies all enact their claims to cultural patrimony. Her findings make it clear that informal and partial privatizations—which go on quietly and continually—are as real a threat to a nation's heritage as the prospect of fast-food restaurants and shopping centers in the ruins of a sacred site.
Download or read book The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter written by Mary Titus and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in the gender roles of American women. Mary Titus draws upon unpublished Porter papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews, to trace Porter’s shifting and complex response to those cultural changes. Titus shows how Porter explored her own ambivalence about gender and creativity, for she experienced firsthand a remarkable range of ideas concerning female sexuality. These included the Victorian attitudes of the grandmother who raised her; the sexual license of revolutionary Mexico, 1920s New York, and 1930s Paris; and the conservative, ordered attitudes of the Agrarians. Throughout Porter’s long career, writes Titus, she “repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman’s maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence.” Much of her writing, then, serves as a medium for what Titus terms Porter’s “gender-thinking”--her sustained examination of the interrelated issues of art, gender, and identity. Porter, says Titus, rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, a turn away from the essential identity of woman as “the repository of life,” as childbearer. In her life Porter increasingly played a highly feminized public role as southern lady, but in her writing she continued to engage changing representations of female identity and sexuality. This is an important new study of the tensions and ambivalence inscribed in Porter’s fiction, as well as the vocational anxiety and gender performance of her actual life.
Download or read book On Second Thought written by William R. Miller and published by Guilford Publications. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rich inner world of a human being is far more complex than either/or. You can love and hate, want to go and want to stay, feel both joy and sadness. Psychologist William Miller--one of the world's leading experts on the science of change--offers a fresh perspective on ambivalence and its transformative potential in this revealing book. Rather than trying to overcome indecision by force of will, Dr. Miller explores what happens when people allow opposing arguments from their “inner committee members” to converse freely with each other. Learning to tolerate and even welcome feelings of ambivalence can help you get unstuck from unwanted habits, clarify your desires and values, explore the pros and cons of tough decisions, and open doorways to change. Vivid examples from everyday life, literature, and history illustrate why we are so often "of two minds," and how to work through it.
Download or read book Recognition and Ambivalence written by Heikki Ikäheimo and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recognition is one of the most debated concepts in contemporary social and political thought. Its proponents, such as Axel Honneth, hold that to be recognized by others is a basic human need that is central to forming an identity, and the denial of recognition deprives individuals and communities of something essential for their flourishing. Yet critics including Judith Butler have questioned whether recognition is implicated in structures of domination, arguing that the desire to be recognized can motivative individuals to accept their assigned place in the social order by conforming to oppressive norms or obeying repressive institutions. Is there a way to break this impasse? Recognition and Ambivalence brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Honneth and Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject. Contributions from both proponents and critics of theories of recognition further reflect upon and clarify the problems and challenges involved in theorizing the concept and its normative desirability. Together, they explore different routes toward a critical theory of recognition, departing from wholly positive or negative views to ask whether it is an essentially ambivalent phenomenon. Featuring original, systematic work in the philosophy of recognition, this book also provides a useful orientation to the key debates on this important topic.
Download or read book Ambivalence and the Structure of Political Opinion written by S. Craig and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-01-14 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents an important step in bringing together various strands of research about attitudinal ambivalence and public opinion. Essays by a distinguished group of political scientists and social psychologists provide a conceptual framework for understanding how ambivalence is currently understood and measured, as well as its relevance to the mass public's beliefs about our political institutions and national identity. The theoretical insights, methodological innovations, and empirical analyses will add substantially to our knowledge about the nature of ambivalence in particular, and the structure and evolution of political attitudes in general.
Download or read book Sexual Ambivalence written by Luc Brisson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-03-28 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of sexual ambivalence in antiquity, which was both deeply threatening to the social order and profoundly attractive.
Download or read book AuthenticTM written by Sarah Banet-Weiser and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-11-26 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating, smart book on what it means to live in a brand culture Brands are everywhere. Branding is central to political campaigns and political protest movements; the alchemy of social media and self-branding creates overnight celebrities; the self-proclaimed “greening” of institutions and merchant goods is nearly universal. But while the practice of branding is typically understood as a tool of marketing, a method of attaching social meaning to a commodity as a way to make it more personally resonant with consumers, Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that in the contemporary era, brands are about culture as much as they are about economics. That, in fact, we live in a brand culture. AuthenticTM maintains that branding has extended beyond a business model to become both reliant on, and reflective of, our most basic social and cultural relations. Further, these types of brand relationships have become cultural contexts for everyday living, individual identity, and personal relationships—what Banet-Weiser refers to as “brand cultures.” Distinct brand cultures, that at times overlap and compete with each other, are taken up in each chapter: the normalization of a feminized “self-brand” in social media, the brand culture of street art in urban spaces, religious brand cultures such as “New Age Spirituality” and “Prosperity Christianity,”and the culture of green branding and “shopping for change.” In a culture where graffiti artists loan their visions to both subway walls and department stores, buying a cup of “fair-trade” coffee is a political statement, and religion is mass-marketed on t-shirts, Banet-Weiser questions the distinction between what we understand as the “authentic” and branding practices. But brand cultures are also contradictory and potentially rife with unexpected possibilities, leading AuthenticTM to articulate a politics of ambivalence, creating a lens through which we can see potential political possibilities within the new consumerism.
Download or read book Pregrets written by Anselm Berrigan and published by Black Square Editions. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. New poems by Anselm Berrigan. "In the world of Anselm Berrigan sketchiness is next to godliness and repeated heavy-lifting becomes a pleasure. PREGRETS has the feel of wandering a giant armory filled with enigmatic objects and pointed memories. Dust motes in daylight betray a thin path forward so the 'tongue' of the book seems in constant peril; addictively so. 'Red copter rises slicing a scraper into outer cubicle dreams...' Possessed of a haunted style that moves beyond surface. Fathomless."--Cedar Sigo "With PREGRETS; Anselm Berrigan captures the scattered environs and tonal intrusions that compose thought-break as society--a reflection of the seemingly scattered populace; where the all is broken while becoming thought; 'unity would like / its finked deproductions back.' If we remove a cogent arc; the dips and peaks of our lives become weirdly accessible; where each observed indentation of skin on skin action becomes a jeweled aphorism; a telegrammed imagistic; from u to us--'I'm a covered base / levitating carry-ons into sub-extinction.' Berrigan synthesizes time's arrival as an act of pregret; by giving us regrets to degret from; now he's got me doing it! The breathless yet finite scrawl of these poems--ecosystems of empowerment that infuse the neighborhood walk with the centered page--re-train listening as a sort of ekphrasis of unfolding; to capture the journey's formation with a delicate insistence on the everyday apogee found between the words; 'being a thingless / telephat;' of poet to reader; 'give my love to the air out there.'"--Edwin Torres "Houdini word smithy Anselm Berrigan writes elsewhere about poetry coming from a place as if a filter between your consciousness and the world fluttering in. This magic act; not facile; is unpredictable--the filter works lovingly overtime; hard at its alchemy; arrangement; intuitive flowing 'moves' of brain flash; found attitude; multiple voiced increments. Sometimes I'm breathless inside a language barrage or barrel speedily turning not bound by any one thought. Other times I'm with abandon in the cognition quotidian soup. ('The abstract poet runs where in cognito again?') But consciousness is a vivid Zen equalizer--a syncretic piling on as words jump the gate; rhapsodize; list; lumber; scan this wild existence. So what IS the sense of PREGRETS? 'gret' comes from the 'greter' meaning to weep; mourn; lament from the Frankish 'gretan.' Was it that moment before you weep? or imagined later? Future pluperfect? Regrets suggest a past. Begrets suggest something between begetting and beginning; more complicated than 'first thought; best thought' And we have also Deflategrets; Freegrets; Megrets; Gretgrets; and then Degrets de-constructs the lament perhaps. So PREGRETS I figure gets at origins that already have some kind of affect/karma but don't have to add up. A huge relief. This work is all about duration and mind and space; and Time as spiral. Often like dream text with that crazy 'other' fluttering in wild tandem. 'The escapist fig as fondled contour.' Amazing."--Anne Waldman
Download or read book Mothering and Ambivalence written by Brid Featherstone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children's rights, lone motherhood and the breakdown of families are all issues at the forefront of current social debate in the West, with little agreement on what constitutes good parenting, or how the needs of both mother and child are best met. The feminist contribution to this debate is particularly important in keeping in view the diverse identities of all those who provide mothering. The psychoanalytic contribution is often undervalued and misunderstood. Mothering and Ambivalence brings together authors from therapeutic, academic and social work backgrounds to discuss dependency, anxiety and gender relations within families. Drawing on extensive professional experience the contributors combine a psychoanalytic and feminist approach to mothering which transcends the polarized and simplistic political debate about women's and children's needs. They also show how such an approach can inform and improve professional practice.
Download or read book The Ambivalent Internet written by Whitney Phillips and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the weird and mean and in-between that characterize everyday expression online, from absurdist photoshops to antagonistic Twitter hashtags to deceptive identity play. Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner focus especially on the ambivalence of this expression: the fact that it is too unwieldy, too variable across cases, to be essentialized as old or new, vernacular or institutional, generative or destructive. Online expression is, instead, all of the above. This ambivalence, the authors argue, hinges on available digital tools. That said, there is nothing unexpected or surprising about even the strangest online behavior. Ours is a brave new world, and there is nothing new under the sun – a point necessary to understanding not just that online spaces are rife with oddity, mischief, and antagonism, but why these behaviors matter. The Ambivalent Internet is essential reading for students and scholars of digital media and related fields across the humanities, as well as anyone interested in mediated culture and expression.
Download or read book Ambivalence written by Hili Razinsky and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining Analytic and Continental approaches, this book provides a detailed analysis of mental ambivalence and its structures, forms and possibilities, in a philosophical context. The author explores ambivalence alongside issues relating to subjectivity, action and judgement, ..
Download or read book Ambivalence written by Jonathan Garfinkel and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TRAVEL WRITING. This provocative memoir chronicles Garfinkel's travels in Israel and Palestine and his journey away from a Zionist education in Toronto. After a screening of a Palestinian film, he meets a Palestinian woman who tells him about a house in Israel occupied by an Arab and a Jew. The story compels him to travel to Israel and the West Bank in search of the house with the hopes of discovering a truer sense of life in the Middle East. But the address she's given him doesn't exist, and nothing is as simple as it seemed...Bringing to light the complexities of real life as opposed to the religious or political ideal, this memoir questions what it really means to adhere to a culture or faith. Rife with riotous, sometimes surreal comedy, as well as tragic misunderstandings, "Ambivalence" offers a vivid and challenging portrait of life in Israel and Palestine.
Download or read book Distant Wars Visible written by Wendy Kozol and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our wired world, visual images of military conflict and political strife are ubiquitous. Far less obvious, far more elusive, is how we see such images, how witnessing military violence and suffering affects us. Distant Wars Visible brings a new perspective to such enduring questions about conflict photography and other forms of visual advocacy, whether in support of U.S. military objectives or in critique of the nation at war. At the book’s center is what author Wendy Kozol calls an analytic of ambivalence—a critical approach to the tensions between spectacle and empathy provoked by gazing at military atrocities and trauma. Through this approach, Distant Wars Visible uses key concepts such as the politics of recoil, the notion of looking elsewhere, skeptical documents, and ethical spectatorship to examine multiple visual cultural practices depicting war, on and off the battlefield, from the 1999 NATO bombings in Kosovo to the present. Kozol’s analysis draws from collections of family photographs, human rights photography, independent film production, photojournalism, and other examples of war’s visual culture, as well as extensive visual evidence of the ways in which U.S. militarism operates to maintain geopolitical dominance—from Fallujah and Abu Ghraib to the most recent drone strikes in Pakistan. Throughout, Kozol reveals how factors such as gender, race, and sexuality construct competing visualizations of identity in a range of media from graphic narrative and film to conflict photography and battlefield souvenirs—and how contingencies and contradictions in visual culture shape the politics and ethics of witnessing.
Download or read book Schlepping Through Ambivalence written by Stanley Tigerman and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays, most previously unpublished, spans the course of Tigerman's career. Included are writings on the history of Chicago architecture, architectural theory, and commentary on contemporaries.
Download or read book Ambivalent Nation written by Hugh Dubrulle and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ambivalent Nation, Hugh Dubrulle explores how Britons envisioned the American Civil War and how these conceptions influenced their discussions about race, politics, society, military affairs, and nationalism. Contributing new research that expands upon previous scholarship focused on establishing British public opinion toward the war, Dubrulle offers a methodical dissection of the ideological forces that shaped that opinion, many of which arose from the complex Anglo-American postcolonial relationship. Britain’s lingering feeling of ownership over its former colony contributed heavily to its discussions of the American Civil War. Because Britain continued to have a substantial material interest in the United States, its writers maintained a position of superiority and authority in respect to American affairs. British commentators tended to see the United States as divided by two distinct civilizations, even before the onset of war: a Yankee bourgeois democracy and a southern oligarchy supported by slavery. They invariably articulated mixed feelings toward both sections, and shortly before the Civil War, the expression of these feelings was magnified by the sudden emergence of inexpensive newspapers, periodicals, and books. The conflicted nature of British attitudes toward the United States during the antebellum years anticipates the ambivalence with which the British reacted to the American crisis in 1861. Britons used prewar stereotypes of northerners and southerners to help explain the course and significance of the conflict. Seen in this fashion, the war seemed particularly relevant to a number of questions that occupied British conversations during this period: the characteristics and capacities of people of African descent, the proper role of democracy in society and politics, the future of armed conflict, and the composition of a durable nation. These questions helped shape Britain’s stance toward the war and, in turn, the war informed British attitudes on these subjects. Dubrulle draws from numerous primary sources to explore the rhetoric and beliefs of British public figures during these years, including government papers, manuscripts from press archives, private correspondence, and samplings from a variety of dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies. The first book to examine closely the forces that shaped British public opinion about the Civil War, Ambivalent Nation contextualizes and expands our understanding of British attitudes during this tumultuous period.
Download or read book Giving Offense written by J.M. Coetzee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship. From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system. "The most impressive feature of Coetzee's essays, besides his ear for language, is his coolheadedness. He can dissect repugnant notions and analyze volatile emotions with enviable poise."—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review "Those looking for simple, ringing denunciations of censorship's evils will be disappointed. Coetzee explicitly rejects such noble tritenesses. Instead . . . he pursues censorship's deeper, more fickle meanings and unmeanings."—Kirkus Reviews "These erudite essays form a powerful, bracing criticism of censorship in its many guises."—Publishers Weekly "Giving Offense gets its incisive message across clearly, even when Coetzee is dealing with such murky theorists as Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, and René; Girard. Coetzee has a light, wry sense of humor."—Bill Marx, Hungry Mind Review "An extraordinary collection of essays."—Martha Bayles, New York Times Book Review "A disturbing and illuminating moral expedition."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
