Download or read book Public Culture written by Marguerite S. Shaffer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2008-08-06 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From medicine shows to the Internet, from the Los Angeles Plaza to the Las Vegas Strip, from the commemoration of the Oklahoma City bombing to television programming after 9/11, scholars examine issues of democracy, diversity, identity, community, citizenship, and belonging through the lens of American popular culture.
Download or read book The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth century United States written by Angela G. Ray and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Angela Ray provides a refreshing new look at the lyceum lecture system as it developed in the United States from the 1820s to the 1880s. She argues that the lyceum contributed to the creation of an American "public" at a time when the country experienced a rapid change in land area, increasing immigration, and a revolution in transportation, communication technology, and social roles. The history of the lyceum in the nineteenth century illustrates a process of expansion, diffusion, and eventual commercialization. In the late 1820s, a politically and economically dominant culture--the white Protestant northeastern middle class--institutionalized the practice of public debating and public lecturing for education and moral uplift. In the 1820s and 1830s, the lyceum was characterized by organized groups in cities and towns, particularly in the Northeast and the Old Northwest (now the Midwest). These groups were established to promote debate, to create a setting for study, and to provide a forum for members' lecturing. By the 1840s and 1850s, however, most lyceums concentrated on the sponsorship of public lectures, presented for institutional profit as well as public instruction and entertainment. Eventually, lyceum lectures became a commercial enterprise and desirable platform for celebrities who wished to expand their incomes from lecturing.
Download or read book Public Culture Cultural Identity Cultural Policy written by Kevin V. Mulcahy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book places the study of public support for the arts and culture within the prism of public policy making. It is explicitly comparative in casting cultural policy within a broad sociopolitical and historical framework. Given the complexity of national communities, there has been an absence of comparative analyses that would explain the wide variability in modes of cultural policy as reflections of public cultures and cultural identity. The discussion is internationally focused and interdisciplinary. Mulcahy contextualizes a wide variety of cultural policies and their relation to politics and identity by asking a basic question: who gets their heritage valorized and by whom is this done? The fundamental assumption is that culture is at the heart of public policy as it defines national identity and personal value.
Download or read book Dictators Democracy and American Public Culture written by Benjamin Leontief Alpers and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the la
Download or read book Producing Public Television Producing Public Culture written by Barry Dornfeld and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1989 to 1991, Barry Dornfeld had an unusual double role on the crew of the major PBS documentary series Childhood. As a researcher for the series, he investigated the relationship between children and media. As an anthropologist, however, his subject was the television production process itself--examining, for example, how producers developed the series, negotiated with their academic advisors, and shaped footage shot around the world into seven programs. He presents the results of his fieldwork in this groundbreaking study--one of the first to take an ethnographic approach to the production of a television show, as opposed to its reception. Dornfeld begins with a broad discussion of public television's role in American culture and goes on to examine documentaries as a form of popular anthropology. Drawing on his observations of Childhood, he considers the documentary form as a kind of "imagining," in which both producers and viewers construct understandings of themselves and others, revealing their conceptions of culture and history and their ideologies of cultural difference and universality. He argues that producers of culture should also be understood as consumers who conduct their work through an active envisioning of the audience. Dornfeld explores as well how intellectual media professionals struggle with the institutional and cultural forces surrounding television that promote entertainment at the expense of education. The book provides a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a major documentary and demonstrates the value of an ethnographic approach to the study of media production.
Download or read book Museums and Communities written by Ivan Karp and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to this volume examine and illustrate struggles and collaborations among museums, festivals, tourism, and historic preservation projects and the communities they represent and serve. Essays include the role of museums in civil society, the history of African-American collections, and experiments with museum-community dialogue about the design of a multicultural society.
Download or read book Science as Public Culture written by Jan Golinski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-06-28 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the development of chemistry in Britain 1760-1820 and relates it to civic life.
Download or read book Globalization written by Arjun Appadurai and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-03 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by one of the most prominent scholars in the field and including a distinguished group of contributors, this collection of essays makes a striking intervention in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions of globalization. While including discussions about what globalization is and whether it is a meaningful term, the volume focuses in particular on the way that changing sites—local, regional, diasporic—are the scenes of emergent forms of sovereignty in which matters of style, sensibility, and ethos articulate new legalities and new kinds of violence. Seeking an alternative to the dead-end debate between those who see globalization as a phenomenon wholly without precedent and those who see it simply as modernization, imperialism, or global capitalism with a new face, the contributors seek to illuminate how space and time are transforming each other in special ways in the present era. They examine how this complex transformation involves changes in the situation of the nation, the state, and the city. While exploring distinct regions—China, Africa, South America, Europe—and representing different disciplines and genres—anthropology, literature, political science, sociology, music, cinema, photography—the contributors are concerned with both the political economy of location and the locations in which political economies are produced and transformed. A special strength of the collection is its concern with emergent styles of subjectivity, citizenship, and mobilization and with the transformations of state power through which market rationalities are distributed and embodied locally. Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Jean François Bayart, Jérôme Bindé, Néstor García Canclini, Leo Ching, Steven Feld, Ralf D. Hotchkiss, Wu Hung, Andreas Huyssen, Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Achille Mbembe, Philipe Rekacewicz, Saskia Sassen, Fatu Kande Senghor, Seteney Shami, Anna Tsing, Zhang Zhen
Download or read book Culture and Public Action written by Vijayendra Rao and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Led by Amartya Sen, Mary Douglas, and Arjun Appadurai, the distinguished anthropologists and economists in this book forcefully argue that culture is central to development, and present a framework for incorporating culture into development discourse. For further information on the book and related essays, please visit www.cultureandpublicaction.org.
Download or read book Cosmopolitanism written by Dipesh Chakrabarty and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-10 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the final installment of Public Culture’s Millennial Quartet, Cosmopolitanism assesses the pasts and possible futures of cosmopolitanism—or ways of thinking, feeling, and acting beyond one’s particular society. With contributions from distinguished scholars in disciplines such as literary studies, art history, South Asian studies, and anthropology, this volume recenters the history and theory of translocal political aspirations and cultural ideas from the usual Western vantage point to areas outside Europe, such as South Asia, China, and Africa. By examining new archives, proposing new theoretical formulations, and suggesting new possibilities of political practice, the contributors critically probe the concept of cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism may be taken to promise a form of supraregional political solidarity, but on the other, these essays argue, it may erode precisely those intimate cultural differences that derive their meaning from particular places and traditions. Given that most cosmopolitan political formations—from the Roman empire and European imperialism to contemporary globalization—have been coercive and unequal, can there be a noncoercive and egalitarian cosmopolitan politics? Finally, the volume asks whether cosmopolitanism can promise any universalism that is not the unwarranted generalization of some Western particular. Contributors. Ackbar Abbas, Arjun Appadurai, Homi K. Bhabha, T. K. Biaya, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ousame Ndiaye Dago, Mamadou Diouf, Wu Hung, Walter D. Mignolo, Sheldon Pollock, Steven Randall
Download or read book Desiring China written by Lisa Rofel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-10 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through window displays, newspapers, soap operas, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, with appropriate needs, aspirations, and longings. Lisa Rofel argues that the creation of such “desiring subjects” is at the core of China’s contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neoliberal subjectivities are created through the production of various desires—material, sexual, and affective—and that it is largely through their engagements with public culture that people in China are imagining and practicing appropriate desires for the post-Mao era. Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings. She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women’s museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.
Download or read book Globalization written by Donald J. Boudreaux and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-12-30 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary era of globalization demonstrates that the local and global aspects of business and government are increasingly intertwined. This volume defines and makes sense of the workings of the global economy—and how it influences businesses and individuals. Each chapter identifies common questions and issues that have gained exposure in the popular media—such as outsourcing, the high cost of international travel, and the impact of a fast-growing China—to illustrate underlying drivers and mechanisms at work. Covering international trade, national wealth disparities (the haves vs. the have-nots), foreign investment, and geographical and cultural issues, and supported with illustrations, maps, charts, a glossary and timeline of key events,Globalization illuminates the dynamics of the global economy and informs readers of its profound impact on our daily lives.
Download or read book The Culture of Public Problems written by Joseph R. Gusfield and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Everyone knows 'drunk driving' is a 'serious' offense. And yet, everyone knows lots of 'drunk drivers' who don't get involved in accidents, don't get caught by the police, and manage to compensate adequately for their 'drunken disability.' Everyone also knows of 'drunk drivers' who have been arrested and gotten off easy. Gusfield's book dissects the conventional wisdom about 'drinking-driving' and examines the paradox of a 'serious' offense that is usually treated lightly by the judiciary and rarely carries social stigma."—Mac Marshall, Social Science and Medicine "A sophisticated and thoughtful critic. . . . Gusfield argues that the 'myth of the killer drunk' is a creation of the 'public culture of law.' . . . Through its dramatic development and condemnation of the anti-social character of the drinking-driver, the public law strengthens the illusion of moral consensus in American society and celebrates the virtues of a sober and orderly world."—James D. Orcutt, Sociology and Social Research "Joseph Gusfield denies neither the role of alcohol in highway accidents nor the need to do something about it. His point is that the research we conduct on drinking-driving and the laws we make to inhibit it tells us more about our moral order than about the effects of drinking-driving itself. Many will object to this conclusion, but none can ignore it. Indeed, the book will put many scientific and legal experts on the defensive as they face Gusfield's massive erudition, pointed analysis and criticism, and powerful argumentation. In The Culture of Public Problems, Gusfield presents the experts, and us, with a masterpiece of sociological reasoning."—Barry Schwartz, American Journal of Sociology This book is truly an outstanding achievement. . . . It is sociology of science, sociology of law, sociology of deviance, and sociology of knowledge. Sociologists generally should find the book of great theoretical interest, and it should stimulate personal reflection on their assumptions about science and the kind of consciousness it creates. They will also find that the book is a delight to read."—William B. Bankston, Social Forces
Download or read book Publics and Counterpublics written by Michael Warner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publics and Counterpublics revolves around a central question: What is a public? The idea of a public is a cultural form, a kind of practical fiction, present in the modern world in a way that is very different from other or earlier societies. Like the idea of rights, or nations, or markets, it can now seem universal. But it has not always been so. Publics exist only by virtue of their imagining. They are a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and very potent life at that. Publics have some regular properties as a form, with powerful implications for the way our social world takes shape; but much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelation. There are ambiguities, even contradictions in the idea of a public. As it is extended to new contexts and media, new polities and rhetorics, its meaning can be seen to change, in ways that we have scarcely begun to appreciate. By combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extended case studies, Publics and Counterpublics shows how the idea of a public works as a formal device in modern culture and traces its implications for contemporary life. Michael Warner offers a revisionist account at the junction of two intellectual traditions with which he has been associated: public-sphere theory and queer theory. To public-sphere theory, this book brings a new emphasis on cultural forms, and a new focus on the dynamics of counterpublics. To queer theory, it brings a new way of seeing how queer culture (among other examples) is shaped by the counterpublic environment.
Download or read book Imagined Communities written by Benedict Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2006-11-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.
Download or read book Institutions of Modernism written by Lawrence S. Rainey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of modernism and its place in public culture looks at where modernism was produced and how it was transmitted to particular audiences. The individual tales of figures like Joyce, Pound, Marinetti and Eliot provide perspectives on the larger story of modernism itself.
Download or read book No Caption Needed written by Robert Hariman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-06 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gaunt woman stares into the bleakness of the Great Depression. An exuberant sailor plants a kiss on a nurse in the heart of Times Square. A naked Vietnamese girl runs in terror from a napalm attack. An unarmed man stops a tank in Tiananmen Square. These and a handful of other photographs have become icons of public culture: widely recognized, historically significant, emotionally resonant images that are used repeatedly to negotiate civic identity. But why are these images so powerful? How do they remain meaningful across generations? What do they expose--and what goes unsaid? InNo Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. As these iconic images are reproduced and refashioned by governments, commercial advertisers, journalists, grassroots advocates, bloggers, and artists, their alterations throw key features of political experience into sharp relief. Iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a crucial resource for critical reflection. Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society.No Caption Neededis a compelling demonstration of photojournalism's vital contribution to public life.
