Four Flows theory and materiality: ISIL’s use of material resources in its communicative constitution

This paper extends Four Flows theory by showing how its agency-related assumptions can explain the role played by materials in the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO). Analysis of Dabiq – the propaganda periodical of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) – illustrates how members of the complex organization engaged in activity coordination to position the organization through communication strategies such as instantiation, cooptation, and intertextual allusions. These institutional positioning strategies are themselves partially material, and we show how they function together with still other material resources as part-whole appeals in which the material part is projected to represent the whole of the organization’s image and meaning across time and space. Each part-whole appeal is predicated on how the organization attributes meaning to its material resources. Implications for CCO theory are included.     

论邓小平人物评价特点的形成原因

在中国社会主义建设的历史新时期，邓小平作为改革开放的总设计师，以马克思主义政治家的胆略和智慧对不同时期各具特色的人物进行科学评价，并形成科学性、务实性、具体性和前瞻性的人物评价特点。     

The socio-material pragmatics of e-governance mobilization

E-governance, with reference to the relationship between the individual and the state, develops in dense networks of human and technological actors. However, mobilization of information technology in e-governance is not a straightforward instantiation of such ambitions but rather a tinkering process in which actors and their interests are combined and transformed. In this paper we examine this idea by investigating the development of a Swedish national public healthcare portal representing a complex, multilevel, and political environment. In this endeavour, the principle of symmetry from Actor-Network Theory and an event-based approach in the analysis play important roles. We show that the development process involves envisioning the future (even if vaguely), implementing concrete ideas about technological functionality and platforms, reconciling diverse interests, prioritizing and framing political concerns and breakdowns, and working toward realization of abstract goals. In this process, the technological actors play a role as important as that of the human actors. The paper concludes that e-governance relationships emerge that rest upon socio-material pragmatics influenced by political transformations that are often unanticipated.     

MATERIAL,LITERARY NARRATIVE AND CULTURAL ECONOMY

In this paper I argue that thinking about the material in cultural economy has much to gain from culture itself. Specifically, I explore the potential of literary narrative for conceptualizing and writing material within a performative cultural economy. Drawing on the industrial short stories of Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, The Wrench, A Tranquil Star), I provide a literal reading of these works, highlighting their foregrounding of material encounters, the importance of process (and not just product), and materials’ instability in process, and their connections to theorizations of economies as assemblage. The paper also explores how Levi writes material to presence using the techniques of narrative discourse, particularly mimesis. The paper concludes by arguing that narrative is a means to writing a performative cultural economy and that cultural economy needs to rekindle the arts of story-telling. Paying attention to literary narrative shows how this might be achieved.     

Provocations on the pleasures of archived paper

Digital formats are often popularly imagined to spell the ‘end’ of paper. In this essay I pose a series of questions about the importance of materiality for how researchers understand and work with archived paper documents. Drawing examples from research among literary papers and personal correspondence, I highlight the ways in which paper traditionally ‘disappears’ from the researcher’s view and ask whether the conditions of the digital turn may in fact provide for a return to ‘thinking through paper’.     

手枪:词与物交织的文本实验——欧阳江河名诗《手枪》解读

名诗《手枪》是著名诗人欧阳江河在现代语境下所写的一首语言诗学实验之作,它充分利用手枪的物质性,并通过作为物的手枪与作为词的手枪的并置、交织,产生一种立体画般迷人的艺术效果,同时此诗包含了丰富的意蕴与深刻的哲理。解读诗人这首早年之作,可以窥见欧阳江河诗歌艺术面貌之一斑。     

Materialising effects of difference in sex education: the ‘absurd’ banana penis

ABSTRACT

This article scrutinises pedagogical practices undergone in sexuality education as recorded with two intergenerational groups of former Australian schoolgirls. It discusses the surprising widespread use of the plastic, white, circumcised banana penis in sexuality education experienced by the younger group. The normalisation of the white, circumcised, plastic, banana penis (without reference to the vulva and/or vagina) is telling about what bodies matter and how sex materialises. The banana penis, as uncritically modelled in sexuality education, effectively materialises difference as both sexist and racist. This paper considers diffractive thinking in classroom with these practices, with students, and ways pedagogical practice may bring about a renormalisation that moves from reiterating racist heteronormative hierarchies to a creative opening up of ways students (as sexed, gendered and raced) can come to safely and affirmatively negotiate differences.     

Philosophies and ethics of the project archive

Archival research can be described as preoccupied with the ontology of data formation and collection in relation to the speaking and writing subject. From its outset, it can be located in the humanistic tradition, which the archival and historical discipline has inherited. Thus, archival research can be described as preoccupied with the ontology of data formation and collection in relation to the speaking and writing subject. At the same time, the archival researcher—the human subject—is produced as the sole source of subjective experiences, consciousness and feelings, and has become the central player in this tradition, embedded in debates over the concept of human autonomy in archival research. Archival researchers—human subjects—should be continually challenged by their own discipline, and by such arguably scientific methods, which often espouse rejecting their ethical commitments to idiosyncrasy, entanglements and the blurring of subject–object binaries. An approach that re-elevates these commitments, we argue, raises the importance of archival research as an ethically non-neutral philosophical project.     

从中国美学兴味蕴藉传统看通俗艺术品位提升——以赵本山作品为个案

随着我国通俗艺术的社会影响力日益强劲,与之相伴随的争议也愈益激烈。那么,通俗艺术是否应当具有起码的文化品位?从中国美学兴味蕴藉传统角度,重新审视当前通俗艺术的品位提升方略,认为以赵本山作品为代表的新世纪以来的艺术作品确实存在文化品位上的缺憾。大多只是达到了"感目"层次,而很少能抵达"会心"层次,更无理由谈论"畅神"层次,因此陷入"眼热心冷"的困境。因此,要提升通俗艺术作品的文化品位、形成"俗而雅"的艺术风格,就需要借鉴、学习感兴美学的相关因素,在作品中灌注进意味深厚的兴味蕴藉,从而真正地打动观众。有兴味蕴藉的艺术才能真正动人。     

The girl with the garden gloves: researching the affordances of sensual materialities in the school garden

ABSTRACT

This article uses vignettes and photographs taken from ethnographic research to reframe the methodological assumptions within school garden research. New theoretical perspectives are applied to previous empirical school garden research that provides deeper understandings of both the teaching and the learning of ecoliteracy in such material contexts. Actor Network Theory and Social Semiotics further highlight the affordance of school garden spaces. We make public the conversations of a small research group about a perceived ethnographic turn towards materiality, aesthetics and agency.