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Directory of World Cinema: Brazil is an important opportunity to synthesise current scholarship on the Brazilian Cinema being undertaken globally, bringing some of the most important movements, genres and themes from across the eras of Brazilian cinema into a coherent picture.
The Propaganda of Peace: The Role of Media and Culture in the Northern Ireland Peace Process by Greg McLaughlin and Stephen Baker has been reviewed by Sue Curry Jansen for The War and Media Network.
'Most propaganda studies focus on the drumbeats of war, the tactics and strategies that ignite the furies of hate and aggression; however, bringing war to a successful conclusion also requires ideological readjustments and management of public perceptions. It is not enough for the victors to write the history of a conflict. To claim the spoils of war and secure the future, they also must cultivate public acceptance of their interpretive frameworks. That is, they need to deploy what McLaughlin and Baker call the ‘propaganda of peace’ in order to effectively craft a new social reality and idealized vision of the future that reconciles, marginalizes or suppresses animosities and revises or erases historical memories.
McLaughlin and Baker’s well-documented, tightly reasoned and carefully crafted book examines the propaganda of peace that was mobilized in Northern Ireland during the period leading up to the ratification of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and which still sustains the peace process. Unlike the propaganda of war, which is usually organized by the state, the military and paramilitary organizations, McLaughlin and Baker argue that the propaganda of peace involves a much broader range of social forces and cultural forms dedicated to uniting society, culture and nation behind a core idea or shared principle.'
The Unprimed Canvas - Issue 1.2
The second issue of Design Ecologies will give reference to articles in the first issue as a critique or reflection of the new contributor’s own practice and research. The collection of ideas will further define and unpack the complexities and tactics of experience in ecological projects. Each contributor will understand the importance of maintaining a 'constant' with the economic, social and environmental fields of relationships. Every article will establish relations not only within the system of symbols but between that system and the forms and locations of the objects that it symbolises.
This collection of ideas will aid in revealing the immediacy of the making of design work through what some might consider the relationship between people, environment and space, but what is actually our co-existence with it.
Click 'Read more' below to find out more...
Katrien Jacobs, author of People's Pornography is interviewed by CNN
Katrien Jacobs is writing a book about pornography in China. The research process sounds stressful.
Jacobs describes an experiment in which she and a group of her students went to a Starbucks coffeehouse in Shenzhen to search for sexually explicit media on the Internet. The aim was to see what they could access through mainland China’s Great Firewall.
“I was more scared than my students were,” admits Jacobs who is a professor of visual culture studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “We were there for 30 minutes and we found all this porn using an Internet connection in a public space.”
Book Launch:
Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art
Edited by Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman
Wednesday, 15 June 2011, 17.30
Research Forum South Room, Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London
Speakers: Harriet Riches (Kingston University) and Lucy Soutter (Royal College of
Art)
Ticket/entry details: Open to all, free admission
Performing Ethos: Queer Publics, Volume 2, Issue 2 (2012)
While the word ‘queer’ is often understood to signal aberrance, in the past decade many scholars working within the field of queer theory have sought to broach the subject of queer ethics. Prompted by the apparent increased visibility of queer culture in the western world, not to mention the proliferation of different kinds of publics, this first special issue of Performing Ethos seeks to analyse a range of theatre and performance practices that raise timely questions about queer ethical and political projects.
The A.V. Club interviews The Exile of Britney Spears author Christopher Smit:
While it has been a few years since Britney Spears ruled the music world, culturally she’s still a hot button topic. She’s simultaneously sought after and criticized by the press. Her new record, Femme Fatale, is good, but is it good enough? And why does everyone still care? Calvin College professor Christopher Smit sought to address those issues in his new book, The Exile Of Britney Spears. He posits that both Britney’s rise and downfall sprung—at least in part—from the public’s consumption of her music, character, and life. Smit will be in town for a reading at Quimby’s April 23, but The A.V. Club caught up with him beforehand to talk about some of his arguments, including why it was so shocking to see Britney’s crotch.
As the PCA motto goes: If it is not popular, then it’s not culture. It was all that and more in San Antonio! 3,300 scholars and practitioners descended upon the Marriott River Walk and River Center hotels-- just footsteps from the Alamo-- for this year’s joint national Popular Culture Association, American Culture Association and regional Southwest Texas PCA/ACA conference. The event drew academics from across the globe to discuss culture in all its manifestations-- deep in the heart of Texas. San Antonio’s unique blend of Texan and traditional Latino culture made an exciting backdrop for the largest PCA event in the world.
To our delight, the Intellect table was hotter than the Texas heat. The directors of POPCAANZ, the PCA of Australia & New Zealand, as well as the Canadian PCA were on hand to discuss their upcoming conferences and launch their respective journals, the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture and the Canadian Journal of Popular Culture. Vicki Karaminas, Nick Baxter-Moore and Greg Gillespie fielded queries from the dozens of interested scholars in attendance. Take a peek at what these new journals have to offer:
A Divided World reviewed in The Wall Street Journal
Read Stefan Kanfer's review of A Divided World: Hollywood Cinema and Emigre Directors in the Era of Roosevelt and Hitler 1933-1948 in The Wall Street Journal.
