Skip to content

EVERYTHING MUST GO

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

… a conference about talking rubbish

Program

Saturday 21st January 2012

11.15-1.00pm ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE USED CLOTHING TRADE
Chair: Professor Nicky Gregson, Durham University
‘
Between A and B: Reprocessing Western second-hand clothing for global markets.’
Julie Botticello (Research Associate, SOAS)

‘The World of Calamity Clothing in Mozambique.’
Andrew Brooks (Geography, King’s College London)

‘The making of Unravel.’
Meghna Gupta (Independent filmmaker)

‘Oxfam Frip Ethique – A social enterprise solution.’
Sarah Farquhar (Head of Retail Brand, Oxfam)

2.00-4.00 pm NEW MODELS: RECYCLING, UPCYCLING AND CLOSING THE LOOP
Chair: Lucy Siegle, Journalist & Broadcaster

‘Fashion and the Community; developing community resources for sustainable fashion and recycling.’
Lizzie Harrison (Founder/Antiform and ReMade in Leeds)

‘The potential of the fashion designer to reduce consumer’s textiles waste.’
Jade Whitson-Smith (University of Leeds)

‘A sneak look behind the curtains of a textile merchant.’
Ross Barry (LMB Business Development Manager)

‘Design for Recycling; closing the loop for textiles.’
Kate Goldsworthy (Textile Futures Research Centre, Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design)

‘Closed Loop or Wear Nothing.’
Cyndi Rhoades (CEO, Worn Again)

The talks will be open to the public on a first come,first served basis. The exhibition opens at 11am
– please arrive promptly to ensure a place.

Please contact Lucy Norris for more information
at lucy.norris [at] ucl.ac.uk
Bargehouse
Oxo Tower Wharf
Bargehouse Street
South Bank
London SE1 9PH

Filed in Conferences, Consumption & consumerism | | Comments (0)

What’s Academia Got To Do With It? Looking for Community-Scholarly Balance in Co-developing Community-driven Research

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Reflections on the relationship between universities and public audiences and communities are widely reflected in discussions of what I would call ‘Public Research’ — here’s one:

Wednesday, November 09, 2011, from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM, Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street, Room 119

Community Development Graduate Collaborative Program Seminar Series

What does it mean to do community-driven research?   This seemingly innocuous question is overlain with conflicting politics, tensions and ethics along with the potential for social change that attracts many activist-scholars to this form of research in the first place. During this seminar, I will attempt to conceptualize a reflexive assessment of praxis by drawing on five years of participatory action research with community groups, organizations and residents in the inner suburban region of Southeast Scarborough.

My entry to this community, and to this talk, begins with a failed struggle to prevent the demolition and displacement of public space through policy-supported demolition of a community mall. But next I tell the story of how this loss has segued into a grassroots attempt to re-spatialize the barriers of inequality between city and inner suburbs in response to processes of gentrification and suburban decline. With an emphasis on change, I focus on the imbrications between politics, research and activism through exploration of three key questions: How do we, as researchers, maintain long-term commitment to an evolving community development project? How do we build and maintain effective relationships with communities that support residents as experts? How do we deal with struggles, conflict and transition? Through reflection on shared struggles, successes and failures over the course of a long-term community development project, I hope to spark discussion over how we can best position ourselves and evaluate our work as scholar-activists.Vanessa Parlette is a doctoral student in urban geography at the University of Toronto. She has been involved in participatory planning and community projects in Southeast Scarborough for the last five years and has drawn on these experiences to question and contest ongoing processes of inequality that perpetuate the racialization and segregation of poverty in Toronto’s inner suburbs.

via Univ. of Toronto Cities Centre.

Filed in Citizenship & publics, Conferences, Knowledge & knowledge politics | | Comments Off

Sound Space and the City

Monday, October 10, 2011

Peterson, Marina. 2010. Sound, Space, and the City. Philadelphia, Pennsylvannia: University of Pennsylvannia Press.

Reviewed by Catherine Scheelar, University of Alberta.

In Sound, Space, and the City, anthropologist Marina Peterson explores the process of center-making in Los Angeles through multicultural performance in public space. Positing her work as an ‘anthropology of the center’, of the city rather than in the city, she traces how meaning is made in and around public performances. Based on ethnographic research from 2001 to 2003, her study observes embodied musical practices that constitute the imagining and making of a multicultural city. A free concert series, Grand Performances is situated in the contexts of historical and contemporary urban planning, artistic programming, and the city as lived and imagined.

Acknowledging that ideas of the social sciences seep into everyday life, she challenges the situatedness of disciplinary knowledge and the locations in which anthropological theory has been developed and applied. Grand Performances came into being as a multicultural arts and music project including ethnicity (but excluding class and political affiliations) for the construction of a general, neutral ‘public’, an audience as both a representation and a synecdoche of the city. She draws links between international performance and downtown development, exploring the politics of multiculturalism as part of wider social and political frameworks enacted on municipal, state, and national levels. In recounting her personal experiences of working in the organization and performing onstage with the DaKAH hip hop orchestra, she uses personal narratives and sensual descriptions of experiencing California Plaza.

The concerts are representations of a city imagined and made in practice, as Los Angeles has been perceived as a city lacking real civic life and a central space where people can come together as a public. The history of the space highlights the dynamics of gentrification; the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project removed unruly bodies, replacing particular people with a general public, both activating and cleansing the urban space. California Plaza now exists as private property on public land, the area’s former blight covered with modern sculptures. With ethnicized neighbourhoods surrounding it, the purported neutrality of downtown is brought into being through practice which supports diversity as a normative feature of city. As a civic institution, Grand Performances creates audience members as civic subjects as spaces of belonging are created through inclusion and exclusion. Peterson cites Lefebvre in discussing the urban public as both sonic and spatial processes of the city, as social and musical rhythms are heard and felt in the body.

(Continued)

Filed in Book reviews, Cities & urbanism | | Comments (1)

Making wifi visible – Network City

Thursday, October 6, 2011
Wifi measuring rods thanks to Oslo School of Architecture (click on image for their article)

Wifi 'measuring rods' thanks to Oslo School of Architecture (click on image for their article)

Filed in Media & communications, Techno-science | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Eurozine on the City

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Noteworthy articles on cities, the urban commons and sustainability, Georg Franck Die urbane Allmende and an issue on Central Europe’s urban identity from Eurozine, an online selection from several European magazines.

Franck argues for a new urbanism that focuses on the middle ground of sustainable, compact neighbourhoods rather than focusing only on architecture as individual green buildings, or the city at an metropolitan scale.  I’ve heard this urban commons recently called the “middle landscape”, not detached sprawl, not the hyper-urban central business district but  livable, mid-scaled sets of buildings that demand less energy while remaining functional and convivial.  These example of Asian cities, however, suggests that as the planet moves toward an uban population of around 4.5 billion, it will be in the style and density of cities such as Jakarta, Hong Kong and Shanghai rather than the European ideal of Parisian cityscapes of 6 to 8 storeys.

– Rob

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments Off