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.

Reviewed by Randi Nixon, University of Alberta (Canada).

Affect has been used in increasingly diffuse ways in various academic discourses; cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial theory and several other theoretical strains interested in the social realm have been exploring the possibilities and implications of theorizing affect. However, while affect indeed possesses great theoretical possibilities, elaboration into exactly how the term can be put to work as an analytical tool in theorizing social and political phenomena has largely been absent from the discussion. In Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, John Protevi attempts to ground affect by developing the concept using a variety of theoretical resources. In doing so, he adds insight into how affect can be used to delve deeper into understanding the interconnectedness of the social, the political, the physiological, and the personal.

An impressive and somewhat daunting theoretical complexity is established early on in the book. The first part “A Concept of Bodies Politic” is dedicated to carefully defining and clarifying his concepts. Part II “Bodies Politic as Organisms” further situates his analysis within a long philosophical history by putting Deleuze’s assertion, “the organism is the judgment of God” into a metatheoretical conversation with the work of Aristotle and Kant. The last section of the book “Love, Rage, and Fear” is where the reader finally begins to see the application and relevance of his theoretico-philosophical concepts.

Suffragettes Vote, New York 1917 (thanks to joshiejuice.com).

Protevi bases his analysis around four key concepts which he continuously weaves throughout his case studies: affective cognition, bodies politic, political cognition and political affect. The term affect has many usages; however, in good Deleuzian faith, Protevi follows Spinoza and stresses the ecosocial embeddedness of affect by defining it as a “body’s ability to act and be acted upon”, both in the sense of physiological change or being affected by an encounter with an object, as well as a “felt change in the power of the body” (49). Drawing from work in affective neuroscience, Protevi utilizes the term “affective cognition” to stress that affect does not work alone, but constitutes bodies politic, and is thus inherently political and wrapped up in relations of power (50). The term “bodies politic” means to capture the emergent, embodied and embedded character of both subjects and other systems; in other words, it encompasses how systems (including subjects) are simultaneously produced, bypassed and surpassed in the workings of somatic and social systems (33). While the concept of the “bodies politic” conceptualizes systems (individual, social or other) as tending toward stereotyped behaviour patterns, Protevi stresses the openness of these systems, and their mutual capacity to break and develop new patterns of behaviour. We see this best illustrated in his discussion of the bodies politic Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (the Columbine shooters) created, which enabled them to maintain their subjectivities throughout the act of killing (158).

Through utilizing “political cognition” the author can to refer to the ways in which affective cognitions of individuals are triggered and shaped through politically shaped categories (ie. race, class, gender), reiterating the complex interconnections that exist between subjects, groups and politics (33). Lastly, the term “political affect” stresses the historically and socially embedded aspect of affective cognition, through acknowledgment that individual bodies politic understand situations through collective political categories, thereby connecting the sense-making of both the individual and larger social networks (35). Protevi maintains the sheer complexity of events such as Hurricane Katrina and takes nothing for granted; the elements (sun, wind, water), history (histories of slave revolt and racial tensions), politics (how the state and media responded and triggered these racial fears), and physiology (how both the people of Lousiana and the rest of the nation affectively responded) all impacted the events that led up to and took place after the hurricane.

Protevi draws on several disciplines to ground his cases. While this may result in what some would consider metatheoretical incoherence, the very nature of his problematic necessitates the usage of several ways of knowing as conceptualized by various disciplines. What is noteworthy about this work is the authors’ ontological standpoint, constructed by altering Deleuze’s thermodynamic register in order to make it compatible with complexity theory (11). His Deleuzian materialism is evident in his insistence on open systems, processes and social practice. The poststructural approach to subjectivity indicates that he is cognizant of the ways that embodied subjects are historically formed through discourse, which indicates that he does not believe that there is an ultimate “truth” within or about the subject. His focus on unconscious affective processes (within the subject, group and polity) further indicates his resistance to perspectives that equate experience/emotion with Truth.

By carefully distinguishing affective cognition and political affect from emotion, he exposes the ways that the social and discursive are implicated in the constitution of our thoughts and feelings. That being said, this does not mean that we are completely predetermined (both complexity theory and Deleuze stress the importance of “the new”, “becoming” and “lines of flight” specifically to avoid this kind of reductionism), but that our personal “truths” are in part a function of complex discursive, historical, political and physiological formations.

The book carries an urgency, which is clearly indicated by the case studies examined; choosing to discuss group affective cognition through the Columbine High School shooting and civil affective cognition using Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that for Protevi, the implications of being unaware of the workings of affect can have devastating human consequences. Reference to Fransisco Varela’s “Reflections on the Chilean Civil War” reiterate the point that without the possibility of emergence or the capacity for mutual recognition, many lives can be lost in horrific ways (44). In order to avoid such circumstances, Protevi asserts that adopting “relativistic fallibility” is vital. The notion of “relativistic fallibility” delineates the ability to maintain one’s perspectives while at the same time acknowledging that they are only one of a multitude, are not the Truth, and ultimately have the capacity to be undone. Protevi states that “we have to beware of the tendency toward fixation, especially when we are being forced into stereotyped roles that make possible the regulation and reproduction of unjust social dynamics” (45). Political affect then, is intimately tied up with ethics. Thus, asking how power is tied up in our collective affects may illuminate several aspects of how our social world is organized, and how appalling inequalities can be justified and maintained.

Political Affect is an ambitious work that does not compromise its complexity in an effort to increase readership. Protevi puts Deleuze to work with relevancy and vigour rarely seen by tending to the multiplicity of forces that simultaneously play a role in actualizing events (for example, in his analysis of Hurricane Katrina, not only does he examine the role played by racial triggers and the mainstream media, but also the forces of the sun, river, man-made levees, and the history of Haitian slave revolts). For those interested in Deleuze, affect, or the ways bodies are implicated in and connected to several seemingly disconnected forces, this book is a must read. While the multidisciplinary focus of the book works to strengthen the analytical potency, it could also potentially alienate readers first approaching such topics. However, for the reader looking for depth and a challenge, this book is worth the work.

- Randi

Reviewed by Marcel LaFlamme, Department of Anthropology, Rice University (US)

On the first Monday of September, the townspeople of Hegins, Pennsylvania would assemble in the park to kill pigeons. Birds rounded up in the railyards of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were transported to Hegins by the crate, where they would be blasted out of the air by shotgun-toting sportsmen. By the early 1990s, when anthropologist Hoon Song began his fieldwork in Hegins, animal rights activists were descending on the pigeon shoot in droves; the apparent senselessness of the killing inspired in them a passion, Song writes, “unmatched by the plight of a million cows” (19). Yet the fervor of the protesters and the ensuing media circus seemed only to fuel the brutality: as the television cameras rolled, ecstatic onlookers decapitated the wounded birds with a flick of the wrist, squashed their bodies underfoot, and even smeared their children’s upturned faces with fresh pigeon blood.

[cc photo credit: Mohd Hafizuddin Husin]

The field, as Song finds it in Pigeon Trouble, is already mediatized, spectacularized, and Song’s informants are powerfully aware of their presence in the representations of others. The protesters have no illusions about winning converts in Hegins; rather, their yearly appearance allows them to gather visual and narrative “raw material” (33) for an audience of supporters who are understood to be elsewhere. The resulting newsletters and direct mailings make Hegins available for consumption as an otherwise inaccessible space of rural depravity. Meanwhile, the working-class hooligans who delight in baiting the out-of-towners also run home during the shoot to monitor the news coverage as it unfolds. Song emphasizes the lapse of time between the moment of being seen in the park and the moment of mediated seeing on the TV screen, a temporal lag that might have been eliminated if the shoot had continued into the smartphone era. As it is, the shoot was canceled in 1999 under threat of litigation, meaning that Pigeon Trouble is, among other things, a record of historically and technologically contingent modalities of “seeing oneself seeing” (205).

Anthropology, as a discipline, fancies itself particularly savvy about the politics of seeing oneself seeing, and the so-called reflexive turn of the 1980s did usher in a new attention to the positionality of the fieldworker. Yet Song is openly skeptical about reflexivity as a textual technique that, by offering some additional context, somehow renders representation unproblematic. “The gaze of power is confessed to have been…coincident with the anthropologist,” he writes, “and the reflexive anthropologist volunteers to capture the heretofore invisible anthropological eye ‘from behind’” (208). But where is this “from behind,” he wonders, and what are the ethical and ontological stakes of occupying it? Song’s rejection of such a space of transcendence both informs and grows out of his own experience of foreignness in Hegins: as a Korean in a mostly white community with little enthusiasm for immigrants, as a shy, birdphobic intellectual more at ease with “people of the kitchen” (68) than the gruff, homosocial world of the pigeon killers. Song does gain a remarkable degree of access to the private gun clubs and drinking establishments where the sportsmen would congregate. Yet he remains, irredeemably, an outsider, and he uses this experience of apartness to link the problem of the ethnographer to the problem of the animal.

Song acknowledges the appeal of a “representationalist” reading of the Hegins pigeon shoot, in which racial violence or economic malaise are displaced onto the body of the pigeon. This, in a sense, was the logic mobilized by then-candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he infamously suggested that people in small-town Pennsylvania “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…as a way to explain their frustrations.” The line was political poison for Obama, but Song suggests that this line of thinking also reifies the very social formations that anthropologists are out to understand. To that end, Song sets out to ask “not what animals are ‘about’ positively and legibly but what they are negatively and illegibly; not the end product of how we render them legible with human meaning but the illegible gulf or difference that facilitates such a reading in the first place” (149). Indeed, Song concludes that this gulf may separate ethnographer and informant just as surely as human and animal. Therefore, for Song, sociality consists not in a shared experience of intersubjectivity or creaturely life. Rather, it consists in “a willing submission to dislocation and desubjectification, that is, a becoming-object to the Other’s gaze” (212). This radical renunciation of the subject’s sovereignty is, for Song, the beginning of ethics. It is a measure of what we owe one another.

Pigeon Trouble suffers, at times, from theoretical digressions that stray far from the lifeworld of Hegins, Pennsylvania. It is as though Song’s dense prose threatens to give way to the “ruins of speech” (119) that he ascribes to his conspiracy-minded informants. Still, the book remains an ethnographically rich and formally ambitious account of a rural community caught in broader webs of signification. It also comes as close as any book I know to offering a phenomenological account of a bird in flight, drawing on Song’s apprenticeship with an enigmatic pigeon trainer named Monk. Through Monk’s eyes, across the species divide, we glimpse the darkness of the trap into which the pigeons are placed, the murmur of the crowd, and then the release into a violent, dazzling brightness.

The Itinerants of Mumbai

The urbanite is often quite uncomfortable with [Mumbai's] most idiosyncratic citizens. That is because they seem to be so at ease in his landscape. Before he sees it coming someone knocks on the car window demanding a few rupees in exchange for a prayer, a flower or a book. Somehow it always feels wrong to refuse the trade, as if it the hawkers were actually asking for nothing but their due. The sedentary car user comes to terms with the nature of reversals, brings the window down and makes a deal. It is encounters like this one, multiplied a million times, that saves this city day after day. For all its shortcomings and in spite of a recent rise in nationalist politics, Mumbai has proved to be an urban oasis for many migrants and travelers ever since the first fishermen settled on its shores. It is the capacity of Mumbaikars to accept a high level of promiscuity with strangers that has made it so safe despite the vertiginous divides existing between castes and classes.

Itinerants become human connectors in an increasingly divided yet interdependent world. As much as the pathways and signals mediate roads and neighbourhoods, itinerants constantly connect the city’s many different dimensions to one another. They are the x-factor that allows this exuberant unpredictable city to function day after day. It is these ever-present encounters that make us realize how full of mad contrasts the city is. Where one brushes shoulders with ipod listening teenagers one moment and the very next, faces a tribal ritual masochist doing a thousand year old dance. Further down the lane, one come across the last of a dying breed of water carriers using ancient goatskin pouches walking past piles of used mineral water bottles.  One can hear a knife sharpener’s wheel screaming, next to a well-stocked shopping mall selling everything under the sun…”

via

- Anne

Entangled Territories, an event organized by Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry (in this case, Adrian Blackwell, Greig de Peuter, Christine Shaw, and Marcelo Vieta) as Act 16 of the Public Acts project, was held within Adrian Blackwell’s installation “carpool” on Sunday, August 6^th, 2006.* In an effort to shift the place of dialogue outside Toronto’s downtown, the event unfolded in North Toronto near Downsview Park, in the parking lot of Idomo Furniture. At the end of a subway line, yet in the middle of the city; amidst the inner suburbs; lodged between an army base, big box stores, and warehouses; and at the confluence of a highway, a subway line, and an airport strip—this site is entangled. It became a temporary commons, animated by bodies in conversation, disagreement, and creative acts in and against the neo-liberal urban agenda.

Arriving on foot, by bike, via subway, or car, and passing over a grassy expanse, a group of activists, artists, and theorists gathered at Entangled Territories to talk about the neo-liberal transformation of Toronto and about how it might be contested. Three independent conversations were opened by these questions: How is capital enclosing urban territories? What possibilities exist for the state to protect existing public spaces, or initiate new ones, when its role has increasingly become that of the policing of space? What capacities do ‘we’ have for resisting the enclosures in the name of constructing new urban commons? In a second round of conversations, the groups’ participants were remixed so we could explore how each question is entangled with the others.

The concept of the commons ran through each conversation, evoking a memory of a space of production and a source of livelihood to which access is conditional on neither private property nor waged-labour. Present or past, urban or rural, capital entails a massive private appropriation of the common: co-operation, land, habit, knowledge…. Enumerating the resources of the common, in public, extends the multitude’s self-awareness of its own power. Moving from description to action, intentional commons strive to desert the rule of capital. These are oriented towards non-commodified creation, unforced co-operation, and non-hierarchical organization. That means that commons cannot be conceived strictly in spatial terms: “There are no commons without incessant activities of commoning” (De Angelis in The Commoner, 2006). This grammatical move puts activity, ethics, and agency at the forefront.

The potential of commoning in the city is, however, stagnated, cut off, and punctured by the practical and affective neo-liberal power it is up against. In Toronto, for example, the downtown is gentrifying rapidly, displacing low-income residents. Land is rezoned to optimize profit rather than livability. New immigrants—those most affected by labour precarity—are warehoused in high-density projects in the city’s mature suburbs, giving residents living downtown the mistaken impression that economic inequality is diminishing. The costs of using public transit rise while the streets are polluted by increasing automobile congestion. Squeezed by new economic ‘realities’ (created through political choices and policies), the municipal government embraces the ‘Creative City’ model, cynically mobilizing creativity as first and foremost a mechanism of economic growth and its producers as exemplars of entrepreneurship in an age of intensified competition amongst global cities.

Neo-liberalism involves a process of ‘rolling back’ social programs while in turn ‘rolling out’ systems of control to police those adversely affected by the former. In the process, the fiction that the power of the state has been reduced unravels: witness not only the securitization of the city, but also how this is bound up with the geo-politics of permanent war. This in turn amplifies the fears that tend to foster consent for a strong state. There are two sides of the new society of risk: insecurity for those who have very little, and intensified protection for those who profit from it. Spaces, times, bodies, affect, desire, and incorporeal matter are seized, regulated, and controlled through increasingly flexible means.

In this environment, commoning sets out from a desire to disentangle a territory from the techniques of capture and the effects of enclosure. Such commoning is stirred by demands and desires for affordable places to live, sources of healthy food, a secure income, breathing spaces, pleasurable forms of life…. Never fully outside state and capital, existing common spaces nonetheless still can be found in our city. On its corners, in its parks and streets, and within its buildings, homes, conversations, intersections, and its geographies, the city expresses and stimulates emergent commoning activities. They dot our city’s territory: earthly commons (air), state commons (city services), socialist micro-commons (housing co-ops), and autonomous micro-commons (free schools).

As we talked, issues, urgencies, tactics, and tensions emerged. We documented them on the paper tablecloths that we gathered around. For us, these conversations confirmed the need to map Toronto’s existing commons, an initiative that would help us to both continue the discussion and further the practice of commoning.

We ate, talked, and listened to the sounds of the political punk project Republic of Safety, who rocked carpool with portable amps. We then left our appropriated site, and dispersed, moving again….

References

De Angelis, M. (2006) Introduction to “Re(in)fusing the Commons,” The Commoner 11. Retrieved December 1, 2006, from http://www.commoner.org.uk/#intro11.

* Editor’s note:  This has taken us a long time to get posted up and we apologize to all concerned for the delay.

-Rob

At 12:01 AM on December 10th, buses stopped moving in Ottawa as the over 2,200 members of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 279 officially went on strike, while at the same time over 30 centimetres of snow was falling and one of the four bridges linking Ottawa and neighboring Gatineau was only open to limited vehicular traffic due to structural concerns … While the snow has since been cleared and the Chaudière Bridge remains open to cars, the drivers, dispatchers and maintenance workers of OC Transpo are still on strike. OC Transpo has a daily ridership of 350,000, which represents about 20% of the commuter traffic in the city…”

With more snow falling as I write, and no end to the strike in sight, the Public Transit in Ottawa Portal is posting breaking news, the OCTranspo LiveJournal Community is hosting lively debates between bus drivers and the public, Kwende Kefentse asked what we can do about a lack of pedestrian scale urban planning both during the strike and afterwards, local photographer Stéphanie Amesse has posted a transit strike survival kit to Flickr, and 19-year old Kwan, a.k.a. SkillzUnknown, has posted his response to the strike (NOC Transpo Cypha) on YouTube:

These are interesting days!

- Anne

In a referendum November 26th, over two thirds of Greenlanders voted in favour of local control from 21 June 2009, splitting oil revenues over 75M kronor with Denmark, and leaving only foreign relations in the hands of the Danish  government in  Copenhagen.  Besides oil, there is speculation and exploration for minerals, including uranium.  View from North Britain comments:

The turnout was around 72%. I reckon that’s an impressive turnout given the dark Arctic winter days. Those in the north of the country must be coping with little or no daylight at this time. Its a clear sign that the island is heading towards independence. As I said in yesterday’s blog, the First Minister Hans Enoksen has a timescale of independence in 12 years time. Others prefer a shorter timescale. The former foreign minister Aleqa Hammond sees independence in 8 years.

The ‘greenlanding’ of arctic governance represents a change in the circumpolar neighbourhood.  There has been relatively little comment, but this will bring local environmental and economic rationality to to Canada’s neighbour across the Baffin Strait. Randy MacDonald summarizes this as:

Home to the US Thule radar base, Greenland will also with its new status be consulted on foreign and defence policy, which are now decided by Copenhagen, but Nuuk would not have the final say and little is expected to change in that area.

Greenlanders, who voted to withdraw from the European Union in a 1982 referendum, will be also be recognised as a distinct people in line with international law, and Greenlandic will be recognised as the official language.

Recognition is important for 50000 natives of the 56000 total population.  According to Sermitsiak’ Nyhedsbreve Nutaarsiassat:

…the Inuit Ataqatigiit party is also ready with a list of tasks for the new self-rule government. ‘The first thing we’ll do is go to the United Nations and request acknowledgement of the Greenlandic people. Denmark made a mistake in 1954 when we lost our right to be a native people. That error must be corrected as soon as possible,’ said party leader Kuupik Kleist.

The decision opens the door to better local control of exploitation of fishery resources in Baffin Strait and and more local processing of these resources.  This provides a model for development in Nunavut.  It provides a model for Quebec separatism, just a few hundred nautical miles southwest.  The homerule proposal is also an innovative model for arctic sovereignty.  There will be more local initiatives, more port facilities, more urban development in Nuuk, the capital, and fewer difficult decisions being backed away from in favour of Danish and European political exigencies.

- Rob

In person, Rushdie is relaxed, wittier and far better read than one would expect. He is funny, almost like a comic who can’t help himself but make jokes that push the limits just past the conventional mores of his audience by saying publicly what might be thought privately. His ability to sustain conversations on history and ethics is also a surprise. I have just time to put up some of his comments on mobilities, frontiers, movement, cities, space and culture, based on my brief notes.

Home:

‘Many of us now come from many places… Its ok to feel at home in different places.’

‘Once you’ve packed and unpacked as many books [as I have in my move to New York in 1999], then that’s where you live!’

[Home is where there are] ‘Echos of home which you never have anywhere elses…’

Travel

To the question about what are the most difficult frontiers in a person’s life, regarding a quote from one of his books that humans are ‘frontier crossing’ people:

‘The most difficult…most important frontier…my father asked if I wanted to go to boarding school in England. My decision when I was 12…’

And later: ‘In ‘Ground Beneath our Feet’ [the argument is made that]…There are two great dreams: the dream of home and of leaving…the direction of away, our imaginings, what excites us is that, …the outcast. … What if Odysseus had stayed home… the journey of the person who departs is absolutely at the heart of our dreams…’

Religion

‘Despite the storehouse of powerful narratives which religions are …[there is, we live in a] Twilight of the gods. A time comes when we have to take on for ourselves our responsibility for our fate…this is a kind of growing up… found in both Nordid and Greek mythologies.’

The last time the Gods appear… intervene in the affairs of man… is the wedding of Cadmus the inventor of the alphabet and the nymph Harmonia – the union of writing and peace.’

Later, Rushdie contrasts the foundations of contemporary European and American political cultures: ‘the Western European idea of freedomn is freedom from religion, not to be declared ‘anathema’ by the church. In the United States liberty is freedom to have religion…. the main preoccupation of the First Amendment.’

Islam:

‘It is important to understand that Islam has never created a free society…’

‘In an open society, people constantly questions their first foundations on which they are based and disagrees on them. [Thus] it shifts and those disagreements shift. …. Societies that don’t allow you to question the fundamental principals on which they are based are not free.’

‘Literalists who insist [that religion is based on] the actual word of god… Once can’t be quesitoned other things atrophy. …Questions are considered to be blasphemy.  A stultifying atmosphere results.’

 And later, recommending the book of David Eggers What is the What: ‘as for the question of ethics, I don’t want to be told by some priest how to live… it is the Mystery’

Freedom

‘An open society requires the ability to quesiton. If you can’t ask difficult questions, quesitons people don’t want asked… you can’t grow.’

‘If you look at the cites of the Muslim world in the 50s and 60s… very different from today… Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East… Cairo. If have witnessed their backsliding into a bog of narrow mindedness during my lifetime… in part a self-inflicted wound.’

‘Who would you rather be, a heretic, apostate or a blasphemer?’

The Global: East and West

‘Amerigo Vespucci was one of the first to understand that this [American continents] was a new thing, it was not India. It was very very big and another big ocean was on the other side… [The 1400s are] a world in which one can see our world at the moment of its birth. [The natives of the New World had a very different sense of time, which didn't invovle progress].. The time included the collision of two different existential ideas of how one lived … either …in a sense of eternity or in a Western European sy in dynamic linear time.’

‘What united these worlds [the Mughal and Florentine Courts] was a belief in magic, even more than god. If you gell in love…you went and got a love potion to make the other person love you back. …[It was a time of the] use of sexual charms. …how to manuals.’

‘The division of East and West is a retro notion which is broken down inside me. Bombay was built in India as an English city on Indian soil. [There is no ancient] Bombay… Old bombay was a fishing village.’

Rushdie’s hilarious comments on American politics and the election of Obama can be found in the broadcast version of this interview.

Salman Rushdi was in Edmonton to launch the inaugural Festival of Ideas and as part of the University of Alberta Centenary. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel at a full house in the Winspear Centre. Their conversation will be broadcast on CBC Radio’s ‘Writers and Company‘.

- Rob

“What else do we lose when we make people disappear? Passage Oublié is an interactive artwork allowing the public to send messages to a touchscreen kiosk located in Pearson’s International Airport. Messages received are animated along flight trajectories on a map featuring airports involved in rendition flights. A rendition flight is a detainee-transfer practice where people, currently mostly Muslim men, are transported in rented commercial jets to interrogation sites around the world known as black sites. Although there exists a legal form of rendition to hand suspects over to another country, the procedure is also conducted outside any legal system, hence offering no protection for the detainees. Passage Oublié focuses on documented cases of such illegal renditions, known as “Extraordinary Renditions”, which surpass the number of legal renditions. The survivors of Extraordinary Renditions tell of numerous human rights violations. Passage Oublié invites Citizens of the World in transit at Pearson’s International Airport to send text messages relating to these questions: Are rendition flights an acceptable means of dealing with new terrorism threats? How does their use affect a country’s credibility as a defender of liberty? Does the end justify the means when it comes to pre-emptive war on terror? Are we compromising on the liberal democracies’ cherished principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty?

-Rob

From the abstract:

Following urban computing and locative media and their accompanying visions from labs, conferences and classrooms to journal publications and popular media accounts, this dissertation presents four case histories in corporate, academic and artistic design practice. An analysis of the Mobile Bristol, Passing Glances, Sonic City and Urban Tapestries research and design projects draws out the idea that everyday life in the future city is expected to become more expressive, engaging and meaningful. The increased extensibility and transmissibility of the city itself, along with an increased ability to be socially embedded within it, is seen to be a fundamental promise inherent in these projects. The dissertation argues that such spatial and cultural potentialities can be productively understood as involving temporary, selective and mobile publics, where creative and playful interactions emerge as primary means of social innovation…

I’ve posted both the full dissertation (1.33 mb pdf) and individual chapters, and feedback is always welcome.

- Anne