Barney, Darin. Communication Technology: The Canadian Democratic Audit. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005).
Communication Technology: The Canadian Democratic Audit
Barney, Darin
When the Internet began to emerge as a popular new mode of communication, many political scientists and social commentators believed that it would revolutionize our democratic institutions. Today, voter turnout is at an historic low and Internet usage is at an all-time high. Can we still make the claim that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) enhance democratic life in Canada? What effect does the technological mediation of political communication have on the practice of Canadian politics? How have such technologies affected the distribution of power in society?
Darin Barney investigates the links between ICTs and democratic processes, arguing that the potential of digital technologies to contribute to a more democratic political system will remain largely untapped unless the more conventional dimensions of Canadian politics, the economy, and modes of governance are reoriented.
Barney, Darin and Feenberg, Andrew, eds. Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
Community in the Digital Age: Philosophy and Practice
Barney, Darin and Feenberg, Andrew, eds.
Is the Internet the key to a reinvigorated public life? Or will it fragment society by enabling citizens to associate only with like-minded others? Online community has provided social researchers with insights into our evolving social life. As suburbanization and the breakdown of the extended family and neighborhood isolate individuals more and more, the Internet appears as a possible source for reconnection. Are virtual communities "real" enough to support the kind of personal commitment and growth we associate with community life, or are they fragile and ultimately unsatisfying substitutes for human interaction? Community in the Digital Age features the latest, most challenging work in an important and fast-changing field, providing a forum for some of the leading North American social scientists and philosophers concerned with the social and political implications of this new technology. Their provocative arguments touch on all sides of the debate surrounding the Internet, community, and democracy.
Barney, Darin. The Network Society. (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2005).
In The Network Society, Darin Barney provides a compelling examination of the social, political and economic implications of network technologies and their application across a wide range of practices and institutions.
Are we in the midst of a digital revolution? Have new information and communication technologies given birth to a new form of society, or do they reinforce and extend existing patterns and relationships? This book provides a clear and engaging discussion of these and other questions. Using a sophisticated model of the relationship between technology and society, Barney investigates both what has changed, and what has remained the same, in the age of the Internet. Among the issues discussed are debates concerning the emergence of a "knowledge economy"; digital restructuring of employment and work; globalization and the status of the nation-state; the prospects of digital democracy; the digital divide; new social movements; and culture, community and identity in the age of new media.
This book provides an accessible resource for a thoughtful engagement with life in the network society. It will be essential reading for students in sociology and media and communications studies. This will be a valuable textbook for undergraduate students of sociology and media and communications studies.
Nelson, Charmaine. The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America.(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America
Nelson, Charmaine
How do we "see" race when the color of skin is stone. Nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture was a highly politicized international movement. Based in Rome, many expatriate American sculptors created works that represented black female subjects in compelling and problematic ways. Rejecting pigment as dangerous and sensual, adherence to white marble abandoned the racialization of the black body by skin color.
In The Color of Stone, Charmaine A. Nelson brilliantly analyzes a key, but often neglected, aspect of neoclassical sculpture—color. Considering three major works—Hiram Powers's Greek Slave, William Wetmore Story's Cleopatra, and Edmonia Lewis's Death of Cleopatra—she explores the intersection of race, sex, and class to reveal the meanings each work holds in terms of colonial histories of visual representation as well as issues of artistic production, identity, and subjectivity. She also juxtaposes these sculptures with other types of art to scrutinize prevalent racial discourses and to examine how the black female subject was made visible in high art.
By establishing the centrality of race within the discussion of neoclassical sculpture, Nelson provides a model for a black feminist art history that at once questions and destabilizes canonical texts.
Nelson, Charmaine ed. Racism, Eh?: A Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology of Race in the Canadian Context.(Concord, Ontario: Captus Press/Captus University Publications).
Racism, Eh?: A Critical Inter-Disciplinary Anthology of Race in the Canadian Context
Nelson, Charmaine ed.
Racism, Eh? Is the first publication that examines racism within the broad Canadian context. It focuses fundamentally on two key aspects of identity or identification – race and nationality – and the complex ways in which they intersect.
Inter-disciplinary in nature, this anthology brings together many of the visionaries seeking to illuminate the topics of race and racism in Canada. Through their analyses of historical and contemporary issues, race and racism are addressed as both physical and psychological phenomena.
This book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as academics who are studying or practicing within Humanities and the Social Sciences. Anyone searching for information on what has been a little-explored and poorly-understood Canadian issue will also find Racism Eh? An invaluable resource.
Raboy, Marc and Landry, Normand. Civil Society, Communication and Global Governance: Issues from the World Summit on the Information Society. (New York: Peter Lang Academic Publishing, 2005).
Civil Society, Communication and Global Governance: Issues from the World Summit on the Information Society
Marc Raboy and Normand Landry
In 2003 and again in 2005, the international community was called to take part in a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This two-phase United Nations summit placed an unprecedented global spotlight on information and communication issues. Civil Society, Communication and Global Governance provides a sweeping portrait of the players, structures and themes of the WSIS, as well as a critical analysis of the summit's first phase, the issues it raised and the groundbreaking role played by civil society. Including an extensive bibliography, list of relevant web sites and key documents, this will be a basic reference source for everyone interested in the role of information and communication on shaping twenty-first-century societies.
Ross, Christine.The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression
Ross, Christine
Reveals how artists engage the scientific notion of depression.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than half of the world's population will have a depressive disorder at some point in their lifetimes. In The Aesthetics of Disengagement Christine Ross shows how contemporary art is a powerful yet largely unacknowledged player in the articulation of depression in Western culture, both adopting and challenging scientific definitions of the condition. Ross explores the ways in which contemporary art performs the detached aesthetics of depression, exposing the viewer's loss of connection and ultimately redefining the function of the image.
Ross examines the works of Ugo Rondinone, Rosemarie Trockel, Ken Lum, John Pilson, Liza May Post, Vanessa Beecroft, and Douglas Gordon, articulating how their art conveys depression's subjectivity and addresses a depressed spectator whose memory and perceptual faculties are impaired. Drawing from the fields of psychoanalysis as well as psychiatry, Ross demonstrates the ways in which a body of art appropriates a symptomatic language of depression to enact disengagement—marked by withdrawal, radical protection of the self from the other, distancing signals, isolation, communication ruptures, and perceptual insufficiency.
Most important, Ross reveals the ways in which art transforms disengagement into a visual strategy of disclosure, a means of reaching the viewer, and how in this way contemporary art puts forth a new understanding of depression.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. (Durham : Duke University Press, c2003).
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Sterne, Jonathan
The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death.
Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class.
A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.
Straw, Will. Cyanide and Sin. Visualizing Crime in 50's America. (PPP Editions, New York, 2006. 192 pp., 196 four-color illustrations, 9x12".).
Cyanide and Sin. Visualizing Crime in 50's America
Straw, Will.
Cyanide and Sin offers a broad history of the true crime magazine in America with an emphasis on the 1950s and on the visual content of these magazines. Will Straw, a scholar in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has written a 12,000 word essay that traces the stylistic and conceptual evolution of the Crime magazine genre. He catalogues specific photographers and key designers who were regular contributors to the various magazines. The book contains 196 images from the true crime genre.
Many of the images reproduced both within these magazines and on their covers were set- up reenactments of crimes, some fictive, others real. Often, the images are accompanied by lurid titles such as: Death Crashes A Party, Love Me or Die!, He Was Too Hot To Cool Down.
There have been numerous publications on the history of pulp and crime fiction. Cyanide and Sin is the first book to look at the true crime magazine and the visuals which were a significant part of its appeal. As Straw writes:
'Crime lent itself readily to some of the most powerful impulses within modern image-making. It gave photographers drawn to social marginality subjects with which to avoid the sentimentality that too easily clings to images of the poor or downtrodden. Crime photography has served as the basis for transgressive violations of good taste, and for romantic glorifications of the doomed life. The images assembled in true crime magazines over their 80 year history have moved ceaselessly between what photographic historian Allan Sekula calls the honorific and repressive functions of photography. Images celebrating an extravagant individuality, for instance, have sat alongside others calling for citizen complicity in the enforcement of state power. '
Straw, Will and Andrew, Caroline, Gattinger, Monica and Jeannotte, Sharon eds. Accounting for Culture: Thinking Through Cultural Citizenship. (Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press, 2005).
Accounting for Culture: Thinking Through Cultural Citizenship
Straw, Will and Andrew, Caroline, Gattinger, Monica and Jeannotte, Sharon eds.
Many scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers in the cultural sector argue that Canadian cultural policy is at a crossroads: that the environment for cultural policy-making has evolved substantially and that traditional rationales for state intervention no longer apply.
The concept of cultural citizenship is a relative newcomer to the cultural policy landscape, and offers a potentially compelling alternative rationale for government intervention in the cultural sector. Likewise, the articulation and use of cultural indicators and of governance concepts are also new arrivals, emerging as potentially powerful tools for policy and program development.
Accounting for Culture is a unique collection f essays from leading Canadian and international scholars that critically examines cultural citizenship, cultural indicators, and governance in the context of evolving cultural practices and cultural policy-making. It will be of strong interest to scholars of cultural policy, communications, cultural studies, and public administration alike.
Wilson, Bronwen. The World in Venice: print, the city, and early modern identity.
The World in Venice: print, the city, and early modern identity
Wilson, Bronwen
Positing a dynamic relationship between print culture and social experience, Bronwen Wilson's The World in Venice focuses on the printed image during a century of profound transformation. City views, costume illustrations, events, and portraits of locals and foreigners are brought together to show how printmakers responded to an expanding image of the world in Renaissance Venice, and how, in turn, prints influenced the ways in which individuals thought about themselves.
Woodcuts and engravings of cities and inhabitants of Europe, and those of distant lands, initiated a sudden and pervasive experience with alterity that redefined the relations of Europeans to the world. By condensing the world into pictures, print enabled a radically novel and vicarious experience of others. Wilson explores the overlapping and evolving relations between space, vision, print, and identity, and engages with current scholarly debates concerning ethnicities, gender and geography, copies and originals, travel, nationhood, fashion, urban life, visuality, and the body.
Venice was one of the largest cities in Renaissance Europe, a trading crossroads, and a centre of print. The World in Venice shows how Venetian identity came to be envisioned within the growing global context that print constructed for it.