Public Culture

The rates of environmental degradation and climate change accelerate and challenge taken-for-granted practices of living across the planet. China’s recent “smogpocalypse” illustrates how disruptive ecoevents necessitate complex, urgent alternatives and exchange. In this essay, we propose and analyze China’s Green Public Culture in terms of its players, networks, media, action, strategy, discourses, and cultural norm. The divergent communication activities of 21st-century green public culture in China are assembled as network pragmatics that cultivate experience, connect practices, tie alliances, express differences, and circulate controversy. Thus, we identify distinctive, emerging networks of cooperation and contestation, the vectors of dissensus that bid to generate and shape resources requisite for living in the Anthropocene.

This study seeks to enhance our understanding of the complexities of heritage and the place of minority narratives within this process, thus creating a dialogue for cultural diversity in heritage management practice. The study is framed around two research questions: What are the factors, tensions and power-relations that contribute to how heritage is valorised in the case study of Cornwall? How might events like the Man Engine (2016) be understood as heritage practice that bridges the tensions of official and unofficial heritage? In order to answer the research questions a tripartite approach is undertaken, first studying official processes including Cornwall’s designation as a World Heritage Site (2006) and the Cornish as a National Minority (2014). Unofficial or alternative forms of heritage that take an everyday, embodied form is then examined. Finally, heritage making that bridges these two processes is explored  - the Man Engine Pilgrimage a popular performative heritage which made a pilgrimage across the landscape visiting old mining sites as an act of community remembrance, spatial identity and celebration. This research found several factors contributed to how heritage was valorised and depended on who the stakeholders were and their motivations. Both affected what was seen as heritage (the narrative) and how those messages were communicated (forms of mediation). All factors thus had impacts on how heritage was perceived and valorised. The study concludes that heritage in Cornwall is defined and ‘valorised’ in different ways, giving rise to diverse social, cultural, political and economic meanings and signification, depending on the perspectives within official and unofficial processes.  There are however crossovers between what and who is doing this valuing. In addition, valorisation complexities lead to tensions and barriers over who is effectively involved. The research argues that the Man Engine traversed some of these barriers and in this sense was a bridging process between official and unofficial heritage. It offers a model of practice, an inclusive vehicle for expression of authorised discourses but also grassroots sociocultural values, and called attention to ways that heritage is used and celebrated through both formal and informal processes and practices.  The study illustrates how institutions can build in ‘from-below’ practices, create conditions for co-production and recognise a plurality of values. The study makes a theoretical contribution to knowledge and extends the boundaries of research methods within the field of critical heritage studies. It draws on both critical and performance theories to illuminate how processes of ‘valorisation’ operate. The study observed affective dimensions and these were found to be important trajectories of how heritage becomes valorised. This adds to a growing body of research that understands that heritage valorisation is about representation and affect. This transdisciplinary approach, bridging theory and practice, offers a way to view multivocality in valorisation and promotes democratisation of heritage as active production and recognition of voices that have been marginalised or omitted.

In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, global protests against racialized police brutality targeted statues and other public art forms symbolizing racism. Either framed as a “weird global media event” or “global iconic event,” Floyd’s murder forced a reckoning with histories of oppression and systemic racism, with a potential enduring social effect and a transnational historical significance by inviting resonance and global solidarity. This article focuses on the U.K. context and spans a decade to invite a rethinking of ideas of crisis, history, and hero through a consideration of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue and its pushing into the Bristol Harbour on June 7, 2020, by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, and Yinka Shonibare CBE’s artwork Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010–2012), commissioned for the “Fourth Plinth” temporary exhibits in Trafalgar Square. Such consideration bears on this contemporary moment when we are witnessing globally connected protest actions calling for the decolonization of public material culture.

Open Access Link here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/10/1/3/htm

In this article, I examine the popular Victorian poem The Light of Asia (1879) and its reception and adaptation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India. Authored by the popular writer, Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia is typically regarded as one of the foundational texts of modern Buddhism in the western world. Yet significantly less has been said about its influence in Asia and especially in India, where it has an equally rich and varied history. While most scholarship has focused on its connections to the Sinhalese Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala and his popular campaigns to ‘liberate’ the MahaBodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, the singular focus on Dharmapala has obscured the poem’s much more expansive and enduring impact on a wide array of colonial Indian publics, regardless of caste, region, religion, ethnicity or language. The article explores the early history of its numerous adaptations, dramatizations, and translations in various regional languages. In providing an analysis of the poem’s Indian publics, the article shows how regional, political, and cultural idioms formed in multilingual contexts enable different readings and how literary and performative cultures interacted with colonial conceptions of religion, nation, and caste.
Keywords: modern Buddhism; Edwin Arnold; Light of Asia; India; public culture; colonialism; vernacular publics; world religion; Orientalism

This article examines the significance of mediation in the public programming and activism of The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), an organization that offers international aid and advocacy to Christians identified as victims of persecution. Focusing on VOM's efforts to rally Westerners, especially evangelical Protestants, I argue that the antipersecution movement urges supporters to share the mantle of martyrdom by engaging in purposeful acts of religious mediation, including the consumption and circulation of martyrological media. I explore a related tendency among evangelicals to valorize non-Western Christians in precarious circumstances as exemplars of self-sacrificing piety, whose suffering represents and inspires conditions of sanctification. Drawing on media analysis and fieldwork, I explore how practices of mediation, as forms of " witness, " invite evangelicals to embody otherwise elusive virtues and modes of agency associated with Christian martyrs, while reflecting ambiguous modern conceptions of the nature of embodied suffering and the relationship between vulnerability and power.

Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus systematically reflects on the practices and legacy of one exceptional cultural agent, Antanas Mockus, twice Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. His accomplishments bear witness to the potential of creative, symbolic practices as a trigger for social change. His failures, in turn, demonstrate what happens when cultural agency and epistemic legitimacy take divergent paths. Mockus’s example motivates us to further revise and sharpen our understanding of what cultural agency is in the present day by bringing into focus some of the most formidable challenges that public humanities face when they travel South and struggle to become genuinely global.

Jürgen Habermas is considered one of the most important and modern sociologists and politicians  of  the Frankfurt School’s  second generation (Max Horkheimer,Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse…);He devoted much of his ideas to the analysis of social actions; He claimed that modernity is unfurfield project that can be replaced by  communicative mind.
      Jürgen Habermas is the funder of the communicative action theory. This theory goes to establish communicative education. It also invites people to communicate with others equally. This  sociologist is known by his critics of the modern rationality and enlightenment .He recommends a rational evaluation to liberate humanity from what it undergoes nowadays.
      In this article, we seek to present the communicative action theory in relation to popular culture according to  the concepts underlying this theory.

Schafer 1963). The two main forces for sustained cultural interaction before this century have been warfare (and the large-scale political systems some- times generated by it) and religions of conversion, which have sometimes, as in the case of Islam, taken warfare as one of the ...

Oleh: Muhammad Husnul Maab Drs. Muslih Faozanudin, M. Sc (Pembimbing I) Drs Swastha Dharma, M. Si (Pembimbing II) Dra. Wahyuningrat, M. Si (Pembimbing III) Jurusan ilmu administrasi Negara, Fakultas Ilmu Sosial dan Ilmu politik, Universitas Jenderal Soedirman ABSTRAK Status " swadana " bagi rumah sakit umum milik pemerintah merupakan suatu tantangan, karena rumah sakit memiliki peran ganda yakni sebagai organisasi pelayanan publik dan sebagai organisasi yang berorientasi bisnis. Oleh karena itu RSU Banyumas perlu merubah budaya kerja birokrasi dengan budaya organisasi " Tri Sukses RSU Banyumas " agar mampu bersaing dengan rumah sakit swasta yang lain, namun tidak meninggalkan tanggung jawab sebagai pelayan masyarakat. Hal ini dilakuan karena budaya organisasi adalah salah satu faktor yang mampu mempengaruhi kualitas pelayanan. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah mengkaji signifikansi pengaruh budaya organisasi terhadap kualitas pelayanan kesehatan di RSU Banyumas. Hasil analisis menunjukkan bahwa pasien puas dengan pelayanan kesehatan di RSU Banyumas karena budaya organisasi di RSU Banyumas sangat baik, meskipun dari segi sarana dan prasarana dan SDM masih kurang memadahi. Oleh karena itu implikasinya adalah budaya organisasi yang sudah baik perlu dipertahankan disertai dengan sarana dan prasarana yang lebih menunjang. ABSTRACT Status " Swadana " for government'state hospital is a challenge, because the hospital have a double role, there are a public service organization and as business organization. So that, RSU Banyumas must change beraucracy's culture to organization culture " Tri Sukses RSU Banyumas " for being competitive with other hospitals without ignoring its responsibility as a public organization because organization culture is one of the factor wich determine the quality of public service. The purpose of this research is to study the significance of organization culture influence toward health service quality of Banyumas State Hospital inn. The result of this analysis show that the patient satisfied with RSU Banyumas's health service cause the organization culture in RSI Banyumas is good, although looked from human resource and infrastructure is not support. Consequently, the implication is that good culture need to be maintained and followed by receive support of human resource and infrastructure

Heritage Studies as a discipline at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, South Africa, commenced in 2015, with the introduction of a one-year Higher Certificate in Heritage Studies. Other programmes followed, including the three-year undergraduate BA degree, with Heritage Studies as a major elective in 2016. Postgraduate programmes in Heritage Studies continue to commence in 2020. These are built on the foundation of the Higher Certificate in Heritage Studies, in itself a post-matriculation tertiary qualification, and the experiences and lessons learnt in teaching and developing a decolonised curriculum. Through the reciprocal processes of teaching and learning experienced during the Higher Certificate in Heritage Studies, it was found that museums and spaces of public culture provide tools within the available heritage landscape with which to teach and engage. Working with students at the beginning of their tertiary experience, using a current methodology better informs the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. This paper outlines a teaching and learning experience while building the heritage programme at Sol Plaatje University. A case study testing this, encouraging decoloniality in object and museum literacy, was undertaken at a national art museum.

Depuis la première moitié du 20e siècle, nous assistons à une véritable explosion de représentations culturelles dans la sphère publique : la culture a été mobilisée par l’État au nom de la nation, par les industries culturelles et touristiques au nom de l’entertainment, et par différents mouvements autochtones au nom de l’auto-détermination. Cette instrumentalisation de la culture a été facilitée par les technologies de reproduction mécanique et de diffusion qui ont beaucoup marqué l’imaginaire mondial du 20e siècle (Benjamin 1988), mais aussi par l’émergence d’un certain discours scientifique anthropologique. Dans cette nouvelle réalité, où la notion anthropologique de « culture » devient de plus en plus visible et ses utilisations semblent s’éloigner de plus en plus de son contexte d’origine, comment devons-nous, en tant qu’anthropologues, parler de la culture? Quel avenir est réservé à cette notion et quel rôle à l’anthropologie, qui se considère comme la génitrice du concept?

Schafer 1963). The two main forces for sustained cultural interaction before this century have been warfare (and the large-scale political systems some- times generated by it) and religions of conversion, which have sometimes, as in the case of Islam, taken warfare as one of the ...

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, the 1857 autobiography and war memoir by Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, has had a long and prolific afterlife in British and Caribbean public imaginations. This article traces the corrective histories deployed to reorder Seacole's narrative into more contemporary political frameworks of anti-racism, multiculturalism, and humanitarianism. In doing so, this article lays bare the constructions of postcolonial black experience and emphasizes the complex experiences of black women in the diaspora. This includes a recognition of the limits of current conceptual frames of inclusion, agency, and resistance in black postcolonial studies and studies of empire.

Informal communities of Russian artists and intellectuals during the late Soviet years practiced a “politics of indistinction.” They claimed to be uninterested in anything political and differentiated themselves from ordinary “Soviet citizens,” whether supporters of or dissenters from the system. However, their apolitical lifestyles and pursuits contributed greatly to creating the conditions for making the collapse of the Soviet state imminent. Close examination of one such group, the Necrorealists, raises a set of questions that are central for an understanding of momentous and unexpected social transformations, and of the concept of "politics" more broadly

The discourse of identity/difference has been instrumental in the formation and legitimization of the most important modern communities, whether national, supranational (like European Union), diasporic or intranational (minorities). In addition, it pervades both postcolonial notions of 'third' spaces and hybridity and New Right identitarianism. To disengage from the discourse of identity/difference, which ineluctably raises the specter of cultural essentialism, we propose to rethink the issues of community and rights, belonging and togetherness based on the notion of 'public culture', conceptualized by Appadurai as a "zone of cultural debate"; an arena where different "types, forms and domains of culture are encountering, interrogating and contesting each other." Understood as the intrinsically heterogeneous and contested terrain encompassing both policy and cultural representations, the arts and everyday social interaction, moral spaces and forms of life, the problematic of public culture highlights the inherently challenging but also explorative and experimental nature of 'commonness,' of 'living together.'

Sufi becoming is conditioned on finding a master who could take one through the spiritual journey for attaining Ultimate Truth. In contrast, Islamic reformism since the late eighteenth century calls for the significance of establishing a direct and autonomous relationship to God and denies the roles of charismatic authority who could mediate between Him and a Muslim. This paper examines how Egyptian Sufi theorists tackled the issue of individualised faith and personal connection to their masters by looking at the conversion narrative of ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910–1978), the French-educated Egyptian scholar of Sufism. He vividly depicted in his work the encounters with the Shadhili masters, whether in person or in ru’ya (dream-like vision), and demonstrated his firm connection to them. In spite of publicly disclosing his Sufi becoming, he managed to gain the status of a Sufi celebrity by performing the selfless Self who aspires to gain access to transcendental reality.

Voy a plantear la viabilidad de la categoría de cultura pública para emprender un análisis político de lo cultural, y cultural de lo político en las sociedades complejas. Debe tomarse la reflexión que sigue, literalmente, como un ensayo. No busque una historia de las categorías, aunque sí encontrará un diálogo con ellas, a partir de las expresiones sociales donde se les ha identificado. Cultura pública, en el sentido que será comprendida, no sólo incluye aquellas relaciones culturales adscritas al denominador de cultura popular, sino que describe, por su aplicación tanto cultural como política, el sentido que los medios le van dando a la sociedad y otras dinámicas comunicativas y culturales que no tienen que ver directamente con lo que pasa en este nivel mediático.

Questo saggio esplora il rapporto tra soggettivazione e comunicazione, adoperando un paradigma teoretico stratificato che adotta analisi di stampo tanto rappresentativo che affettivo. Assumendo la soggettivazione nel senso attribuito a questo concetto da Foucault, come un processo storico collegato una configurazione epistemologica e spaziotemporale ben definita, il saggio sostiene che la comunicazione audiovisuale operi come un dispositivo di posizionamento sociale e di mobilitazione percettiva. Inoltre, esso avanza la proposta teorica di analizzare le dinamiche di interazione e socializzazione, che sempre più spesso vengono generate dai cosiddetti nuovi media, in relazione alla New Economy al fine di evidenziare in che modo la produzione sociale sia sfruttata come valore di mercato.

Many artworks from recent South Korean history are located in the nebulous but fertile contact zone between public/popular culture and democracy movements. Being Political Popular attempts a thematically focused and historically interventionist inquiry into the current status of South Korean contemporary art, exploring the work of 17 artists and art collectives.

Being Political Popular documents the complex lines of thinking that scholars such as Chang-nam Kim, Namhee Lee, and Wan-kyung Sung have nurtured on the topics of the popular music and resistant youth culture of the 1970s, the politics of minjung subjectivity during the 1980s democracy movement, and the 1980s minjung art movement. The book also includes artists' writings and manifestos by Minouk Lim, mixrice, Hein-kuhn Oh, and Sangdom Kim--primary materials that provide the reader with a closer look at their art-making. It serves as a reader's gateway to the recent history of South Korean visual arts and public culture, marking the beginning of a more nuanced and multifaceted investigation of the South Korean aesthetics of politics. (From University of Washington Press website)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sohl Lee, "Preface"
Sohl Lee, "Introduction: Between Minjung and Taejung" (p.10-17)
Sohl Lee, "Sites of Resistant Collectivity: Choi Byung-soo, Kim Dong-won, Labor News Collective, Park Jae-dong (p.18-39)
Sohl Lee, "Reenacting History: Kim Min-gi, Hong Sung-dam, Hein-kuhn Oh (p.40-63)
Hein-kuhn Oh "Making the Gwangju Story" (1995) (p.62-3)
Sohl Lee, "Between One and Many: siren eun young jung, mixrice, Minouk Lim" (p.64-103)
Mixrice, "Conversations for Return" (2006) (p.94-5) 
Minouk Lim, "A Bartleby within Myself: S.O.S.--Adoptive Dissensus" (2009) (p.102-3)
Sohl Lee, "Seoul Tour / Pyongyang Express: Chan-kyong Park, Seung Woo Back, listen to the city" (p.104-127)
Sohl Lee, "The Past is the Future: Park Bul-dong, Nam Gung Ho Seok" (p.128-139)
Sohl Lee, "Play to Fly: Sangdon Kim, Minari and Hack" (p.140-153)
Sangdon Kim, "Discoplan: A Workshop to Regenerate the Former Camp Nimble Site" (p.148-9) 
Sohl Lee, "A Letter to the Future of Korean Art" (p.154-7)

Minouk Lim, "The (Im)Possibility of Art as Life" (p.158-163)

Namhee Lee, "Minjung, History, and the Crisis of Historical Subjectivity" (p.164-177)

Chang-nam Kim, "Kim Min-gi and the 1970s South Korean Youth Culture" (p. 178-187)

Wan-kyung Sung, "The Rise and Fall of Minjung Art" (p.188-202)

Biography (p.204-206)

Ovarian cancer is the deadliest of all gynecological cancers. Diagnosis is often late-stage when the disease has spread and is harder to manage. Primarily non-visual and sometimes ambiguous early symptoms are exacerbated by the rarity and metaphoric/metonymic character of representations of the ovaries or ovarian disease in television, film, and literature. More representations of ovarian cancer in public and popular culture, as well as images that appeal to a wider range of sensory experience, may help the problem of late-stage diagnosis by producing greater practical awareness of the ovaries and ovarian disease.

This book chapter is a decolonial look at international solidarity as a necessary yet contested notion practiced between Africa and Europe. It poses love as central to any notion of solidarity. I look at examples from Namibia's liberation struggle, such as the SWAPO newsletter Namibia Today as unpacked in Laura Horelli's research and artistic work. I also look at the lifework of activists and intellectuals Ottilie and Kenneth Abrahams. I also trace international solidarity in the early 20th century as embodied by theatre artist Rosa Clay whose Namibian-Finnish-American migrations are evidence of internationalism. The chapter also unpacks recent efforts by contemporary artists and social movements aimed at international solidarity and the limits of these practices.