24 Kasım 2009 Salı

Home (Key Ideas in Geography) by Alison Blunt (Author), Robyn Dowling (Author)

As I promised myself earlier on, this is a brief summary of (the first chapter) of the book "Home: Key Ideas in Geography"
Blunt and Dowling describes home "as a place and as an idea, an imaginary imbued with feeling"(2). these feelings include belonging, desire, intimacy and fear, violence, alienation.
Home is thus "spatial imaginary" they conclude.
"a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales and connect places" (2).

inspired by their word play I will suggest to consider home as "imaginary space". (How brilliant!)
the authors lists several frameworks that conceptualize the "home".
Marxist conceive home as a site for social reproduction, where the worker prepares him/herself for work./Basically/
Humanist geographers investigate how places entail meanings, significance for people. they are interested in how people relate to the dwelling, how a sense of home is created. this is what I am interested in as well.
they dont consider home as house or shelter, rather it is an "irreplaceable centre of significance".A place to withdraw and venture forth. this is where feminist critics are suspicious about. It is rather a romantic take of home they argue. As they find such an approach masculinist, the home is a haven for the men, who rest in it, but for women it is a workplace and more than that most of the time a site for oppression and violence.
I find the quote of Dovey quite interesting, she sees home as a relationship with the environment through which people make sense of their world. It corresponds with Stuart Hall's definition of culture. In a similar manner Nikos Papastergiadis sees home as a place where personal and social meanings are grounded.
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"Being Home refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; "not being home" is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself."
chandra Talpade Mohanty

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8 Kasım 2009 Pazar

james elkins on practice-based phd

It also seems wholly in keeping with the way art is often produced, in the company of many disparate interests that do not, at least for some time, seem to be directly linked to one another. It avoids the usual academic demands of coherence, rationality, and intellectual synthesis-which again is appropriate for much of visual art.
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Because the purpose of the candidate's forays into different disciplines is to mine them in order to further her artwork. Hence normal scholarly criteria of truth, the production of new knowledge, thoroughness, clarity, and scholarly protocol just do not apply. The dissertations can still be checked, and the candidates can be advised as if they were students of art history, anthropology, and other disciplines: but in fact they aren't, and the normal protocols of readings by specialists is not logically appropriate. It needs a separate justification.
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It would make sense to put se minars on theories of reading especially Paul De Man's-at the heart of the new programmes. Translation theory, too, could playa part, and so could anthropological theories of interpretation. Perhaps the new degree should be understood as a fundamental critique of disciplinarity itself-in which case it might frUitfully engage vvith existing debates about the nature of interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and subdisciplinary work in many other fields
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The Three Configurations of Practice-Based Phds

3 Kasım 2009 Salı

"home" by alison blunt and roby dowling

the book talks about different approaches to studies on home. I like the idea of including some ongoing phd projects on the topic, it gives not only an idea on current projects, also different and more minor trends in the field. the authors draw attention to the fact that the interest on the topic of home is quite recent.(Wonder why) from mid 90s on more and more researches have been conducted on the topic. several approaches at hand, feminist and post-colonial perspectives are the ones that sounds intriguing and might help me get out of my little box I think.
anyway the book is a good anthology, a kind of beginners book that might allow you to jump to other stuff.
home as a micro-cosmos, a space we develop an ethic of existence.
It feels like a valid starting point for the quest for familiar, the place of the exotic. Still vague how to move on from there.
"the anthropology of domestic space can become a native research paradise illustrating the exotic in the familiar"
Irene Cieraad says in page 43
I will try to write a more comprehensive summary of the book when I turn back from the trip (hopefully).