Search results for "esthetics"
showing 10 items of 761 documents
Securitizing images: The female body and the war in Afghanistan
2012
Referring to the recent ‘visual turn’ in Critical Security Studies, the aim of this article is threefold. First, by taking the concept of visual securitization one step further, we intend to theorize the image as an iconic act understood as an act of showing and seeing. This turn to the performativity of the visual directs our attention to the securitizing power of images. Second, this article addresses the methodological challenges of analysing images and introduces an iconological approach. Iconology enables the systematic interpretation of images as images by also taking their social embeddedness into account. In the third part of this article we apply this theoretical and methodologica…
The Lord’s Resistance Army and the arms that brought the Lord
2019
This article develops the notion of polyphonic silence as a means for thinking through the ethical and political ramifications of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and contrasts the silence surrounding two periods of extreme violence in northern Uganda: 1) the northern Ugandan war (1986–2006), which is contemporarily often shrouded by silence, and 2) the early decades of colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead,…
Democratic values in the aesthetics of classic American pragmatism
2011
Abstract In the present paper an interpretation of the political dimension of pragmatic aesthetic reflection is proposed. The interconnection between politics and aesthetics in three classic American pragmatists: William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is evoked. The author claims that by emphasizing the role of democratic values in philosophy and life, the classic American pragmatists encroach upon the field of the arts and aesthetics. Their emphasis put upon individual activity, free expression of thoughts, plurality of the forms of expression, and acceptance of criticism as a tool helping create better solutions in human cooperation can easi…
Potentials of Togetherness: Beyond Individualism and Community in Nordic Art Education
2013
Historically, art education has focused mainly on individual learning processes. In Nordic countries,' for example, discourses of training the rational individual through skills of objective representation, developing the authentic individual through child-centered education, or stimulating identity-processes through critical pedagogy have dominated over ideas of collectivity, community, and society (llleris, 2002; Kjosavik, 2001; Lindstrom, 2009; Pedersen, 1998; Pohjakallio, 1998). Today, poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and subjectivation are challenging these modernist discourses by proposing more dynamic models of multiple and instable learning selves, always in the making (e.…
Body, Nature, Language: Artisans to Artists in the Commodification of Authenticity
1969
This article examines processes of authenticating and selling handicrafts at the conjuncture of cultural pride and economic profit in two peripheral sites (Finnish Sámiland and rural Québec), under shared conditions of late capitalism and globalising political economies. These conditions (re)structure traditionalist and modernist discourses about artisans' historical bodies, their connections to the local land (nature), and how they interactionally authenticate and sell their products through language. Under these conditions, the commodification of authenticity pushes artisans and handicrafts beyond being emblems of national belonging and collective tradition, and toward individualised, art…
Things matter: about materiality and recovery from mental health difficulties
2020
ABSTRACT Purpose The aim of this study is to explore how material things might become involved in the recovery process of people with mental health difficulties. Method Empirical material from three different studies on various aspects concerning mental health issues that each of the authors had conducted was reanalysed through a phenomenological item analysis. Results We discovered that mundane objects such as a mobile phone, a bench, a door and a key have agency to contribute to peoples’ recovery and wellbeing. Things became agents that created contexts that initiated physical, social and emotional movements. Conclusion By giving attention to materiality we might become aware of the impor…
cARTegory Theory: Framing Aesthetics of Mathematics
2019
Mathematics can help investigate hidden patterns and structures in music and visual arts. Also, math in and of itself possesses an intrinsic beauty. We can explore such a specific beauty through the comparison of objects and processes in math with objects and processes in the arts. Recent experimental studies investigate the aesthetics of mathematical proofs compared to those of music. We can contextualize these studies within the framework of category theory applied to the arts (cARTegory theory), thanks to the helpfulness of categories for the analysis of transformations and transformations of transformations. This approach can be effective for the pedagogy of mathematics, mathematical mu…
Dental-gingival remodeling with BOPT no-prep veneers
2017
Recent years have seen increasing demand for treatments aimed at improving dental esthetics. In this context, both patients and dentists prefer to preserve dental structures as far as possible; thanks to technological advances, especially in adhesive dentistry, new materials and minimally invasive techniques such as “no-prep” (no preparation) veneers have made this possible. Nevertheless, no-prep veneers have specific indications and suffer certain disadvantages. Objectives: This clinical case describes the rehabilitation of the upper anterior region by means of no-prep veneers, with BOPT (Biologically Oriented Preparation Technique) cervical margins. The patient had requested an aesthetic …
Important thoughts on images and words
2015
Both images and words have their unique materiality that tends to be forgotten or bypassed in our modern times and perhaps in particular in our technology-driven contemporary culture. This oblivion...
The Makings of Mother in Diary Narratives
2004
This article ponders the special character of “confessional” texts, especially the diary-form text both for its keeper and for its researcher. Diaries written by ordinary people certainly give us knowledge about psychic, cultural, and social realities, but what kind of knowledge, and how could it be interpreted? This article uses a toolbox of narrative discourse analysis critically applied to diary texts written by three mothers during the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s. Theoretically, feminist ideas of the desire to mother and Foucauldian thought of the arts of existence are made use of in the article.