The architect's gaze: The maintenance of collective professional vision in the work of the architect

Knowledge is something which is essentially embodied and present in the collective practices of seeing, in the professional vision of specific communities of knowledge workers. Architects represent a form of professional and knowledge-intensive work that includes both abstract categories such as style and design (‘form’) and material categories (‘matter’). Thus, professional vision is midway between, but also capable of integrating and co-aligning, abstract/intangible and concrete/material knowledge. Exploring how architects draw on vision and know-how in their day-to-day work, as well as in their engagement with a variety of media at a major Swedish firm of architects, the study suggests that the professional vision of the practicing architect is never fully integrated or coherent but must be subject to constant modifications and joint adjustments.     

Seeing What One Sees: Perception,Emotion, and Activity

In this article, it is demonstrated (a) how seeing is organized in the spatiotemporal arrangement of bodies and conduct within which the participants display and manage their orientations to the ongoing activity, and (b) how seeing and emotion are mutually constituted in the precise coordination of conduct and how they, can constitute resources for organizing the ongoing activity. The view advanced in this article sharply contradicts the traditional conception of visual perception, according to which the verb "see" names a discrete process, event, or state hidden under the individual's skin. Seeing is rather an organizational feature of an embodied, visible activity.     

By all appearances: thoughts on colonialism,visuality and racial neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

In a Montreal neighbourhood in the fall of 2013, a community mural celebrating ‘diversity, adversity and solidarity’ was vandalized: the image of a Black woman was spray-painted white. In this paper, I take the events and discourses surrounding this incident and my personal responses to them as a starting point for examining the racialized politics of visual representation. Using critical race-class analysis informed by contemporary theories of Black visuality, I consider dynamics of Black invisibility and visibility in Canada and consider the role visual texts play in reinforcing, reproducing, and resisting racialized social relations. I argue for caution regarding politics of representation, and consider Black and Indigenous art practices for the creative forms of resistance to colonial-capitalist ideology and visual logics they offer.     

Practices of Color Classification

Color categories sit at the intersection of 2 central topics in the study of human cognition: (a) the analysis of vision, and (b) the study of semantic categories, or more generally processes of classification. Using as data videotape of archaeologists filling out a coding sheet that requires them to systematically describe the color of the dirt they have excavated, this article describes the practices required to competently classify color within the work life of their profession. The task of color classification is embedded within a situated activity system, which includes not only several different ways of identifying the same color (each designed for alternative uses), but also cognitive artifacts, such as a Munsell color chart and specific embodied practices. The chart creates a historically constituted architecture for perception, a heterotopia that juxtaposes in a single visual field 2 very different kinds of space. As multiple parties fill out the coding sheet together, the full resources of the organization of talk-in-interaction are brought to bear on the contingent tasks they are charged with accomplishing. This investigation of a situated activity system encompassing not only semantic categories, but also physical tools and embodied practices, contrasts with most previous research on color categories, which has focused almost exclusively on mental phenomena, and not on how people perform color classification to pursue a relevant course of action in the consequential settings that make up their lifeworld.     

Open door environments as interactional resources to initiate unscheduled encounters in office organizations

ABSTRACT

In this article, we show how a common type of material environment in office organizations, namely offices with doors left open, enables and sustains the initiation of unscheduled, informal encounters. Using video recordings of naturally occurring interactions, we identify and describe a recurrent practice whereby visitors, mainly through their embodied conduct as they approach the doorway, are recognized by their recipients as initiating an encounter. We unpack the systematic practices and resources involved and analyze a series of variations through which co-workers deal with three interactional problems: obtaining the office occupant’s attention, negotiating availability, and negotiating entitlement. The article (1) demarcates a set of practices typical of unscheduled encounters in office organizations; (2) sheds new lights on how shared and fractured visual spaces can be used as resources to produce complex organizational meanings; and (3) proposes an approach of organizational activity and knowledge as inherently interactional, embodied and material.     

‘Bring down the controlled movements!’ – exploring the possibilities of and limitations on achieving embodied agency in ballet and fashion

This paper explores the subtleties of exercising embodied agency within two contexts shaped by ideals and norms: ballet and fashion. Here, we focus on how dancers and models rehearsing offstage towards onstage performances negotiate their potential and limitations for achieving agency over and over. Whereas a ‘turn to embodiment’ has occurred within organization studies, less is known about how embodied agency is choreographed and practised between visible front stages and ‘hidden’ offstages, or in relation to the various human and non-human agents present in the field. The empirical material of this paper is derived from two separate ethnographic studies. By combining insights from the two contexts, we make a joint effort to explore a complex phenomenon in more detail. This paper develops our micro-level understanding of embodied agency as a relational endeavour, and offers insights into the surprisingly ‘a-mobile’ discussion of embodied practices within organization studies.     

Visualities of strategic vision: Lookout Mountain Laboratory and the deterrent state from nuclear tests to Vietnam

This article considers two visual cultures of America’s deterrent state in the Cold War, the cinematic and cybernetic, by following the history of the 600th Photographic Squadron of the United States (US) Air Force in Vietnam and its 1950s progenitor, the 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron, or Lookout Mountain Laboratory. We argue that cinematic and cybernetic visual cultures were at the heart of a Cold War visual alliance that was also a Cold War visual contest, and cameras were situated at the centre of the contest. Specifically, the cinematic and the cybernetic represent two distinct visualities of vision, as the Cold War cameras of the Air Force assumed either transcendental or transcendent positions. The former, in keeping with a cinematic visuality, was oriented towards casting America as a sight to see in the context of its war on communism, with cameras operating as a condition of possibility for the construction of the ‘image’, whereas the latter, in keeping with a cybernetic visuality, was oriented towards the American appetite to see, to monitor and survey the world over, with cameras operating as processors of ‘information’. The history of the 600th Photographic Squadron and its progenitor, Lookout Mountain Laboratory, suggests that the transition from cinematic to cybernetic visualities of vision was part of a broader transformation in the US Cold War state from a nuclear deterrent state to a supra-nuclear deterrent state.     

Environmental conversions and muslim activists: constructing knowledge at the intersection of religion and politics

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the production of knowledge by Muslim environmental activists in the United States and Great Britain, applying Eyerman and Jamison’s theory of cognitive praxis to demonstrate how religious and political knowledge and practices are synthesised by the activists. The paper emerges from research conducted with Islamic environmental organizations in the United States and Great Britain in 2012–2013 and utilises data gathered from interviews conducted with Muslim environmental activists working in those organizations and from the publicly available newsletters, websites, and articles produced by the activists and organizations. I argue that through the integration of environmental and religious knowledge, Muslim environmentalists construct a ‘critical community’ within Islam that seeks to transform orthodox Islamic knowledge and practice. In the process, Muslim environmentalists demonstrate that religiously-grounded social movements may simultaneously pursue religious and political change.     

Art,climate change and (other) eco materials: rethinking the cosmopolitanization of aesthetics and the aesthetics of cosmopolitanization with Ulrich Beck

Based on fieldwork in Japan and Hong Kong, I ask how methodological cosmopolitanism, as formulated by Ulrich Beck, may afford new and highly needed modes for grappling with climatically concerned art and aesthetic practices across geographical regions. I will argue that methodological cosmopolitanism serves as an important framework for approaching such art practices, and suggest that two overall intertwined strands concerning aesthetic practices engaged in global issues of climate change, emerge from this – the cosmopolitanization of aesthetics and, reversely, the aesthetics of cosmopolitanization. Departing from my fieldwork among farming artists in the Hong Kong countryside and in the Japanese satoyama – rural mountain – areas, I will, on the one hand, argue that art practices are ‘cosmopolitanized’ by the awareness of global risks, manifested in anticipation of the comprehensive climatic changes (in)discriminately affecting across nations and regions. At the same time, and importantly, art practices are actively attending to this ‘risky’ cosmopolitanization, giving aesthetic voice, form and ‘visuality’ to unfolding climatic issues and concerns and hereby practising what I will call an ‘aesthetics of cosmopolitanization’.     

It Is Not Old‐Fashioned,It Is Vintage,Vintage Fashion and The Complexities of 21st Century Consumption Practices

This article reviews consumption practices concerning vintage, a fashion style based on used or retro‐style garments. Existing studies connect vintage with authenticity, nostalgia and identity. We explore how the vintage style deploys and comments on consumer culture, bypassing producers by wearing old garments to communicate ‘authentic’ identities. We argue that existing theories on consumption, fashion and subculture cannot fully explain vintage practices. Bypassing the dichotomies and one‐dimensional explanations of these theories, we show that vintage, with its ambivalent relation to both subcultural distinction practices and mainstream consumer culture, serves as a prism through which to examine and understand the complexities and subtleties of 21st century consumption practices.     

Seeing through transparency: Performativity,vision and intent 1

Abstract

This paper engages with debates around transformations in the production and circulation of images and the changes in modes of perception that these offer. Paul Virilio (1991, 1994) has argued that technological developments have produced a shift in the site of meaning‐production from the material reference space of the image (print or celluloid) to the time of visual contact by the viewer. I consider what significance these temporalities have in relation to social difference, and I develop debates around the performative to consider how the viewer is constituted in visual performativity. This focus on time and performativity opens up questions of how vision may constitute the agency, intention and responsibility of the viewer. Drawing on an example of visual irony in advertising, I explore how the temporal suspension of meanings allows for a suspension of the terms of intent and responsibility. This visual performative accesses and reworks the terms of social difference and privilege in what I have called ‘retroactive intentionality’.     

‘Roundabout routes and sanctuary schools’: the role of situated educational practices and habitus in the creation of transnational professionals

In this article, I examine the role of ‘education’ in the formation of transnational professionals in contemporary Hong Kong. A significant body of work has been devoted to considering the ways in which knowledge within particular global financial centres is embodied through the practices of a transnational capitalist class (TNCC). Yet, very few researchers have discussed how this TNCC is actually created. In this article, I highlight the importance of one faction of the TNCC ‐‘overseas‐educated locals’‐ and describe the sense of common identity and mutual recognition that binds them. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Hong Kong and Vancouver between 2000 and 2003, I demonstrate the salience of embedded and spatialized practices of education in the creation of the TNCC. In particular, I look at the role of inculcation within a school/university and home environment, as well as the significance of a distinctive habitus, and conclude that these situated processes are indeed crucial to the development of an exclusive class of transnational professionals.     

The fanta-sy of global products: fizzy-drinks,differentiated ubiquity and the placing of globalization

ABSTRACT

If globalization is conceived as an outcome of negotiations between places and relational processes, how do researchers capture such amorphous complexity? Drawing upon the framework of assemblage theory this paper unpicks the plethora of processes and practices encompassed within the problematic term ‘globalization’. Focusing on the ‘banal’ object of a can of Fanta, we demonstrate how this exists in an assemblage which maintains coherence across space (i.e. is universally recognizable) yet is spatially differentiated in its components. Shedding light on how these processes coalesce in place we argue for the acknowledgement of the ‘ubiquitous’ in making place and the importance of difference in underpinning the ‘global’.     

Young people looking forward: Imagined future and normative tensions in urban Norway

We explore the meaning-making practices of ‘little personal stories’ and ‘big societal stories’ in the imagined futures of 12- and 13-year-olds within Norway, known for its egalitarian ideals and welfare society. Using the concept ‘prospective narratives’, we explore these practices through the students' narrative world-making. The narratives connect the imagined future with gender and class variations related to larger social norms in the arenas of work and family. They demonstrate embodied and positioned cultural knowledge of the present, reflecting tensions between dominant social norms—‘big stories’—in terms of child-centred parenting, active work-life and egalitarian ideals across gender and class.     

The promises of practice

Practice has become a topic of increasing empirical and conceptual concern within sociology and neighbouring fields. ‘Practice’ can refer to a location or it can refer to action. It is possible to be ‘in practice’, to ‘have a practice’ or to be ‘constituted by practice’. Practice can be a cause, an effect or an explanation. Within science and technology studies (STS), the practice orientation is simultaneously analytical – in the form of various practice theories – and empirical, in that research objects are often defined as ‘practices’. Focusing on a range of examples, especially ethnomethodological, this paper examines some implications and problems that follow when practice slides unnoticed between empirical and conceptual registers. Arguing that a reconsideration of practice thinking is important in order to retain its vigour, we outline a view of practice as a ‘factish’, at once conceptual and empirical, which facilitates analyses of practical ontologies and their transformations. This informs a final discussion of the politics and promises of practice.     

‘Without Being Walt Whitman’: Vicente Huidobro,Whitman, and the Poetics of Sight

The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.     

‘Steroids,it’s so much an identity thing!’ perceptions of steroid use,risk and masculine body image

This paper explores how taste and distaste, body image and masculinity play into young people’s perceptions of risk related to steroid use. Data are drawn from a qualitative study on risk-taking among 52 Danish youths enrolled in high school or vocational training. A number of ‘risky’ practices such as drug use, fights, speeding, etc. were discussed. In contrast to these practices, which were primarily described in relation to ‘physical risks’, steroid use was understood as part of an ‘identity’ or ‘lifestyle’ in a way these other risks were not. Few interviewees had used steroids, and the large majority distanced themselves from the practice. Reasons for not wanting to use steroids were related to (1) perceiving the drug to be part of a broader lifestyle and identity that they are not interested in committing to or embodying and (2) finding the body image, physicality and associations with steroid use ‘fake’, ‘gross’ and distasteful. We draw on recent developments in feminist sociological theory related to the gendered body as both a performance and process to understand steroid use as a practice through which the body and self is produced. More than a one-dimensional ‘risky’ practice, we argue that gendered and embodied identities are crucial to understanding the dynamics of steroid use.     

Affective practices,care and bioscience: a study of two laboratories

Scientific knowledge‐making is not just a matter of experiments, modelling and fieldwork. It also involves affective, embodied and material practices (Wetherell, 2012) which can be understood together as ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). In this paper we explore how affect spans and connects material, subjective and organizational practices, focusing in particular on the patterns of care we encountered in an observational study of two bioscience laboratories. We explore the preferred emotional subjectivities of each lab and their relation to material practice. We go on to consider flows and clots in the circulation of affect and their relation to care through an exploration of belonging and humour in the labs. We show how being a successful scientist or group of researchers involves a careful choreography of affect in relation to materials, colleagues and others to produce scientific results, subjects and workplaces. We end by considering how thinking with care troubles dominant constructions of scientific practice, successful scientific selves and collectives.     

Visuality, mobility and the cosmopolitan: inhabiting the world from afar

In earlier publications based on the research discussed in this article (e.g. Szerszynski and Urry 2002), we argued that an emergent culture of cosmopolitanism, refracted into different forms amongst different social groups, was being nurtured by a widespread 'banal globalism'--a proliferation of global symbols and narratives made available through the media and popular culture. In the current article we draw on this and other empirical research to explore the relationship between visuality, mobility and cosmopolitanism. First we describe the multiple forms of mobility that expand people's awareness of the wider world and their capacity to compare different places. We then chart the changing role that visuality has played in citizenship throughout history, noting that citizenship also involves a transformation of vision, an absenting from particular contexts and interests. We explore one particular version of that transformation--seeing the world from afar, especially in the form of images of the earth seen from space--noting how such images conventionally connote both power and alienation. We then draw on another research project, on place and vision, to argue that the shift to a cosmopolitan relationship with place means that humans increasingly inhabit their world only at a distance.     

Viewpoint: Power/difference

Postmodernisms and poststructuralisms have attempted to rearrange our social ways of seeing, saying and sharing: as such — but not alone — such cultural productions signify crises of social representation. These ‘notes for an investigation‘, in turning the subject, draw out some problems of (i) celebrating difference(s); (ii) continuing social forms that limit some human beings all of the time; and (iii) how some practical critiques that refuse an organizing social grammar that hurts can, in their claimed alternative totalization/essentialism (a) subordinate and exploit (b) deny embodied difference(s).