Mobilizing Urban Publics,Imagining Democratic Possibilities

Publics are not what they were once imagined to be. A growing body of interdisciplinary work is shifting attention to processes in which publics are summoned, constituted and mobilized within political struggles. Nowhere is the formation of publics, as multiple, contingent and contested, more evident than in the varied responses to the transformation of urban spaces. Publics are emerging around issues of belonging, heritage, rights and participation within increasingly divided and unequal cities. Through a close reading of discourses of revitalization and gentrification in the case study of the controversial redevelopment of the Woodward's building in Vancouver, Canada, I examine how the formation of issues imagines and mobilizes publics and further how these discourses work to define possibilities of democratic participation. I show that discourses of revitalization, relying on economic and cultural logics of urban redevelopment, imagine an exclusive, individualized and passive public. In contrast, anti-gentrification discourses, advancing social and political logics of redevelopment, mobilize a collective, active and more inclusive public. In exploring publics within the relationship between issue formation and political participation, I suggest that urban struggles, such as that at Woodward's, are sites in which to understand how meanings of democracy are being contested and rewritten in the contemporary moment.     

Venture philanthropy and social entrepreneurship in community redevelopment

This article provides a case study of Tom Cousins, a social entrepreneur who used his own venture philanthropic investments and leveraged additional resources through extensive public‐private partnerships for the sole intent of redeveloping an area of disinvestment and poverty. In the process, Cousins also provided the visionary, strategic, and operational leadership often associated with the actions and responsibilities of a social entrepreneur. The limited research to date has investigated social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy as separate and often unrelated concepts. In this study, we analyze the sustained and intensive involvement by Cousins and his foundations and the continued leadership provided in the creation of public‐private partnerships focused on the redevelopment of the East Lake area in Atlanta.     

Community Practice in the Bulldozer’s Shadow: The History and Legacy of Social Work in Urban Renewal

Social work has a long history of involvement in urban development policy, dating to the settlement house movement. This article explores a neglected part of this history by analyzing the role of social work in urban renewal programs. The functions of social work in urban renewal—including relocating families displaced by slum clearance and community organizing to foster resident input in planning—reflect enduring tensions in practice between social justice and social control. Implications for current practice are explored as the profession continues to define its part in urban redevelopment policies.     

Heritage and Community Regeneration in Northern Ireland: Finding Points of Coalescence in the Development Planning Process

ABSTRACT

Bringing heritage resources to the forefront in communities can serve to help heal long-standing divides with impacts not only in economic dimensions, but also social and cultural. It is an ironic turn—some of the heritage resources in Northern Ireland have been the site of intense and violent conflict over long periods of time—and now serve as focal points for bringing together divergent groups, helping heal divisions in communities. Seventeen communities throughout Northern Ireland are examined, gauging impacts and perceptions of community regeneration and redevelopment processes. Results provide insights for addressing lingering conflict and finding points of coalescence, with heritage playing a role in transformation.     

Bridging and Bonding in the Academic Melting Pot: Cultural Resources and Network Diversity

Understanding how cultural resources shape the formation of social networks is a methodological challenge as well as a theoretical objective, and both are yet to be met. In this study, sociability on college campuses is modeled as a process in which students’ prior cultural experiences and the current social structure of the student body work together, affecting the likelihood of friendships that take place within or across racial boundaries. Structural and cultural perspectives are surveyed to develop hypotheses concerning the determinants of interracial friendship, and these hypotheses are tested against a sample of 3,392 students from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen. The results suggest that religiosity, political activism, high arts participation, and athletic activities undertaken prior to college affect the diversity of social networks formed in the first year, but work in different directions. The effects of these cultural experiences may be explained by the racial organization of cultural activity on campus.     

CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE VARIETY OF MODES OF CULTURAL CONSUMPTION IN THE OPERA AUDIENCE

Research on cultural consumption and its social conditions mainly focuses on tastes and on products consumed rather than on modes of consumption. This article takes up this desideratum and studies the modes of listening to classical music in opera audiences based on a visitor survey. In contrast to the prevailing image of the silent and intellectual audience in high‐brow institutions, the study shows there is a broad array of modes people use to listen to classical music. With respect to Bourdieu's theory of arts perception, in particular his notion of cultural capital, one can show empirically that the modes of cultural consumption in this case are determined by listeners' cultural capital.     

From Kolkhoz to Holding Company: a Hungarian Agricultural Producer Co-operative in Transition

This paper uses a case study, the Noble Grape co-operative (a pseudonym), to illustrate the roles of social and cultural capital in both the creation of a successful agricultural producer co-operative (collective farm) in socialist Hungary and its transformation into a successful private company after 1989. It identifies both continuities in personnel, from socialist technocrat to capitalist manager, and continuities in the financial establishment with which it deals. The social origins of the key players in the transformation are compared with the existing sociological literature on changing elites in Eastern Europe, and the fate of the ordinary members who appear to be the losers in the process.     

A Global-Middle-Class House?1 Cultural Capital,Taste, and Kitsch

Abstract

In this article, I show how the category of the migrant house, as has been recently discussed in much scholarship, can be expanded to include another subcategory—the global-middle-class house. Recently, the migrant house has generated much research in migration studies and in disciplines of the built environment. Consequently, it has been examined through various perspectives, including home and belonging, materiality in the home, and the transnational home. It has not been examined, however, through the concepts of cultural capital, taste and kitsch, as developed by Bourdieu and others. This article applies these concepts in the exploration of the migrant house through a case study of one house and its transformation from old to new in suburban Melbourne. The article shows how the concepts of cultural capital, taste and kitsch can be utilized to expand the category of the migrant house to include the global-middle-class house. Following a theoretical discussion, the article analyses the old family house, the decision to demolish, the construction process and the redevelopment of a new house, together with an analysis of material objects in the new house and around it. The article argues that this is a specific kind of a migrant house, a global-middle-class house, because it combines popular global taste with objects taken from the ancestral past of its migrant residents.     

Culture Clash and Second Home Ownership in the U.S. Northern Forest

Culture clash, or intracommunity tensions related to rapid in‐migration, between permanent and newcomer residents has been well studied in relation to environmental conservation in natural amenity communities; however, less is known about culture clash within communities characterized by high rates of second home ownership. We examine the causes of perceived culture clash in communities of the U.S. Northern Forest using mail survey data from four case studies within New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. In contrast to past culture clash research, we consider multiple dimensions of cultural capital that are independent of second home owners' rural or urban origins, and how key aspects of culture compare to economic standing and social interaction as drivers of perceived culture clash. Permanent residents perceive greater levels of culture clash than second home owners, net other measures, indicating that seasonal migration in and of itself encourages notions of otherness between residents. More frequent social interaction between resident groups helps to ameliorate intracommunity tensions. Cultural capital and social interaction measures were equally effective in explaining variation in perceived culture clash. Our findings indicate that the culture clash concept extends beyond scenarios of environmental conflict and applies to more general forms of intergroup tensions.     

Visions and politics in the making of Stockholm's House of Culture: Institutional complexity within extraordinary projects

The aim of the article is to analyse and comprehend the interplay of institutional logics in the realisation of Stockholm's House of Culture, Kulturhuset, hereby beginning to answer the question of what role cultural logics play in cultural development projects. Based on an in-depth case study of the process leading up to the creation of Kulturhuset, the article explores the interplay of a politico-bureaucratic logic and a cultural–professional logic governing the evolution of the project. Following a Scandinavian tradition of interpretative studies of complex development projects, the making of Kulturhuset is framed as an extraordinary project involving a complicated development process. The process dynamics are explored and analysed through the lens of institutional complexity. The article's main contribution lies in its highlighting the interplay of – and nuancing the relation between – institutional logics. It also serves as a reminder of the power of bureaucratic ordering in urban development projects.     

‘It’s like exercise for your soul’: how participation in youth arts activities contributes to young people’s wellbeing

Active participation in organised youth arts activities is generally considered ‘good’ for young peoples’ social and emotional wellbeing. There is, however, less known about how youth arts participation helps to create wellbeing benefits. This paper details a retrospective narrative study that sought to understand not only what wellbeing benefits 17 participants attributed to youth arts activity, but more specifically, how these outcomes occurred. The concept of liminality, within a spaces of wellbeing approach, is used as a framework to explore and understand participant’s stories of their time at Corrugated Iron Youth Arts, in Darwin, Australia. A pattern of transformation involving three phases emerged through an analysis of participant stories. This involved (1) joining in, (2) developing skills and gaining experience, and (3) becoming a ‘real’ performer. These stages have strong resonance with contemporary conceptualisations of liminal experiences, and provide further evidence for the value of youth arts activity as a space for the development of social and emotional wellbeing.     

Curating Inequality: The Link between Cultural Reproduction and Race in the Visual Arts

Although the U.S. population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, research indicates that minority participation in the arts continues to decline. This article addresses the racial disparity of public art museum attendance by examining the role of the art museum curator and the process by which concepts of race are reproduced within the space of the public art museum. Utilizing Bourdieu's theories of cultural reproduction, social space, and symbolic power as a preliminary framework of inquiry, we examine the concept of whiteness as privileged social construct. Through face‐to‐face in‐depth interviews with museum curators, we investigate the means by which the dominant cultural narrative of whiteness is maintained through the preferences, decisions, and social interactions of curators. We draw upon critical white studies, a part of critical race theory, to underline the manner in which whiteness presents itself as a position of dominance. Our findings show that whiteness is maintained through the process of exclusion by presenting the white cultural narrative as both ordinary and invisible.     

Intellectual property and industrialization: legalizing hope in economic growth

This article draws on theoretical resources from economic sociology and sociology of law to intervene in economic debates about the relationship between intellectual property and industrialization. Utilizing historical evidence from the earliest period of American intellectual property law and from a formative company in the New England textile industry, I propose a social process of influence that connects intellectual property law to industrialization. I argue that, consistent with the findings of New Economic Sociology, social relationship structures and social capital are the proximate influential force in industrialization. However, I also argue that transformative changes in those social relationship structures are rooted in the emergence of a particular type of political culture: what I call here, borrowing from Hannah Arendt and Frank Dobbin, a “Natal-Industrial Culture.” A Natal-Industrial Culture, as I propose it here, is a political culture in which collective hopes for the future are placed in new technologies and new cultural products, as means for achieving economic growth. Intellectual property law contributed to the emergence of this new type of political culture by holding out the promise of property, as a reward for the provision of new technologies or new cultural products. Because of the way that hope works on motivation—through cognitive pre-rehearsals of future attainment, which involve semantically-meaningful propositions and contribute to positive emotional experience—the promise of property provided a powerful stimulant to social capital formation. Working through the semantic resonances of property, intellectual property law contributed to a political culture in which invention and creativity were expected to secure a future of growth within the political community, both for particular members and for the political community, as a whole. By fostering a Natal-Industrial Culture, intellectual property law contributed to systematic invention and social capital-formation, leading, in turn, to the transformative changes in working and material provisioning that constitute industrialization.     

A semiotic approach to ‘ethnicity’. An example from Taiwanese ‘Chineseness’

For a few decades, socio-cultural as well as linguistic anthropologists have worked hard to construct a reliable semiotic paradigm to study linguistic, cultural and social interactions. These subfields – linguistic, cultural and social – are often analytically tackled asunder, though they are intimately interconnected, intertwined and overlapping. The semiotic theory of culture is not a novel discovery in itself, but it can also be applied to the study of society and ethnicity. Culture, society and ethnicity are systems of communication, that is systems of signs; society is a system of signs whose meaning emerges from social interactions and ethnicity a system of signs whose meaning is strategically imposed by a specific society through a specific culture. Moreover, those three systems of communication, of signs, are interconnected in various ways. This essay will analyze ‘Taiwanese Ethnicity’ in its semiotic dimension, and explore how society, culture and ethnicity interact in constructing an ethnic identification.     

Clinical sociology between social disease and sociological disease

This essay's aim is to explore the potential for relieving suffering with which clinical sociology can provide social actors. The author carries out a theoretical reflection of culture's function in human societies. Culture is an instrument for social actors, to give a meaning to what is happening at each moment. If culture does not grant an effective interpretation of reality, phenomena of disease can arise. This can happen for many different reasons, such as incoherent cultural representations or conflicts between different cultural issues. The paper outlines the kinds of cultural disease that can occur, as well as the possible causes of each. It also sets a link between cultural disease and the contemporary, general lack of cognitive references, due to historical changes – such as globalization – that have been happening too fast to be fully accepted by all.     

Rethinking the circuit of culture: How participatory culture has transformed cross-cultural communication

This paper explores the influence of digital communication ? and in particular social media ? on cross-cultural communication, based on the Circuit of Culture model. Scholarly literature supports the notion that social media has changed the speed at which we communicate, as well as removed traditional (geographical) boundaries around cross-cultural campaigns. Since the introduction of digital media, the role of the public relations practitioner has become more strategic in order to maintain relevance with even more diverse ? and dispersed ? audiences. Large scale campaigns, like the Human Rights Campaign to support Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) rights, have seen messages spread far beyond the country of origin, and with that, demonstrate the ability to affect advocacy campaigns in other countries. The authors argue that instead of acting as cultural intermediaries, public relations practitioners must become cultural curators, with the skills to create meaning from audiences, who are now content creators in their own rights, and encourage a true participatory environment that sees cultural values shared as part of an organic exchange process.     

Culture and the Confederate flag: Attitudes toward a divisive symbol

The Confederate flag remains a controversial symbol. This article reviews research on attitudes toward the Confederate flag and its public display. In order to better understand the divisiveness of the flag, I outline a historical timeline of the U.S. South and the Confederate flag while emphasizing the association between race and politics within the region. Culture is crucial to this paper because the flag is rooted in cultural constructions of its symbolism, and because opinions toward the flag shed light on the process of cultural change. Overall, this work synthesizes existing research on attitudes and legislative voting patterns focused on the flag and provides a foundation and suggestions for future inquiry into the topic. As a case study analyzing the manner in which “unsettled times” (Swidler, 1986) produce climates conducive to social change, I argue that the Charleston Emanuel AME Church shootings created an opportunity to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds. I conclude by viewing the flag debate within a society that has and continues to perpetuate racial inequities. Future research has the task of analyzing implications of Confederate flag support hopefully leading to the elimination of ideologies that spur racial violence.     

Public space,collective memory and intercultural dialogue in a (UK) city of culture

Using the case study of Derry~Londonderry and its designation as ‘UK City of Culture 2013’, the primary objective of this research paper is to critically analyse the challenges associated with the production of a year-long cultural programme in a culturally and politically divided place. Given that Northern Ireland’s second largest city has been understood in terms of a conflict between ‘two traditions’, Irish/Catholic and British/Protestant, we critically assess the dialogue and policy negotiations with reference to public places as well as representations of collective memory and traditional music during the year. Fieldwork over two years has enabled us to investigate how culture and identity politics are played out in the context of a city undergoing a process of reconciliation. Placing our case study in a strongly comparative context, we argue that cultural concerns are pivotal points of (re-)negotiation in any society transitioning from conflict to ‘peace’ and that this issue, therefore, is of vital concern to academics and policymakers alike internationally.     

Using Arts Activism and Poetry to Catalyze Human Rights Engagement and Reflection

Human rights are fundamental to our global social work profession, and teaching methods must be developed that truly engage students in taking a human rights approach to their work. This paper presents the process of engaging students in arts activism as a strategy for teaching about human rights in social work, and also discusses the catalyzing power of arts activism and poetry therapy to deepen student reflection on human rights. Students' responses to their involvement with One Million Bones—a global arts activism effort to prevent and remediate mass violence—are presented with commentary and interpretation. In this preliminary study, results indicate that arts activism and poetry therapy can work together to promote reflective engagement with human rights.