[Commlist] Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 5.2 published

Intellect is delighted to announce that the Journal of Urban Cultural 
Studies 5.2 is now available! For more information about the issue, 
click here >> https://bit.ly/2QF7tI8

Special Issue: World-making in Urban Cultural Studies

Contents

Making worlds in urban cultural studies
Authors: Carolyn Birdsall and Simone Kalkman

In this editorial, we explore the relevance of the concepts of worlding 
and world-making within the context of urban cultural studies. We ask 
how cultural practices make worlds and how these practices are in turn 
worlded, with particular attention to the diverse forms that the urban 
(as a ‘global’ phenomenon) takes across the world and fact that academic 
research itself should be considered a form of worlding. In doing so, 
three focal points come to the fore. The first is the importance of 
so-called ‘elite dreams’ and their messy and contested relation with 
worlding practices from below. Second, we emphasize the need to examine 
the social, political and economic contexts in which cultural objects 
are created, distributed and received – which calls for an 
interdisciplinary approach. Third, we focus on historical differences 
and the need for longer-term perspectives within scholarly research, 
considering how particular cultural practices are preserved and remembered.

The beach as microcosm of a cosmopolitan city: Imagining and 
experiencing urban encounters at Trieste’s Pedocin beach
Authors: Milou van Hout

This article focuses on the nature of beaches as places of urban 
encounters, critically examining the cosmopolitanized discourse of 
Trieste’s urban identity by exploring the dynamics of urban 
‘world-making’ at Trieste’s Pedocin beach. The analysis focuses on the 
ways in which the recent documentary L’Ultima Spiaggia (The Last Resort) 
(Anastopoulos and Del Degan, 2016) moves away from the poetic elite 
imaginations that have fashioned cultural narratives of Trieste. The 
film represents a cosmopolitan experience, which, for Trieste’s 
beachgoers, is not enclosed in the moment of encounter with diversity 
and the other. Cosmopolitanism, here, is rather the individual capacity 
to live between the overlapping urban realities that the triestini 
inhabit, and yet within their own internal moment.

(Re)Addressing Mostar: Global imaginaries, local activisms
Authors: Giulia Carabelli

This article examines how artistic interventions in public space become 
worlding practices that challenge established, global representations of 
cities. Focusing on Mostar, an ethnically divided city in Bosnia and 
Herzegovina, the essay contrasts the global representation of the city 
as intolerant and uncooperative to the worlding practices of Abart, a 
collective whose art interventions make visible moments of solidarity 
among supposedly antagonistic actors. Through the mobilization of 
Lefebvre’s core concepts of the production of space and heterotopia, 
this article explores how Abart navigates global funding streams through 
the re-appropriation of donors’ vocabulary as a means of countering 
their dominant narratives that limit the very potentials of urban 
activism. Thus, Mostar’s network of activists constitutes a significant 
example of grassroots actors critically intervening into the ‘art of 
being global’.

Of ‘Godziners’ and ‘Designer Citizens’: The emergence of designers as 
political subjects in Cape Town
Authors: Laura Nkula-Wenz

Over the course of 2011, the City of Cape Town bid for, and eventually 
won the title of World Design Capital 2014. This article discusses how 
the ‘idea of design’ emerged as a new governmental rationality and mode 
of subjectivation, positing the local ‘design community’ as an 
indispensable macro-actor of local development and policy production. It 
unpacks the various (self-)ascriptions and socio-economic aspirations 
pinned to the notion of design and its actionable subjectivity, the 
designer. While recognizing that the idea of design has raised hopes for 
innovative solutions that could help to address Cape Town’s most 
pervasive urban challenges, the article ultimately questions whether 
real change ‘by design’ can be attained without designers acknowledging 
and (self-)critically engaging with the political dimension of their work.

Bourgeois worlds and urban nightmares: The post-Ottoman Balkan City 
through the lens of Milutin Uskoković’s Newcomers
Authors: Miloš Jovanović

In the nineteenth century, the bourgeois elites of newly minted national 
capitals Belgrade and Sofia sought to produce ‘European’ urban space, 
their first step on a path to industrial modernity and a new 
relationship with the world. When such designs failed, their execution 
left real, devastating material consequences. This article explores the 
underside of elite dreams through Milutin Uskoković’s Newcomers (1910). 
Set in 1906 Belgrade, the novel’s tragic form emphasizes the futility of 
bourgeois aspirations on the periphery of global capital. I expand on 
such themes through archival sources, which consistently describe the 
post-Ottoman city as a landscape of dispossession. Ultimately, I argue 
that urban modernity has historically been informed by failed elite 
dreams and their resulting urban nightmares, particularly in spaces 
off-centre to capitalist flows.

Favelas at the biennale: Exhibiting Brazilian informality in Europe
Authors: Simone Kalkman

Brazilian favelas have become world-famous through representations in 
cinema, tourism and art. This article discusses engagements with 
Brazilian favelas in art and architecture, focusing on the 2016 Venice 
Biennale of Architecture. This exhibition is analysed as a practice of 
worlding, focusing on how artists and curators transform favelas into 
objects to be seen, experienced and thought about. The article shows 
that the incorporation of favelas into European art contexts is 
inextricably related, first, to imaginaries of Brazilian nationality 
and, second, to the idea that the global North can learn from favelas. 
Building on this, I argue that ethical and epistemological questions are 
inextricably intertwined when exhibiting Brazilian favelas in Europe, 
which implies recognizing the complicity of academic research in this 
process of knowledge production.

Urban encounters: Performance and making urban worlds
Authors: Dan Swanton

This article develops how urban encounters have been theorized and 
mobilized across the social sciences to emphasize the ordinary and 
unspectacular ways in which people live together in cities in response 
to widespread talk of a crisis of multiculturalism. Situated in the 
contact zone between social science disciplines and arts practice, the 
article argues for performative and more political theorizations of 
spaces of encounter. Focusing on photographer Mahtab Hussain’s project 
You Get Me? (2017), the article examines how photographic portraits 
offer one example of a performative encounter that takes up as a 
position in the politics of lived experience by carving out spaces where 
difference might be encountered in new ways, and by challenging viewers 
to imagine and enact new ways of being-in-common.

Seeing the self in the world: Attending to banal globalism in urban 
visual cultures
Authors: Simon Ferdinand

Urban visual cultures are permeated by images of the global earth. From 
environmentalist posters presenting fragile whole earths, to logos that 
brand international corporations, these visual figures have dissolved 
into the scarcely scrutinized backdrop of everyday practice. This short 
article underlines the significance of this ‘banal globalism’ as the 
condition in which global discourses shape identities and frame 
experience in ways that elude conscious disputation. It indicates two 
complexities surrounding banal globalism. First I stress how the 
inconspicuousness and seeming triviality of banal global images exceed 
critical approaches based on the concentrated reading of visual objects. 
Then I indicate how such focused analysis can uncover rich and strange 
global visions that might otherwise be overlooked as part of the 
quotidian urban backdrop.

Defiant worldings from Manchester, England: Expulsed global solidarities 
and the international homeland of dignity
Authors: Cornelia Gräbner

This article explores contemporary material and affective traces of two 
instances of global solidarity in Manchester, England. The first is a 
letter sent to Abraham Lincoln by an assembly of Manchester citizens in 
December 1862, assuring Lincoln of their unwavering support for the 
struggle for the freedom of all despite the cotton famine’s effect on 
those assembled. The second instance refers to the multi-faceted 
practices of solidarity with the Spanish Republic and the International 
Brigades. Drawing on Stephen D’Arcy’s ‘language of the unheard’ and 
Ananya Roy’s ‘civic governmentality’, and on commemorative traces in 
Manchester’s topography, the article reflects on how ‘defiant worldings’ 
are commemorated, subordinated and/or marginalized but also how the 
spirit of egalitarian, anti-racist and anti-fascist defiance is 
remembered and kept alive.

Mobile worlding: Exploring the trans-urban circulation and the 
interconnectedness of migrants’ urban world-making practices
Authors: Luce Beeckmans

This short-form article considers the concept of ‘mobile worlding’ in 
relation to migrants’ world-making practices. Yet, instead of the 
conventional focus on the transnational cultural exchange between 
migrants’ home and host countries, this article theorizes the 
trans-urban circulation and interconnectedness of migrants’ urban 
world-making practices across cities in Europe. It reflects on how 
migrants’ urban world-making practices may be conceptualized as 
‘practices of citation and reference in a world of inter-connected 
urbanism’ or a ‘mobile urbanism’ from below (McCann et al. and McCann 
and Ward). In this article, examples of urban world-making practices of 
African diaspora are discussed, highlighting the author’s own research 
on religious place-making in European cities, as well as other instances 
of ‘mobile worlding’ that are not yet conceptualized as such, for 
instance hip-hop and fashion.
---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------