Perpetual Peace Project is organized by the Slought Foundation, based on Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Contribution to Political Science (1795). The project “is a two-year initiative of the European Union National Institutes of Culture’s ‘Series in New European Manifestos,’ which re-revisits and re-writes European political texts that have profoundly shaped our modern world.” Kant […]
Women Hold Up Half the Sky
A number of friends have read the book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. There’s also a movement by that name. The book was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine recently, which is where I first learned of it. Then my friend Carol interviewed […]
Loss within Loss
Last night I sat listening to the New Orleans Hot 8 Brass Band play “St. James Infirmary.” While I sat there I felt inconsolable about the losses experienced recently by friends, strangers, and acquaintances. This has been a particularly hard summer and fall for many in this community. Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age […]
Community Informatics as “Activist” Social Informatics
Larry Stillman of Monash University wrote the original drafts on community informatics for Wikipedia. He just posted this comment to the “ciresearchers” listserv: “From my perspective, SI [social informatics] is more the academic study of social uses of technology, but CI [community informatics] is much more an activist approach of ICTs for social change and […]
Guerilla Art Action Group
Temporary Services (TS)–through Half-Letter Press–has been producing wonderful little booklets of interviews, which now number five. One of the “Temporary Conversations” was with Jean Toche of the Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG). Formed in 1969 and enduring through 1976, GAAG consisted of Jean Toche, Jon Hendricks, and Poppy Johnson, with occasional others. The bright orange […]
Every Body! Again
Artist Bonnie Fortune, organizer and curator of the exhibit “Every Body!,” asked some of us to reflect on these questions, or similar ones: How feminist health movements challenge/change the images of women and/or men and health? Where do you think the visual representation of bodies in feminist health movements needs to go, and/ or the new concerns they must grapple with? […]
Every Body! Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009
Artist Bonnie Fortune is tremendous (she’s shown above on the right, with another tremendous artist, Heather Ault)! She conceptualized, organized, and raised funds to produce a two-city, multi-event extravaganza called Every Body! This past week I have gotten the flier for the public performance of Terri Kapsalis’s “The Hysterical Alphabet,” and the flier for the […]
Aim High
I have been obsessing about this challenge today. This photo, taken by a student in a first-year class that I am co-teaching, captures it well. There’s the goal on a pole, but the pole is rusty and without a top. The conflict I feel is that the efforts I and many others make to “engage” […]
The Big Neighborhood Supper
About 25 of us gathered on a fairly warm and humid August evening to enjoy The Big Neighborhood Supper. Artist Maggie Taylor worked hard all summer to collaboratively organize workshops , conceptualize a group gathering around local food and drink, and produce a meal in a lovely setting. She pulled it off, and then some! […]
Nina Simon on “It Is What It Is”
Here’s a thoughtful post by Nina Simon on her “Museum 2.0” blog that digs into the quandaries and challenges of “conversational art.” Her focus is Jeremy Deller‘s interactive installation on the Iraq War, “It Is What It Is.”
