Art and Motion: Shen Yuan’s Transcultural Aesthetics

2013

Processes resulting from and in turn (re-)shaping translocal connectivities and entanglements in economic, political and cultural contexts have significant impacts upon the social dynamics within and between the groups involved.1 Thus they also affect the everyday lives of people. While such processes undoubtedly have a long historical dimension, they have intensified since European colonial expansion and industrialisation and acquired new dimensions »globalisation« processes since the late decades of the 20th century.2 First steamers, railways, telegraph and telephone rapidly in creased the speed, quantity and quality of travel and communication; then a further shift accompanied the invention and mass production of aeroplanes, computers and mobile phones. Yet we must be cautious not to ascribe too mono-centric a position to overarching Western paradigms and narratives of (first) an expansive imperial agenda, i.e. seeking to extend one’s own markets and political terrains at the cos...

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2012

America is founded on myths of mobility.. .. Yet the Asian American has been conspicuously absent in existing generalist formulations of a presumably universally applicable theory of American mobility.. .. What, in their works, are the spatial expressions of the Asian American's "place" in the overall social structure?-Sau-ling Cynthia Wong 1 The spread of border-crossing Internet technology highlights the vexed positioning of Asian Americans visà-vis the U.S. nation-state and their uncertain relationship to the notion of diaspora.-Rachel Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong 2 In her 2003 introduction with Rachel Lee to their co-edited critical anthology, Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong draws critical attention to the implications of the formation of an Asian American "diasporic community" in cyberspace. "If diasporic community is not an oxymoron," propose Wong and Lee, "then we must consider how virtual media might be more seamlessly adopted by ethnically or racially defined communities whose geographical proximity

Tempo Social, 2018

As a concept, mobility captures the common impression that one’s lifeworld is in flux, with not only people, but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. The scholarly literature is replete with metaphors trying to describe (perceived) altered spatial and temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and scapes; time-space compression, distantiation, or punctuation; the network society and its space of flows; the death of distance and the acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. Scholars have used figures of mobile people, too, from nomads to pilgrims, to describe both self and other in the social sciences and humanities for a long time. Taking the societal implications of various forms of mobility seriously and not as a given, the critical discussion of mobility concepts and figures presented here helps us to assess the analytical purchase of the conceptual perspective of mobility studies to normalize movement within the single category of “mobility.”

Contemporaneity : Mobility and Exchange, 2021

2018

This short paper will just try and pick apart a couple of examples to reveal how mobilities are both differentiated and differentiate among people. That is they are both a function of social status but also help enact social status. Slightly against the implication above I will also show that it is not just that digital is fast and materials mo0ving are slow, but rather that all speeds depend upon material things that come to shape them, and that all forms of movment increasingly interact with forms of data and informational realms. For the sake of symmetry the paper will look at two flows of people each of around 220 persons per year: the movement of the ‘floating population’ of migrant workers in China, and the mass tourism market of the Mediterranean. In so doing with will ask about how we think about ‘dwelling’ in a mobile world – what changes with our senses of self and place as the world is on the move. It will look at the assemblage of materials, media and bodies that enables...

The Routledge handbook of mobilities, 2013

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2019

This article examines how contemporary media art and popular culture, vernacular cultural practices, and digital technologies express and actualize aspirations for global mobility. This task is propelled by the need to question the limited scope of how we envision globalization. Here I explore how people use forms of visual media to “perform the global” through mediated experiences of mobility. I propose the concept of “virtual cosmopolitans” to describe those who participate in the experience of global citizenship through their use of photography, film, and digital media. Although they do not have access to conventional forms of cosmopolitan mobility, these virtual cosmopolitans find ways to envision or simulate cosmopolitan experiences by inserting themselves into the global imaginary via mediated networks of images. This article discusses how these virtual cosmopolitans participate in the discourse and experience of globalization, and considers ways to manifest and actualize cosmopolitan desires through vernacular forms of media. I focus on two documentary films that engage with the photographic medium to consider diverse forms of mediated mobility: Born into Brothels (Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, 2004) and City of Photos (Nishtha Jain, 2005). Although both films illustrate how disadvantaged subjects in contemporary Indian society negotiate their desires of mobility, they propose different ways to assert their identity as a cosmopolitan, deploying varying levels of imagination. This discussion illustrates how marginalized subjects engage with global forces in local spaces by cultivating media literacy and demonstrating creative uses of visual media.

Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2007

In his book On the Move, cultural geographer Tim Cresswell (2006) argues that mobility has become a powerful concept both in everyday life and in contemporary social thought. In daily life mobility is an embodied activity, and physical movement is obviously integral to the way in which the world is experienced. In an era of globalisation, however, contemporary conceptualisations of mobility have extended beyond the idea of movement as a literal, embodied activity. Cresswell argues that mobility should be recognised as a political concept that is informed by very specific world-views and ideological commitments. He argues that there are, broadly speaking, two interrelated ways of thinking about mobility. On the one hand, mobility is 'connected to civilisation, progress and freedom', a metaphor for social change and a symbol of subaltern power. On the other, mobility is associated with deviance, perceived as a threat to social cohesion and an impediment to the ideal of community and belonging (Cresswell, 2006, p. 37). However construed, mobility has become a metaphor and a contemporary structure of feeling that informs both thought and action. Discussions about drama that take place in educational and community settings frequently invoke the concept of mobility, however implicitly. Negotiating movement between belonging and dispossession, stability and flexibility, localism and internationalism, roots and routes, for example, has preoccupied many authors who have published in this journal. Following immediately after the special edition 'On Site and Place', I should like to suggest that the concept of mobility provides an interesting way of thinking about the debates included in this edition. The metaphor of mobility is related to the dynamic of social intervention, where traditional beliefs are unsettled and values are reconfigured. It also points to the possibility of personal change, where theatre's liveness and activity narrates shifting identities, as an embodied process of becoming. Both Kennedy C. Chinyowa and Asma Mundrawala are, in different ways, concerned with how theatre for development mobilises individuals and communities. The interventionist programmes they describe share an interest in harnessing theatre to social change. For Kennedy Chinyowa, analysing the creative methods of theatremakers in Southern Africa provides a way of reconceptualising community engagement and activity in programmes about sexual health. The contribution of development experts that Chinyowa identifies in this practice is explicitly orientated towards fostering partnerships with local communities and their use of popular forms of performance is designed to support the kind of critical dialogue that encourages individual and social change. Asma Mundrawala offers a critique of the work of travelling theatre companies in Pakistan that have addressed issues of honour killing and forced marriages in their work. Mundrawala raises questions about the

2007

This article takes point of departure in the challenges to understand the importance of contemporary mobility. The approach advocated is a cross-disciplinary one drawing on sociology, geography, urban planning and design, and cultural studies. As such the perspective is to be seen as a part of the so-called 'mobility turn' within social science. The perspective is illustrative for the research efforts at the Centre for Mobility and Urban Studies (C-MUS), Aalborg University. The article presents the contours of a theoretical perspective meeting the challenges to research into contemporary urban mobilities. In particular the article discusses 1) the physical city, its infrastructures and technological hardware/software, 2) policies and planning strategies for urban mobility and 3) the lived everyday life in the city and the region.