This week’s Reader Advisor reflects on the state of law enforcement in our country. As I write this on Friday afternoon I am having a hard time finding any value, context, or urgency in my perspective as a white American. Instead I am going to step aside and let the links speak for themselves. To start, a poem by June Jordan via The Poetry Foundation.
Read MoreThe “way markers” come, as one would expect, from Tobias’s visceral responses to his walk along the path and are designed to tickle your ears, nose, and skin, as well as your brain. You experience more than you see, depending on the weather and how open you are that day.
Read MoreThe creation of “spaces” is an often-invoked mechanism in cultural documents, reports, and applications. It is a quick and effective literary tool that helps illustrate project benefits that might not be easily accounted for or evaluated. This turn of phrase also nicely references the most current and prominent tactic (or buzzword) within non-profit community cultural engineering called “placemaking,” which describes efforts that seek to revitalize communities through the reinvention and reorientation of public spaces. Taking a longer consideration of “space creation” has led me to this week’s links. Specifically, how do we effect our environments through actions alone? Can a physical space be altered by non-physical means? These questions plus more in this week’s Reader Advisor.
Read MoreHappy Fourth of July from all of us at Artblog! May all your hotdogs be sizzling and your s’mores runny and sweet. — Love, Roberta and the Artblog Team
Read MoreWhat will the future bring? Will it be bliss or apocalypse? Imagining the future has always been a means of actively processing the history of the present. In 1895, H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine critiqued labor and class conditions of the day by transporting his protagonist to a future ruled by bloodthirsty proletariat mutants feeding off the waifish decedents of the aristocracy. In the racially charged climate of 1966, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek envisioned a future where the races worked side by side to seek out new civilizations and new sexual conquests. Perhaps most strikingly of all, in the 1980s and ’90s Octavia Butler provided an alternative to the stagnantly white male visions of the future and created stories that were sculpted by the past and current oppression of women and blacks. So for this week’s Reader Advisor I offer few links that examine how we shape the future and how our projections shape the here and now.
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