Ambiguous Territory

Ambiguous Territory
Author: Cathryn Dwyre
Publisher: Actar D, Inc.
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-01-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1638408300

The writers and designers in this collection are among the most thoughtful architects, artists, landscape architects, and theorists working today. The editors organized these essays and works of art and design around three territories: the atmospheric, the biologic, and the geologic. Each cluster of essays is further framed by forewords and afterwords, which draw individual points of view into a larger articulation of what an ambiguous territory might be and how it operates. Ambiguous Territory emerged from a symposium and exhibition held at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2017, and exhibitions at the University of Virginia and Pratt Manhattan Gallery in 2018, and at Ithaca College in 2019. The conversations that arise in this book are inquisitive and critically engaged. They pressure assumptions we routinely make about what constitutes meaningful and principled perspectives in architecture, landscape architecture, and art. Both the texts and the work take on some of the trickiest issues of our time. -- Excerpt from a foreword to the book by Catherine Ingraham Professor, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, Pratt Institute The works in Ambiguous Territory exist in a creative space, in the moody realm of possibilities. It’s a sphere of design in which solutions (or lack thereof) have yet to settle. That should be a familiar feeling for all creative people, whose daily life may include exploring a way out of a problem without being able to nail down an exact answer. This volume belongs in that territory of ambiguity and curiosity, a place where there is room for musings, laughter, and despair. The projects convey, in different ways, a hope for a better future, but also a sense of not knowing if that future is at all possible. -- Excerpt from an afterword to the book by Peder Anker Professor, the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University With Contributions of Ellie Abrons, Paula Gaetano Adi, amid.cero9, Amy Balkin, Philip Beesley, Ursula Biemann, The Bittertang Farm, Edward Burtynsky, Bradley Cantrell, Gustavo Crembil, Brian Davis, Design Earth, Mark Dion, Formlessfinder, Lindsey french, Adam Fure, Futureforms, Michael Geffel, Rania Ghosn, David Gissen, El Hadi Jazairy, Harrison Atelier, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Lisa Hirmer, Catherine Ingraham, Lydia Kallipoliti, Perry Kulper, Sean Lally, Landing Studio, Lateral Office, LCLA, Mark Lindquist, LiquidFactory, Ariane Lourie-Harrison, Meredith Miller, Thom Moran, Ricardo de Ostos, NaJa & deOstos, Nemestudio, Mark Nystrom, OMG / O’Donnell Miller Group, The Open Workshop, Ricardo de Ostos, oOR / Office of Outdoor Research, Jennifer Peeples, pneumastudio, Alessandra Ponte, Office for Political Innovation, Rachele Riley, RVTR, Smout Allen, smudge studio, Neil Spiller, Terreform ONE, Andreas Theodoridis, Unknown Fields, Liam Young, Marina Zurkow

9/11

9/11
Author: David Simpson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2006-05-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0226759393

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a general sense that the world was different—that nothing would ever be the same—settled upon a grieving nation; the events of that day were received as cataclysmic disruptions of an ordered world. Refuting this claim, David Simpson examines the complex and paradoxical character of American public discourse since that September morning, considering the ways the event has been aestheticized, exploited, and appropriated, while “Ground Zero” remains the contested site of an effort at adequate commemoration. In 9/11, Simpson argues that elements of the conventional culture of mourning and remembrance—grieving the dead, summarizing their lives in obituaries, and erecting monuments in their memory—have been co-opted for political advantage. He also confronts those who labeled the event an “apocalypse,” condemning their exploitation of 9/11 for the defense of torture and war. In four elegant chapters—two of which expand on essays originally published in the London Review of Books to great acclaim—Simpson analyzes the response to 9/11: the nationally syndicated “Portraits of Grief” obituaries in the New York Times; the debates over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center towers and the memorial design; the representation of American and Iraqi dead after the invasion of March 2003, along with the worldwide circulation of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs; and the urgent and largely ignored critique of homeland rhetoric from the domain of critical theory. Calling for a sustained cultural and theoretical analysis, 9/11 is the first book of its kind to consider the events of that tragic day with a perspective so firmly grounded in the humanities and so persuasive about the contribution they can make to our understanding of its consequences.

Dangerous Territories

Dangerous Territories
Author: Leslie G. Roman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2013-10-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 113666890X

With the recent conservative retrenchment, educational institutions have witnessed a backlash against the gains made by feminist and antiracist activists. Dangerous Territories examines higher education as one site of this backlash, at the same time challenging the binary framing of discourse as "reactionary" vs. "progressive," or Right vs. Left. Contributors are scholars working within and across a variety of disciplines including law, history, sociology, education, literature, women's studies, queer theory, cultural politics and postcolonialism.

Beyond Sovereign Territory

Beyond Sovereign Territory
Author: Thom Kuehls
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 189
Release:
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1452901597

How should we think about politics in a world where ecological problems - from the deforestation of the Amazon to acid rain - transcend national boundaries? This is the timely and important question addressed by Thom Kuehls in Beyond Sovereign Territory. Contending that the sovereign territorial state is not adequate to contain or describe the boundaries of ecopolitics, the author reorients our thinking about government, nature, and politics. Kuehls argues that changes in technology and the scope of governmental aims have rendered conventional ecological and internationalist aims anachronistic - and ultimately ineffective - in the face of impending environmental collapse. He questions the process by which land is transformed into an object of sovereignty - into "territory" - demonstrating how representations of political space that are premised on territorial sovereignty fail to come to terms with much of what is involved in ecopolitics. Ultimately, Kuehls critiques an orientation that privileges a certain utilitarian relationship between humans and nonhuman nature, one in which the earth is largely interpreted as given to humans. Deeply humanistic and challenging conventional wisdom, Beyond Sovereign Territory will be of interest to readers of environmental politics, geography, international politics, and political theory.

Counter-Statement

Counter-Statement
Author: Kenneth Burke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 254
Release:
Genre:
ISBN:

The Idea of North

The Idea of North
Author: Peter Davidson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2005-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1861895631

While a compass might tell us which direction we are going, there is really only one direction to which it ever points: north. North is the ultimate point of orientation, but it is also a celebrated destination for the adventurous, the curious, the solitary, and the foolhardy. In this fascinating book—updated in this accessible, pocket edition—Peter Davidson explores the concept of “north” through its many manifestations in painting, legend, and literature. Arctic bound, Davidson takes the reader on a journey from the heart of society to the most far-flung outposts of human geography, packing in our rucksacks a treasure trove of stories and artworks, from the Icelandic Sagas to Nabokov’s snowy kingdom of Zembla, from Hans Christian Andersen’s forbidding Snow Queen to the works of artists such as Eric Ravilious, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Andy Goldsworthy. He celebrates the different ways our artists and writers have illuminated our relationship with the earth’s most dangerous and austere terrain. Through Davidson’s astonishing but inviting erudition, we ultimately come to see north as a permanent goal, frozen forever on a horizon we never seem to quite reach.

Parallel Lines

Parallel Lines
Author: Guy Westwell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2014-10-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231850727

Parallel Lines describes how post-9/11 cinema, from Spike Lee's 25th Hour (2002) to Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (2012), relates to different, and competing, versions of US national identity in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The book combines readings of individual films (World Trade Center, United 93, Fahrenheit 9/11, Loose Change) and cycles of films (depicting revenge, conspiracy, torture and war) with extended commentary on recurring themes, including the relationship between the US and the rest of the world, narratives of therapeutic recovery, questions of ethical obligation. The volume argues that post-9/11 cinema is varied and dynamic, registering shock and upheaval in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, displaying capacity for critique following the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal mid-decade, and seeking to reestablish consensus during Obama's troubled second term of office.

Hearings

Hearings
Author: United States. Congress. House
Publisher:
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1941
Genre:
ISBN:

Outlaw Territories

Outlaw Territories
Author: Felicity D. Scott
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2016-05-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1935408798

Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency traces the relations of architecture and urbanism to forms of human unsettlement and territorial insecurity during the 1960s and ’70s. Investigating a set of responses to the growing urban unrest in the developed and developing worlds, Outlaw Territories revisits an era when the discipline of architecture staked out a role in global environmental governance and the biopolitical management of populations. Felicity D. Scott demonstrates how architecture engaged the displacement of persons brought on by migration, urbanization, environmental catastrophe, and warfare, and at the same time how it responded to the material, environmental, psychological, and geopolitical transformations brought on by postindustrial technologies and neoliberal capitalism after World War II. At the height of the US–led war in Vietnam and Cambodia, and ongoing decolonization struggles in many parts of the world, architecture not only emerged as a target of political agitation on account of its inherent normativity but also became heavily imbricated within military, legal, and humanitarian apparatuses, and scientific and technological research dedicated to questions of international management and security. Once architecture became aligned with a global matrix of forces concerned with the environment, economic development, migration, genocide, and war, its conventional role did not remain unchallenged but shifted at times toward providing strategic expertise for institutions responding to transformations born of neoliberal capitalism. Outlaw Territories interrogates this nexus, and questions how and to what ends architecture and the environment came to be intimately connected to the expanded exercise of power within shifting geopolitical frameworks of this time.