{"id":272,"date":"2012-12-31T10:03:45","date_gmt":"2012-12-31T14:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/crdirector\/?p=272"},"modified":"2019-04-16T12:56:00","modified_gmt":"2019-04-16T16:56:00","slug":"curating-the-performing-artsmontreal-revitalizing-american-studiesnewark-improving-quality-of-life-in-south-africastellenbosch-by-neil-baldwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2012\/12\/31\/curating-the-performing-artsmontreal-revitalizing-american-studiesnewark-improving-quality-of-life-in-south-africastellenbosch-by-neil-baldwin\/","title":{"rendered":"Curating performing arts\/Montreal, revitalizing American Studies\/Newark, improving quality of life in South Africa\/Stellenbosch – by Neil Baldwin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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[One of the many benefits of running a virtual interdisciplinary Center like the CRC<\/a> <\/strong>is the ‘news and views’<\/em> we receive from our diverse listserv friends around the nation and the world. This month, we chose just three<\/em> recent notices to bring to the wider attention of our readership. \u00a0We were impressed by the intensity of mission, ambition of subject-matter, and breadth of constituencies. Click on the links below — and let us know what you think. creative@montclair.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

Envisioning<\/strong> the Practice: Montreal International Symposium on Curating the Performing Arts, April 2014.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

ACAQ<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0[Montreal Association of Arts Curators] is organizing its first symposium,\u00a0Envisioning the Practice:\u00a0<\/em>Montr\u00e9al International Symposium on Curating the Performing Arts<\/em>, April 10-13, 2014.<\/p>\n

The symposium will be hosted by the\u00a0PHI Centre<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Facult\u00e9 des arts<\/em>\u00a0of the\u00a0Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al (UQAM)<\/em>, Montreal (Canada).<\/p>\n

Envisioning the Practice\u00a0<\/em>strives to create further parameters and grounds on which to foster theories and critical thinking about the practice of curating the performing arts through the presentation, discussion and publication of academic papers on related topics.<\/p>\n

This symposium brings together proponents of recent critical and practice-based discourses on curating the performing arts (dance\/movement, \u00e9mergent practices, interdisciplinary forms, media arts, music\/sound, theater\/text-based) in order to enrich, structure and theorize the practice of curating in the field, with an interest in best practices.<\/p>\n

Over the last 40 years, there have been numerous events, publications and graduate university programs dedicated to examining the role and deepening the knowledge base of professional curators in the visual arts. However, curators of the performing arts \u2013 who variously call themselves presenters, programmers, artistic directors, producers, diffuseurs,<\/em> cultural agents and more — have been missing from these developments. In recent years there has been considerable momentum generating through formal and informal conversations on the subject of curating in the performing arts, aiming to flesh out issues about the practice. A first collection of texts, for instance, \u201cCurating Performing Arts\u201d was edited and published in 2010 by\u00a0Frakcija Performing Arts Journal #55\u00a0<\/em>in Croatia. Two exploratory meetings of artists and arts presenters were organized in North America and Europe:\u00a0 \u201cThe Culture of Curation\u201d<\/em> in Toronto, Canada in 2010 by the Canadian Association of Performing Arts Presenters<\/em>, and \u201cBeyond Curating: strategies of knowledge transfer in dance, performance and visual arts\u201d held in Essen, Germany in 2011 by Tanzplan Essen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As well as these specific conferences and publication, over the years an increasing number of international performing arts marketplace events have included conferences, roundtables and discussion opportunities that sometimes move towards consideration of the vocation of the performing arts presenters. \u00a0A premiere graduate programme Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance<\/em> (ICPP) at Wesleyan University (U.S.A.) began in 2011.<\/p>\n

Building on these previous advancements, \u201cEnvisioning the Practice: Montr\u00e9al International Symposium on Curating the Performing Arts\u201d<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 strives to create further parameters and grounds on which to foster theories about the practice of curating the performing arts. This symposium seeks to bring together recent discourses on curating the performing arts (dance\/movement, music\/sound, theatre\/text-based, interdisciplinary, media arts and emergent practices) in order to enrich, structure and theorize possibilities of curating in the field, with an interest in \u201cbest practices\u201d.<\/p>\n

To identify shared critical curatorial methods among practitioners, artists and institutions and to devise new territories for expanding the practice, the symposium will present current research and critical thinking on topics related to curating the performing arts.<\/p>\n

Curators(institutional, independent, artist-curators, critic-curators, among others), artists, artistic directors, programmers, presenters, producers, scholars, art administrators, art historians, art critics, independent scholars and graduate students are invited to submit proposals.<\/p>\n

For more information, go here<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>or email Symposium Planning Committee co-chair Dena Davida: dena@tangente.qc.ca<\/a><\/p>\n

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‘Battlegrounds’ in Newark\/Challenging Modes of Oppression: The American Studies Graduate Student Conference April 2013.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n
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It is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is.\u00a0<\/strong>Where a battle has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>\u2013 Henry David Thoreau, A Week on Concord and Merrimack Rivers<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Rutgers University American Studies Graduate Program seeks papers for its upcoming conference \u201cBattlegrounds.\u201d<\/strong> Even as \u201cbattlegrounds\u201d implies a divisive undertaking\u2013\u2013a material or rhetorical cleavage, or even an academic violence between fields, ideas and scholars\u2013\u2013we encourage subverting oppositions that only serve to reify the modes of oppression they challenge. Thus, we embrace intersectionality, affect theory, post-humanism, borderlands studies, and other realms of interdisciplinary\u00a0inquiry. To limit this conference and conversation to a single discipline or intellectual approach would be to undermine the very nature of \u201cthe battleground\u201d as a multi-ocular and multi-modal space.<\/p>\n

Interested graduate students should submit a 300-400 word abstract by\u00a0January 7th, 2013<\/strong>\u00a0along with your name and department. Please send submissions as a PDF attachment to\u00a0battlegrounds2012@gmail.com.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

We will inform selected presenters by January 31st, 2013.<\/p>\n

This conference will approach battlegrounds in the following contexts:<\/p>\n

Cities: <\/strong>Post-industrial and global cities are battleground spaces. The geographic home of this conference, Newark, has long been made visible as a battleground. Both the events of 1967 and the histories of industrial pollution have marked Newark as such. The project of neoliberal urban renewal of which Newark is today a fragile example now reorganizes and sublates that history through a new securitization of the city, a total collapse of public and private logics of \u201cdevelopment,\u201d a deployment of superpanoptic technologies of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment, and state-sponsored gentrification.<\/p>\n

Weather:<\/strong> Recent weather-related events such as Hurricane Sandy, the Colorado Wildfires, and the 2011 T\u014dhoku earthquake and tsunami remind us that issues of \u201cclimate change\u201d and \u201cclimate science\u201d are often contextualized through the rhetoric of \u201cbattle.\u201d What are the ramifications of couching terms like \u201cclimate\u201d and \u201cweather\u201d within the discourse of \u201cbattle?\u201d How have battles related to climate, weather, and the \u201cecological\u201d been waged in physical space? How have they been made manifest in political, social, economic ideology and policy?<\/p>\n

Digital Culture<\/strong>: Physical \u201cbattlegrounds\u201d are still hallowed ground to some in our country\u2013\u2013 commemorations are held, souvenirs are sold. \u00a0The technoscientific invitations of a digital age, however, radically reconfigure what counts as \u201ccultural production\u201d altogether. \u00a0How are today\u2019s culture wars fought on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube? Are the Culture Wars over? Is using that term even appropriate? Or, are the Cultural Wars entering a new phase that is related to digital technology? What is to be done when divergent, battling groups see their \u201cculture\u201d as increasingly dominant precisely because of their choice of media? The technoscientific innovations of the digital age have seemingly calcified divergent \u201ccultural\u201d groups into even more oppositional categories. Groups of varying political persuasions are able to mobilize using the cultural edifices of sites such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. Yet older technologies like TV and Radio still garner frenzied listeners as well. How might \u201ccultural production\u201d be re-conceived so that we may at once classify the divergent groups by both their physical and electronic presence?<\/p>\n

Gender & \u00a0Sexuality:<\/strong> The presidential election cycle is a reminder of the ways in which the bodies of women are made available for circulation between male subjects in a phallocentric political structure. \u00a0The \u201cbattle\u201d over access to birth control and abortion rights is being reformed along new tactical lines as the administrative state takes an increased regulatory role in a healthcare system whose growth remains one of the largest reliable engines of the economy. At the same time, other bodies become differently a battleground: transgender youth deploy their own counter-tactics to survive schools in the shadow of the newly protected white, gay male body of the teen bullying and suicide \u201cepidemics\u201d of the United States.<\/p>\n

Race<\/strong>: In the twilight of the first-term of a presidency in a so-called \u201cpost-racial\u201d era the call to examine the battlegrounds constitutive of and constituted by race and racialization becomes ever more urgent. \u00a0Certain contemporary battlegrounds are explicitly marked as racialized: mass incarceration, the erosion of affirmative action, new technologies of immigration, surveillance, detention and deportation; yet, others are not: the obesity \u201cepidemic,\u201d the dismantling of the welfare state, and the State promotion of gay marriage.<\/p>\n

Transnationalism, the State, & Globality<\/strong>: America\u2019s hegemonic positions in flows of transnational violence, war and capital, are more complicated than ever. \u00a0Where does the threshold between a \u201cforeign\u201d and \u201cdomestic\u201d conflict begin and end? At the deployment of occupying armies and bases around the world? At the racialization of sexuality through the regulation of the bodies of Black and Latina women in domestic welfare reform? At the new frontier of NGO-governance funded by the United States to replace the postcolonial state? What is the structure of American discourses of battle and struggle on the contemporary international scale?<\/p>\n

To learn more about The Rutgers University American Studies Program, go here<\/a><\/strong> \u00a0or email Sara Grossman, sargross@andromeda.rutgers.edu<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A Case Study from the Global South: \u00a0‘The iShack Project’ to Improve the Quality of Life in Stellenboch, South Africa [An Ongoing Transdisciplinary Conversation.]<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n
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Enkanini\u00a0<\/strong>is an informal settlement of about 8,000 people located in the vicinity of Stellenbosch University, South Africa.\u00a0 Small shacks, water sanitation challenges, poverty, lack of electricity characterize this informal settlement as does its tight social networks, groups and religious organizations.\u00a0 As part of their doctoral training in transdisciplinary research, PhD students at Stellenbosch work with colleagues across disciplines and Enkanini inhabitants in order to strengthen the local capacity to improve living conditions. The students\u2019 task is to employ disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiry approaches to meet their development goals in sustainable ways. Working in Enkanini where actors have not yet organized in rational and democratic institutions reveals the need for new approaches to local engagement, transdisciplinary knowledge construction and development work. This case study documents the Enkanini initiative. It outlines the project\u2019s context and goals; the composition of working team and recruited forms of expertise; key moments and challenges in the project\u2019s life as well as emerging lessons and challenges.\u00a0 A concrete instance of transdisciplinary research in a developing country and a training ground for researchers employing transdisciplinary approaches, the case provides a common ground for deliberation around two questions:<\/div>\n
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Question one:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 How might current conceptions of transdisciplinary research be enriched through the lessons learned from developing contexts where rational democratic practices and institutions are only emerging?<\/p>\n

Question two<\/em>:\u00a0<\/strong> What lessons can be drawn from the case to address the challenge of preparing masters and doctoral candidates to conduct research that is at once rigorous and responsible and able to address problems of our time\u2014e.g. from poverty to climate change to the protection of universal human rights?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

State of the Art: THE CONTEXT<\/strong><\/p>\n

Approximately 25% of South African urban households live in informal structures of various kinds, despite a massive house building program put in place by the South African government since 1994. In recent years, a new housing policy introduced by the government, called Breaking New Ground: A Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Sustainable Human Settlements (commonly referred to now as BNG), shifted the emphasis from building new structures in greenfield sites on the urban peripheries to the \u201cincremental in situ upgrading\u201d of informal settlements where they are more or less currently located. It was envisioned that this Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme (UISP) would move the focus away from building housing units to addressing the need for more integrated sustainable human settlements. However, the shack dwellers in line for incremental upgrading often wait an average of no less than eight years before the electricity and water grid is installed. One such informal settlement is Enkanini, located within walking distance of the center of Stellenbosch, which is a town of nearly 200 000 people located 40 minutes by road from Cape Town. Enkanini is a growing informal settlement, currently home to about 8000 people. It is a proper illegal settlement and un-serviced, unlike most of Cape Town\u2019s settlements that are legal informal, or legal serviced with shacks. Its location on a steep slope has made it an unlikely candidate for the upgrading programme because of the engineering difficulties involved. Any provision of services would come at a high cost, and neither the municipality nor the poverty-stricken inhabitants have any incentive to press for upgrading. As such, Enkanini presented an opportunity for a project group from the University of Stellenbosch and the Sustainability Institute to test the idea of an alternative trajectory for incremental upgrading with ecological design, in particular with energy, sanitation and waste technologies. Using an ecological design approach, the iShack project<\/strong> based in Stellenbosch developed an approach that provides shack dwellers with immediate solutions that can improve their lives before electricity and water grids are installed. The iShack project, the focal point of this case, is one of three related innovations in Enkanini. The other two projects addressed sanitation issues and social processes of social mobilization and institution building respectively.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[One of the many benefits of running a virtual interdisciplinary Center like the CRC is the ‘news and views’ we receive from our diverse listserv friends around the nation and the world. This month, we chose just three recent notices to bring to the wider attention of our readership. \u00a0We were impressed by the intensity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,7,9,10,11],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-director-s-essay","tag-american-studies","tag-environment","tag-performing-arts","tag-qualty-of-life","tag-social-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1077,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/1077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}