Browsing by Subject "Dialogical"
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Item Digging through time: psychogeographies of occupation(2015-12) Simblist, Noah Leon; Reynolds, Ann Morris; El-Ariss, Tarek; Mulder, Stephennie; Di-Capua, Yoav; Flaherty, GeorgeThis dissertation is about the relationship between contemporary art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Specifically, I look at the ways that artists have dealt with the history of this region and its impact on the present, using four moments as the subject of the following chapters: ancient Palestine, the Holocaust, The nakba, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The historiographical impulse has a particular resonance for artists making work about the Middle East, a political space where competing historical narratives are the basis for disagreements about sovereignty. I focus on works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Ayreen Anastas, Amir Yatziv, Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Khaled Hourani, Dor Guez, Campus in Camps, and Akram Zaatari. A number of patterns emerge when we look at how these artists approach history. One is the tendency for artists to act like historians. As a subset of this tendency is the archival impulse, wherein artists use found photographs, film or documents to intervene in normative representations of history. Another is for artists to act like archaeologists, digging up repressed histories. Another is to commemorate a traumatic event in a way that rejects traditional forms of memorialization such as monuments. At the core of each chapter are examples of artistic practices that use conversation as a medium. I analyze these conversations about history as a dialogical practice and argue that this methodology offers a uniquely productive opportunity to work through the ideologies embedded within the psychogeographies of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Within these conversations and other aesthetic structures, I argue that these artists emphasize the all too common challenge in producing new forms of civic imagination – the tendency to address historical trauma though repetition compulsion and melancholia. They react to this challenge by engaging collective memory, producing counter-memories and, in some cases, produce counterpublics.Item Women's Counter Narrative of Redemption(2010-12) Russell, Matthew H.; Bell, Nancy J.; Zvonkovic, Anisa M.; Sharp, Elizabeth A.; Harris, Kitty S.The purpose of this study was to explore how a group of women construct narratives of redemption in their recovery from long-term drug and alcohol abuse. While there has been a great deal of research on addiction, there has been relatively little research on recovery and virtually none that has made direct inquiry into the lived experiences of women. The narratives that constituted this research represented not only a silenced population but also an alternative narrative to the standard redemptive narrative and the cultural discourse that supports it. Understanding how these women developed and articulated this counter narrative can enhance the understanding of human development in general and the ways in which self-identity is negotiated in everyday life. The research was grounded in post-structural, deconstructive and dialogical theoretical perspectives. Five women who had completed a comprehensive residential substance-abuse treatment program at the Santa Maria Hostel and were active at Mercy Street, a church for recovering addicts in Houston Texas, participated. The Santa Maria Hostel serves an ethnically diverse population of women with children and is known to be the “last chance” for many of these women before the penitentiary. The analysis for the project was based on four semi-structured interviews with each of the women. They were encouraged to talk about their life before recovery, what led to their recovery and how they maintain their recovery. The core imperative with the redemptive master narrative necessitates an interpretive framework based upon Victor Frankl’s “tragic optimism” which creates a direct correspondence between wrongs suffered and the redemptive present. Yet these women’s stories did not conform to the prototypical redemptive construct, particularly in terms of how the past was held, languaged and integrated. They employed entirely different strategies which included holding certain segments of their past in a structure of meaninglessness. This is languaged through what is characterized as the poetics of “nevertheless”. Recovery and redemption is constructed in spite of the past; past suffering is not extolled for present redemption. Implications of this counter narrative in terms of the women’s lives, theory, power relations, and alternative social discourse are discussed.