Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University
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Browsing Communication & Culture, Joint Program with Toronto Metropolitan University by Author "Bailey, Steven C."
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Item Open Access From Lifeworld to City Life: Rethinking how the Culture of Everyday Life in Cities Engages Urban Administration(2022-09) Martin, George Richard; Bailey, Steven C.Since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic in the winter of 2020, city governments around the world have faced extraordinary demands from citizens for services, expertise, and leadership. Urban administration has rarely been so involved in everyday life. Yet, during this time, reflexive fear, justifiable criticism, and malicious disdain of public initiatives and civic authorities seem to have undermined the status of urban administration as a representation of the public interest. The links that connect everyday experiences to urban administration have become strained to the extent that there is a waning certainty as to how "the city" as a collective project is constituted and realized. City governments and those who study urban society and culture, now face the task of re-examining fundamental questions about how urban administration engages urban life. Accordingly, in the most general sense, in this dissertation, I ask how urban administration comes to make sense to the people it serves. I aim, specifically, to foster an interest in the definition of the situations for administrating cities using a cross-disciplinary approach that engages traditions of urban theory, reflective analysis, hermeneutics and cultural sociology. I do this by looking at how these traditions elucidate the relationship between urban lifeworld and administration as it is found in various contemporary practices of city governance and urban life. Through this analysis, I suggest that the relationship between lifeworld and urban administration is established in practical conditions, but these conditions are ultimately grounded in participants engaging in self-reflective modes of theorizing the city as a situation for taking action, a process I will refer to as order-making. This notion of order-making is not merely an attempt to formulate a method of analysing urban administration. Nor does it simply provide an account of an individual’s encounter with institutions of urban administration. Instead, the analysis proposes a way to re-consider those who are involved in the administration of the city, both in formal and incidental ways, as active agents in the urban community engaged in the ongoing and collective project of theorizing the city as an order-making situation. This study highlights order-making as it is entrenched in the messiness and details of everyday urban culture, yet it also shows that order-making extends beyond the limits of the commonplace so as to produce an enduring order, or form, of the city itself. In this sense, what might be called the movement toward order-making underpins a multiplicity of engagements with administration while attending to the permanence—or, the formal goodness—of the city as a type of community. This enquiry thus supports a radically pluralistic grounding for urban administration by exploring what fundamentally connects the diversity of urban experience with the singularity of administration. Instead of assessing specific administrative policies and practices, this dissertation steps back to consider a broad view of administering the city to see what underpins the relationship of the urban lifeworld to the administration of city life. To do this, I consider questions such as: How do people conceptualize the city as a project? What part do everyday routine, memory, and meaning-making play in administration? How does the administration of cities engage forms of urban lifestyle and even the notion of the good life? How is the urban community made and remade? This analysis, in sum, aims to elucidate how order-making occurs in the confluence of legalistic and customary experiences of city life to clarify the realization of the city as a form of community. I consider order-making in four contexts of urban administration: city planning, gentrification, technology, and theory. I first consider details of order-making as people discuss city planning at a local administrative tribunal. Next, I expand the focus by considering order-making within the context of neighbourhood gentrification and how gentrification epitomizes order-making as the desire to reconcile personal experience and identity with the city at large. I then turn to the technology of smart cities to address ways order-making connects technology to the problematics of the urban lifeworld. This sets up a discussion about the notion of making within order-making, which is subsequently treated in terms of social theory. It is in this last main discussion that I consider the engagement of the lifeworld with urban administration as a way of engaging the city as an externalized ‘thing’. In a closing discussion, I briefly outline a program for future research, suggesting ways urban order-making might contribute to an effective response to current challenges facing city governance. Throughout this dissertation, I aim to expand the discussion about what connects everyday urban culture to urban administration in establishing a sense of order. The analysis hopefully helps turns attention to new ways in which institutions of urban administration might become better attuned to the plurality of cultural and historic experiences that now constitute much of the social life of contemporary cities. It offers an analysis of administration in terms of being self-reflexively aware of mundane actions, incidental memories, and the taken-for-granted patterns of everyday life, so that an array of experiences might not just reshape administrative practices to make outcomes just and fair but also substantially redefine the epistemological grounds on which such practices are grounded, that is, the ethos of doing urban administration. This involves imagining new ways of thinking about entrenched notions of administrative authority so that institutions of community order-making accord far more with the global, diasporic, and post-colonial dynamics of urban communities. In that sense, this work hopefully contributes to new ways of ensuring cities remain accountable, meaningful, and worthy of trust amid a period of disorientating change.Item Open Access Modes of Listening and their Implications to Audience Experience of Orchestral Concerts, with a Case Study of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra(2018-03-01) Willshire, Catherine Anne; Bailey, Steven C.Although listeners adopt similar behaviours according to sociocultural norms in the concert hall, they do not all experience an orchestral performance in the same way. Stockfelts theory of Adequate Modes of Listening provides the framework necessary to examine contemporary listening practices in the modern orchestral context, and provides an alternative to the dominant marketing paradigm. Using a representative case study of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the current research performs interviews, document survey and analysis, and concert observation to answer questions such as; do facilitators, orchestra, and audience members agree on a single (or related group) of genre-normative modes of listening? What happens when there is a breakdown in the assumed sociocultural conventions? How can the orchestra facilitate its listeners? By examining the way in which a listener experiences orchestral music, we can strengthen our understanding of contemporary listening practices and develop nuanced approaches to promoting sustainable audiences.Item Open Access One Nation Under the Market: Mediated Narratives of the 2008 Crisis in America(2015-12-16) Curran, Michael Gregory; Bailey, Steven C.This dissertation examines the construction of the 2008 economic crisis in American media through a comparative analysis of three case studies, each involving a different medium and each involving a distinct implied public. I have approached this subject from a rhetorically-inclined hermeneutical and phenomenological perspective that conceptualizes texts as manifestations of symbolic practices which reflect social reality as well as construct it, and I explore how the texts of each case study simultaneously reflect and conjure both the 2008 crisis and their imagined publics. In order to explore the some of the various ways the 2008 crisis has been constructed in American media, this research deploys three primary lines of investigation: the examination of radio broadcasts of speeches by American presidents during the crisis, the analysis of a selection of documentary and fictional films on or related to the crisis, and the evaluation of periodical articles from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The findings of the research reveal that the three case studies examined offer particularly distinct and elastic depictions of the 2008 crisis. The presidential radio addresses depicted the crisis in a predominantly metaphorical manner as a painful event experienced by a national public through their rhetorical invocation of a particular and patriotic mytho-ideological imaginary of America and its history. The films portrayed the crisis primarily as the dramatic unfolding of a traumatic narrative, emphasizing the character-driven nature of this dramatic unfolding and frequently highlighting the moral ambiguity of agents and characters. The periodical articles largely constructed the crisis as principally related to matters of governance, finance and economics in both its precipitation and in its assuagement or resolution, conspicuously paying scant attention to the affective dimensions of its impact. Collectively, the case studies evidence that the multiform and dynamic character of the depictions of the 2008 crisis in American media are significantly shaped by the combinative overlap of the particularity of the crisis as a complex and ambiguous phenomena, the dominant modes of address and distinct properties of each media type, and the particular implied publics to which each body of texts corresponded.Item Open Access Refusing the End of History: The Politics and Aesthetics of Castorf's Volksbhne(2020-05-11) Korte, Christine Andrea; Bailey, Steven C.From 1992 to 2017, the cultural landscape of Berlin was contested and shaped by the Volksbhne under its artistic director, Frank Castorf. Throughout his tenure, Castorf refused the liberal democratic consensus euphorically proclaimed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He made his theatre a space for working through the collapse of socialism and Fukuyamas end of history. Castorfs responses to postsocialismhis contouring of the historic theatre institution and his stagecraftconstituted a refusal of the dominant narrative of history and are the focus of this dissertation. I show how Castorf transformed the dogmatic state-funded theatre into a venue for radical politics and avant-garde aesthetics. During the fractious post-Wende period and beyond, Castorf played a public role as polemicist, cultural diagnostician, and prognosticator. At the nexus between the extreme Right and Left, Castorf mined for critiques of liberal democracy and linear narratives of progress. With Jnger and Schmitt on the Right, and Benjamin, Mller and iek on the Left, Castorfs intellectual genealogy is woven from a promiscuous engagement of Marx and Nietzsche. Castorf used the theatre and these traditions of intellectual thought to channel the wide-spread ressentiment, disorientation and hopelessness wrought by the demise of the Eastern Bloc and rapid Westernization. For Castorf, the only way to deal with these discontents was to shed light upon the temptations of illiberal reaction on behalf of those individuals disenchanted with post-Wende society. Here, Castorf drew a strong parallel to Berlin in the 1920s, focusing specifically on Conservative Revolutionary thought and events in and around the historic Volksbhne. The same dark forces lurking on the horizon of Weimar Germany inform Castorfs reception of the present in his dramaturgy. The dissertation develops chronologically and establishes three stages of Castorfs theory-praxis relationship: the mania of the 1990s; the melancholy of his Russian Turn in the early 2000s, and the foregrounding of epic and political theatre strategies coinciding with the 2008 financial crisis. His productions were anarchic events that turned the dramatic canon into occasions for satire, slapstick, digression and ultimately ambivalence. Creating openings, Castorf revived forgotten local and site-specific histories that he hoped would revitalize a proletarian consciousness. Refusing closure, this dissertation makes the case for Castorfs Volksbhne as an archive for an alternative socialist imaginary, conveying the utopian spirit of what the GDR might have been.Item Open Access Somatic Anacrusis: An Experiential Poetics of Deborah Hay's Choreography and Practice in the Solo At Once(2016-11-25) Andrews, Pamela Megan; Bailey, Steven C.This project is a kind of doingmovingthinking: a close study of iconic American dancer/choreographer Deborah Hays choreography and practice through my particular dancing experience of her solo At Once. The resulting experiential poetics illuminates both the implicit critique of an instrumental/rational paradigm and also the ethical implications of the particular relationality enacted in Hays work. I characterize Hays work as a radical communication practice, one that moves language through the body in a dynamic torqueing process that both gathers toward and unravels from the edges of meaningfulness in a process of perception. I work at the interdisciplinary intersection of dance, performance, somatics and cultural studies, and my thinking draws substantially on Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenological philosophy and language. Aspiring to a balanced integration of moving and writing, of practice and theory, I follow a performance studies approach, attempting, as characterized by performance scholar Dwight Conquergood: to live betwixt and between theory and theatricality, paradigms and practices, critical reflection and creative accomplishment (318). Through personal daily practice and performance of Hays work allied with close description, I apply my devised method of emergent choreographic analysis to Hays choreography and practice. This analysis, conducted from inside the practice of the work, reveals how Hays complex and distinctly linguistic choreography operates as a constructed situation for the practice of perception and that, in performance, this practice moves language through the body in a dynamic torqueing process that engenders a unique lived experience of paradoxical simultaneity. I coin the term somatic anacrusis to articulate this underlying processual phenomenon. Reconsidering the dimension of relationality in Hays work, I re-frame somatic anacrusis as a pre-relational pre-disposing, a kind of suspended or unconsummated relationality. Feminist philosopher Luce Irigarays thinking helps illuminate the ethical implications of Hays work as a practice of perception that opens a new way toward the other. I conclude by appropriating Hays own rhetorical interrogative strategy what if? What if somatic anacrusis offers a possible answer to Irigarays call for a new way to approach the other that respects fundamental difference and yet allows encounter?Item Open Access The Root of Excellence: An Interpretive Approach to Understanding Elder Care within Transnational Chinese Families in Canada(2018-03-01) Han Zhang; Bailey, Steven C.; Alan, BlumSituated at the intersection between globalization and demographic aging, this dissertation seeks to add a critical and interdisciplinary voice to the vibrant conversation on the topic of elder care. It weaves the complex conceptual threads of aging, transnational migration, and the ethics of care into a phenomenological inquiry into the lived experiences of the elderly and their adult children in the intimate space of seven transnational Chinese families in Canada. The research conceptualizes old age as a matter out of place in a neoliberal system marked by growth and productivity, and formulates a theoretical framework of sticky ambiguity as a way to reveal the tensions inherent in the discourse on elder care as a social, cultural, and intercultural phenomenon. In order to resist essentialist narratives of Chinese Canadian families, I emphasize the importance of cultural translation as a responsibility and an important means to unsettle meanings and cultural differences. An interpretive and reflexive methodology is used to analyze qualitative data in an attempt to move beyond a surface reading of the texts. In contrast to typical narrative analysis that aims to code, characterize, and thematize qualitative data, this method treats narrative as the subjects attempt to reconcile the divided self as he or she searches for a good way of representing the problem. The analysis makes observable the subjects orientation to values and idealization, and reveals the hidden struggles and conflicts that are often concealed in speech. Through three case studies on the themes of ambivalence, death, and filial piety, I try to understand how the subject orients to each phenomenon as a problem-solving situation in order to produce a dialogue about the meaning and sticky ambiguity of aging and elder care. My analysis shows that the meaning of aging and elder care is far from stable and singular. It is constructed through an evolving process of moral reasoning that is entangled in a continuous struggle with cultural identities, selfhood, gender, class, heritage, intimacy, and morality.Item Open Access Worshipping at the Shrine of Wagner: Fandom, Media and Richard Wagner(2023-03-28) Hurst, Emilie; Bailey, Steven C.Nineteenth-century opera composer Richard Wagner has long inspired passionate responses, with contemporary commentators often noting the cult-like reverence with which lovers approached his operas. In the years since, however, interest in Wagner’s art has not disappeared. In this dissertation, I explore the contours of modern Wagnerism using as my primary case study the Toronto Wagner Society, asking how members incorporate opera into their lives and what Wagner means to them. To do this, I employ a multimethodology of ethnography, an examination of Wagner’s art and rhetoric, and a consideration of the materiality of opera. These findings are analyzed through a dual lens of fan studies and cultural techniques, with which this dissertation makes two principal moves: first, to highlight how fandom of high culture is different in nature, not in kind to fandom of popular culture; second, to propose a networked model of fandom, one which conceptualizes fandom as a dynamic assemblage of audience, media and text. Chapter 1 opens by asking what is a fan, which I resolve through the introduction of cultural techniques, and subsequently, my networked model of fandom. I also consider how cultural techniques research might expand to include ethnography. Chapter 2 lays out the main findings of my interview. Particularly, I examine how aging intersects with reception, how fans re-enact the distinction between German and Italian opera, and the joy of opera as an explicitly performance art. Chapter 3 tackles the dual description of Wagner as both “work” and “overwhelming.” By taking seriously Theodor Adorno’s criticism, I illustrate how his music and rhetoric exert their agency onto fans. The final chapter studies the materiality of reception. Employing the metaphor of Michel Serres’ parasite, I analyze how the media which host opera shape reception through an examination of the role of the theatre, and by tracking mentions of Wagner in Toronto’s Globe newspaper in the years 1875–1876.