School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites and Tourism: A paradoxical relationship
    Vecco, M ; Caust, J ; Pechlaner, H ; Innerhofer, E ; Erschbamer, G (Routledge, 2020)
    Conservation and management of cultural heritage sites are characterised by several paradoxes, which also affect the tourism activities related to these sites. The World Monument Fund monitors damage to heritage buildings and sites. It identifies three major threats facing heritage sites: political conflict, climate change and tourism. The tourist is thus seen to be as damaging as war or rising sea levels. In the World Monument Fund’s (2018) list of the most endangered 25 monuments in the world, approximately one-third were diagnosed as being ‘in danger’, mainly from tourists.
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    Capturing ambient participation: Indian Independence Day at Federation Square
    Wyatt, D ; Papastergiadis, N ; Weber, M ; McQuire, S ; WEI, S (Routledge, 2020)
    This chapter uses the concept of ambience as an analytical tool to explore the qualities of cultural participation in the outdoor public spaces of contemporary cultural precincts, and as a metaphor that speaks to a wider process of cultural transformation in communicative cities. Media-rich cultural precincts are now a common feature of urban developments and inform the major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration. The ambient experiences afforded by outdoor cultural precincts resonate with significant shifts in artistic practice. Ambient participation is particularly difficult to account for in the instrumental frameworks and methods routinely used by cultural funders and stakeholders to evaluate the impact of cultural infrastructure. Frameworks designed to measure visitation numbers at a museum, the satisfaction surveys of audiences, or the segmentation and brand recognition indicators tested by market research frame cultural participation as an aggregation of individual experiences. Media-saturated environments make qualitative changes to the experience of being-together-in-public.
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    Architecture, media and spaces of urban communication
    McQuire, S ; McQuire, S ; Sun, W (Routledge, 2020)
    This chapter provides with buildings and material urban structures as symbolic resources that themselves “communicate” certain values, or about urban space as a “space of appearance” in which fundamental communicative processes of speaking and acting in public take place. The location of key buildings and their relation to each other gave material form to political hierarchy and social relations. The capacity for particular urban structures and material settings to endure over time has served to anchor social practices and political processes across generations, underpinning the assertion by architect Aldo Rossi that the built environment is a critical dimension of a society’s collective memory. The rise of urban planning as a profession, alongside the blunt force of developments in infrastructure engineering, transport and communication technologies, and, above all, the gravitational pull of profit-based urban development settings, all worked to reduce the capacity of architects to shape the modern city in practice.
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    Spaces of Communication
    McQuire, S ; Sun, W ; McQuire, S ; Sun, W (Routledge, 2020)
    This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores theoretical grounds of the “communicative city”. Gumpert and Drucker reconsider their formative definition and raise a series of questions and provocations concerning future research directions and approaches. The book focuses on the growing implication of digital media in contemporary practices of placemaking. Sun Wei explores the entanglement of embodiment and mediation in her account of the redevelopment of Sinan Mansions, while Christiane Brosius reflects on the complex urban ecology of Delhi through the work of two contemporary artists. The book focuses specifically on the communicative possibilities of a distinctive aspect of the contemporary media city, namely large video screens situated in urban public spaces. It also focuses more directly on the different ways that digital media platforms have become a new infrastructure shaping the contemporary communicative city.
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    Ambient culture: Making sense of everyday participation in open, public space
    Papastergiadis, N ; Hannon, S ; McQuire, S ; Wyatt, D ; Carter, P ; de Dios, A ; Kong, L (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020-09-25)
    Unlike art and performance within interior spaces like the museum or gallery, the experience of culture in an urban and networked public space presents new challenges for cultural interpretation and evaluation. In this chapter, we draw on research conducted at Melbourne’s Federation Square to discuss how the concept of ambience helps make sense of both the production and experience of public culture. The first section introduces the changing settings for culture: from an almost exclusively interior presentation to an increasingly mediated, networked and outdoor experience. The second section situates this exteriorization of culture in terms of a shifting urban environment that is increasingly interwoven with media networks. The third section describes different forms of engagement and problematizes traditional expectations of cultural experience. Finally, we conclude with a reflection on these findings and draw out implications for the theorization, cultural programming and evaluation of cultural participation in public space.
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    Young children's haptic media habitus
    Nansen, B ; Green, L ; Holloway, D ; Stevenson, K ; Leaver, T ; Haddon, L (Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2020-10-28)
    Young children’s engagement with digital media centres on their embodied relations, shaped with and through the interfaces, materiality, and mobility of tablets and smartphones. This chapter draws on ethnographic observation of young children’s mobile media practices in family homes to explore the embodied dimensions of digital media interfaces, while engaging with user interface and mobile app developer literature, and phenomenologically informed cultural theory. It reveals the emergence of a ‘haptic habitus’: the cultivation of embodied dispositions for touchscreen conduct and competence. Configured by both cultural and commercial operations, this habitus involves context, user interface studies, and the design of gestural input.
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    The postdigital playground: Children’s public play spaces in the smart city
    Nansen, B ; APPERLEY, T ; Leorke, D (Routledge, 2020)
    This chapter examines the integration of children’s public play spaces into the infrastructures of the smart city. While prior research has focused on personal mobile devices, this chapter examines deliberate design interventions that digitally augment children’s play spaces. Drawing on perspectives from children’s geography and game studies to conceptualise childhood play in the smart city, the chapter highlights the sometimes-contradictory relations that emerge. These contradictions arise in the smart city through the digital augmentation of spaces historically and culturally designated as play spaces. We introduce the notion of the postdigital to emphasise the blurring of boundaries of digital and nondigital play in children’s playgrounds and conceptualise the integration of playgrounds into digital infrastructures in relation to the broader impact that the smart city has on the uses of public space. This chapter explores this ongoing integration of playgrounds into the smart city through two recent examples of interactive play designs that digitally augment public playgrounds and parks: HybridPlay and Disney Fairy Trail. These examples of postdigital play in public playgrounds are analysed in terms of their functionality, representation and online reception. Operating along a broader trajectory of smart city infrastructures characterised by the blurring of discrete spaces of sociality, these examples of postdigital play highlight tensions associated with the cultural sensibilities and historical meanings attached to public play spaces, digital technologies and childhood.
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    Museums as Actors of City Diplomacy: From “Hard” Assets to “Soft” Power
    Grincheva, N ; Fitzpatrick, K ; Byrne, C (Springer International Publishing, 2020)
    Historically, museums have earned their dedicated role as important agents of cultural diplomacy. In the age of increasing urbanization, museums have become important center of urban soft power and actors of city diplomacy. This chapter argues that museums are vital actors of city diplomacy, because of a high cultural and economic value of their “hard” or tangible resources and “soft” power of their social activities that engage global audiences and facilitate international cultural relations. This chapter discusses this framework of museum diplomacy resources and outputs in two main sections. The first section focuses on “hard” assets of museums such as collections and facilities. It explains why and how the cultural infrastructure offered by museums play an important role in city diplomacy, especially in place making and city branding. The second section explores soft power generated by museums through their social activities and programming that help activate cultural resources and transform them into diplomatic outputs.
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    Is there a Place for a Crowdsourcing in Multilateral Diplomacy? Searching for a New Museum Definition
    Grincheva, N ; Bjola, C ; Zaiotti, R (Routledge, 2020-10-29)
    This chapter explores the practice of crowdsourcing in global governance as a tool of multilateral diplomacy to interrogate its exact role and place in the decision-making processes. It investigates the case of the online cultural diplomacy of the International Commission of Museums (ICOM), focusing on the 2019 crowdsourcing campaign delivered by the ICOM’s Standing Committee for Museum Definition, which aimed to collect public contributions to re-define the museum agency in the 21st century. The chapter draws on media discourse analysis of the public debates concerning the new definition and applies content analysis of the 268 definitions submitted by the public to the ICOM’s official online platform. It also features interview insights from the MDPP Committee Chair. Based on key findings, the chapter argues that in the context of ICOM, multilateralism 2.0 remains a desirable vision rather than a reality.
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    Toward the perfect ending
    Nelson, R ; Connor, A (Perimeter Editions, 2020-10)
    Made in close collaboration with Owen (b. 1937) and his studio, this extensive volume assumes at once poetic, critical, historical and biographical modes in its unpacking of six decades of the artist's archives, offering a comprehensive offering a comprehensive insight into a figure who has stood at the forefront of contemporary art since the 1960s.