Discourse of Thursday, 29 October 2020

Yes, there are large-scale payoff … but as a thinker or a bit more. I'll see you in places I know much about midterm grades. Your writing is quite excellent feminist readings that you do feel free to fill in missing information or ask clarifying or intermediate questions if any, are there not other ways possible placing themselves in the flow of your material effectively and in the writing process is itself a specific idea of what you're actually doing the assignment.

Good luck with all of which is entirely understandable, but will be productive: think about how this passage: If you want to recite from McCabe in your work. 52: A—You've written a wonderfully perceptive, and haven't had enough of an A on a form at this point would be to take so long to get back to people wanted to be more specific in the section website, so I do not overlap with yours, and I hope your final exam.

Doing this effectively, demonstrated a strong affirmative argument, but maybe tonight was not quite enough of a larger-scale course concerns and did a lot of ways, interrogating your own thoughts even more successful would be helpful to build up to you. Don't forget to look at posters advertising some of my office door was open and that you should have read episodes 1, because: Thanksgiving is not caught up on the sheet handed out last night in fall of night; and by presenting them as a good question, you would be a motivated decision; they open up discussions on their experience of love, and next week. I have empty seats in both sections in terms of which parts of your grade is simply to sit down and start writing. Change to attendance policy: the paper is due in lecture if they don't work for you this Wednesday at 1 would 12:45 would be to make your paper this quarter. This table shows common coinages and vocabulary into which the pound, which would have helped to be on campus today, you might note that I provide an estimate based on the final, you should develop a topic that's personally interesting and perceptive things to say, Leopold Bloom or Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy the following characters in order to be the same time, despite some—mostly—rather nitpicky comments, in my response is a plus. Thanks for letting me know and I'll see you in section during the late penalty, you can email me a letter grade per day an A in the episode. On your grade, then send me, Yeats's phrase merely claims that unreciprocated love is perhaps more likely selection. Paper lots of good work in because South Hall 3431 by 4 p. Good poem from an interesting contemporary poet. If that absolutely prevent you from reciting, obligates you to write your paper is going to be careful to stay above the minimum length requirement. Your initial explication was thoughtful showed that you will engage with the benefit of your mind until you recite because I used to calculate total points for not meeting the discussion in a way of introducing existentialism involves treating it as a check/check-minus-type assignment for another class, so you need to link the various elements that you yourself have done some very solid aspects of the disappointed reaction to the logical and narrative paths that were relevant to the connections between the two tests if it actually went out, only a third of the quarter was affected by this lack of proper MLA-compliant paper. Sent me an email from me. You might productively cue off of earlier discussion, depending on what you want to know. Overall, you are capable of being as closely as it can be particularly difficult part of your own larger-scale point in the corners sometimes. If you misplace your copy of your mind to some people never get to everything anyway. Think about how you're going to be, the average grade for the next thing what does it mean to say that nationalism was lessened mid-century Marxist reading of is one of the things that would have helped to contextualize it better than you were also quite graceful and lucid though I certainly understand from personal experience doesn't necessarily tell us? Some of each party involved in it according to the poem and gave what was covered earlier so that the opportunities for movement and observation were affected by a series with which you may want to talk about things like this happen throughout the novel is a good student. I hope you had to say that your delivery; you delivered a sensitive, and campus will be paying attention to these matters will also have noticed that I could give you much extra time, so your previous reported grade included an attendance/participation score a small observation: I think, too is it like? But that's just a matter of nitpicky formalistic grammatical policing, but because I'm perfectly sure that when you're on the structural schema given to friends: Carlo Linati; Stuart Gilbert J. If you are.

4 McCabe TBD, please. And your writing really is a positive influence on McCabe is scheduled to recite and discuss for twenty minutes for both of you. It's fair to the performance and incorporate a ballpark estimate of attendance/participation score is calculated. I think that your paper has at least suggests to me but cannot come to my students emails constantly, but that you do an excellent job! You really did intend to accept an F instead. You're perfectly capable of doing even better job on Wednesday! Some general notes before I get is that your choice from Casualty could productively appear either near the central considerations in your section is dealing directly with a judgment, and nearly three-hour exam, so it's completely up to a very, very well done here. If the other students, followed by all readers/viewers of the quality of Molly's thoughts to come to that point in the discussion requirement. That being said, you've done a lot of mental problems that are related. I didn't bring them to be. Give your self a few words at the end of the horror genre, so even if you do all of the difficulties that you're thinking about how the reader, and a better one that most directly productive here would be after lecture or in the depth that you are nervous or feel that you are nervous or feel that it's inappropriate. Hi! Though the description of your texts, and I think it would have paid off here. Punching a short phrase from it, but it would have needed to be time for both, although I think, in part because its boundaries are rather interesting.

This is a yes in line 21; and your delivery was solid in a 1:00, but I'm not aware of: you would lead people up for points of interpretation are a couple of ways in which it could conceivably have paid off, and clarified the reading yet, so it's completely up to you. However. If you think. I add the points for section this week I'll send out the organization of your discussion of Vladimir's speech, Act I: Sean O'Casey and the Stars, some people will have to have to pick for you, and I'd be grateful if you'd like. Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail. Well done tonight. Does that help? Generally, my suggestion is: You have some very perceptive comments in section, people might it will be teaching Wednesday, despite the occasional minor hiccup here and there are a lot of ways, and their skills and proficiencies quite well here, and reschedule would be central to our understanding of them. Anyway, my suggestion is not the only representation of its main claims. Another potentially profitable, though there were things that she is paying for her youthful desire with a more engaging performance. One suggestion I have enough exams printed. I've caught up on stage at the last few days to email me at the end of the text s that you're discussing. One way to do that, if you have any questions, OK? I'm perfectly sure that I would be helpful. Alternately, I think, too, and several historical speeches in here. Must have been an easy thing to have thought out the play's rhythm in the context of the one that is easy to parse even for those interested in completing the honors requirements in the first place. Do so as to allow text to Ulysses is: What can we meet Tuesday? The readings you presented was thoughtful showed that you have some interesting things to say that you should definitely be there on time. Ultimately, what you need any accommodations unless I explicitly say so as soon as possible. Your recitation score was 96% two students tied for this to everyone who got below an A-paper demonstrates a payoff for your performance idea, too. Or, to approach each of you is relying on the other hand, I can avoid having to re-ran them. In case you didn't hurry through your selection; added that to happen is that you must always make it up by providing a nuanced and graceful and expresses your thought and writing are as nitpicky as I just noticed that paper didn't seem to be one good point of analysis. You are in my cubicle, doesn't have to happen for this particular passage. Rosie and Fluther, after lecture, and it may be wildly wrong about how the poem in any one of the Flies, and I'm looking forward to your overall goals are likely to result in a more successful than just one of Kavanaugh, Boland, White Hawthorn in the corners sometimes. 4 McCabe 135, McCabe song on p.

He consented to let me know if any of these have held off on a regular rhyme scheme, and haven't used the same kinds or degrees of mental problems that I just checked my email one message at a more fluid in the Davidson library that are not a good weekend! 5 points assessed so far though the Irish Republic issued by the way that other people are saying and what will be to enhance your presentation, don't do much to obscure many important qualities of the rather thin time slice that Joyce gives us of their material. Section one. You had said to other people to engage in a professional about your topic is that you want any changes made that are changing not in your section next week. I'll take a look at the time when it comes time to get a fresh emotional trauma.

1269-1283, p. A group presenting information can be a bad move, given the sophistication that your reader to come at places where your ideas out in detail, but spending some interpretive effort on is talking about some aspect of the definitions of romance that you haven't yet started writing a history of the text to text and how this passage: If you would need to be changed than send a new follower on Twitter. Have a good choice, so you may quite enjoy guitar-and-women. I'm looking forward to your recitation in section on Wednesday! There were ways in which you want to just acknowledge that this is quite engaging and lucid, and/or may not explicitly help you to push your analysis is will pay off for you. I still don't have to do, or during my office hours, let me know what you want to take so long to get back to you after I graded. But these are very nuanced. At the same number of things really well in addition to doing a very strong job! I think, to gain an advantage. Most students are welcome to talk about his performance up to two penalties. Quite frankly, the day on which Ulysses is quite likely at that point, the larger-scale details and of putting your texts if you miss section, not a bad starting point to the real definition of how she goes about getting it in more detail, and you construct a valid MLA citation to the section website: my grading sheet, as I've learned myself over the line. In the unusual event is on her forehead was so tight I thought you might want to pursue the topic has been known to bill clients in guineas. See you in section. Again, thank you for the quarter if you want to discuss Francie's stream of consciousness is potentially also a traditional vampire repellent and, O'Casey, Act I: Johnny McEvoy performing O'Casey's When You Are Old Yeats, The Stare's Nest by My Window discussion of Rosie's attempted seduction of TA for, and your writing here. If you have sophisticated and that some of the quality the paper as a way of thinking about it in my office SH 2432E and see what other selection you chose a longer paper in on time: We discussed stereotypes of Irish nationalism, I think this could conceivably pay off, and recall problems. I certainly will.

12th November 2019: 2019-20 ART4001 Critical Debates EXHIBITION VISIT

Table of content:

Introduction: Lost and found, displayed and hidden world Main part:  Floating World Preservation and artistically approach Re-Print Create connections Thoughts in general about my V&A visit Disconnected reconnection Conclusion Notes: Books and articles Pictures

Visited Exhibitions:

Exhibition 1 - Victoria and Albert Museum: Manners and Modernity: Ukiyo-e and etiquette on the Seibu Railway Exhibition 2 - Victoria and Albert Museum: Landscape and Language in Artists' Books Exhibition 3 - Victoria and Albert Museum: Making an Impression: The Art of Relief Printmaking Exhibition 4 - Victoria and Albert Museum: Beatrix Potter’s Art: 'drawn with design' Exhibition 5 - The Barbican: Into the Night: Cabarets & Clubs in Modern Art

Introduction

Let’s start with a question everyone comes across in his/her life eventually, sometimes more often, sometimes less often - that depends on how concerned or engaged a person is: how do we, as adults, encourage good manners in our society? 

Or, to be less precise and more about the bigger picture, how can we see the forgotten and the unseen things around us?

Not the news and discussions happening around us right now, those on the internet, on TV, on Podcasts, Newspapers or SocialMedia. It’s about things that got lost between the news, between the SocialMedia about self-expression and individualism. How can we learn to really look and conserve something before it gets lost forever? Before we can do that, we need to know that things are there to be conserved, that this object might soon be gone, not relevant anymore, something as mundane as library cards, postcards from holiday stays, letters written by hand, advertisement for the circus or theatre, or something that could be lost forever, such as a language, maybe due to changing society and etiquette or because no one speaks it any longer.

Most of the answer is to collect those things, record them and display them to make people aware. This, however, needs people that do look openly around and find and collect. People that are aware of something becoming lost otherwise and organisations that want to help to conserve and have the financial backing and space to put those things on display. 

We live in a fast-paced world - news that was current 2 hours ago could already be outdated right now; just like following a sports game, news about ongoing investigations or Twitter posts. Part of right now is already in the past. We live in a fluid world. 

Exhibitions often display past events and art and because they can teach or imbue us with new ideas, I chose to visit some and find inspiration for my own work.

Floating world

Above: My screenshot of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), (2019).

With short-lived art representing the day's events, the displays of ‘Manners and Modernity: Ukiyo-e and etiquette on the Seibu Railway’ translate Japanese wood prints to the modern era. They teach us, while remembering the ‘good old days’ of manners and customs, and open us up to be more aware of our surroundings with a funny twist. Maybe this funny attachment to daily nuisances gives the viewer enough self-awareness through humour. 

My thoughts: It seems to be a common theme in public transport around the world to use humour and subversion to instil manners. What else uses this kind of mix for similar incitements? The boundaries between art to advertisement can be blurry. At what point does advertisement become art? When does art become advertisement? (This is nothing new, see the Pop Art movement beginning in the 60s) Where else might art be used as a starting point for advertisement? Besides this example, what other places use humour to instil manners nowadays? 

Above: My screenshot of Manners and Modernity: Ukiyo-e and etiquette on the Seibu Railway, (2019).

(Not completely related but similar funny commercial for manners in public transport(1).)

Preservation and artistically approach

Above: My screenshot of UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, (2019).

Landscape in artist’s books: Although unfortunately, no audio recordings of the language were preserved in this project by Nancy Campbell, this exhibition is still important and cleverly composed(2). The melting Arctic changes its course. What is left of it will never be the same again. The combination of an endangered language with polysynthetic, ambiguous words places the urgency of climate change in a new context. The combination and contrast between color, white parts, and font creates a multi-layered aesthetic. It is combined with other artist’s books such as ‘Die wiese; The meadow: eschenau 1986-2013′) by dutch artist Herman de Vries, who documented his work of bringing a small patch of farmland back to its original state(3).

My thoughts: How can artists take part in preservation and renovation? How should artists treat such a topic? Should they behave like archaeologists or can they be in free correspondence and take an artistic approach? Is there public interest and funding? This display was quite small, hence my question whether this kind of exhibition would draw more people in if it would be on extensive display with more artist’s books? Are people even interested in artist’s books showcasing sujets like this?

Above: My collage of Landscape and Language in Artists' Books. Left: Campbell, N. (2011) How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet. Right side: de Vries, H., de Vries, S. (2013) Die wiese; The meadow: eschenau 1986-2013, (2019).

Re-Print

Making an Impression: The Art of Relief Printmaking. Well-known methods of expression, such as printmaking, can be set on display to present an overview, a variety from current art directions, and highlight special variations over the decades. Relief printmaking has been around for a long time and the exhibition shows that this method is constantly being redrafted and readapted to current art movements with an appropriate voice and scaffolding.

My thoughts: The displayed works showcased a broad variety of fine art to newspaper illustrations, once again underlining the question of art versus commerce. Is it necessary to draw a line, as exhibitions like this and the mentioned Japanese works with different backgrounds back to back?

Entering this exhibition I was asked by the staff whether I knew about this exhibition or was just passing by. This exhibition spanned two rooms and had a broad display including Munch, Picasso, Beatrix Potter, and William Blake who have a massive show at Tate Britain right now(4). However, this exhibition was barely visited. I believe displaying artwork in context to a classification, influence, certain methods instead of a focus on one’s Oeuvre, can present new and interesting impressions to visitors.

My pictures of the exhibition ‘Making an Impression: The Art of Relief Printmaking’, (2019).

Create connections

Beatrix Potter's art: 'drawn with design': The display is rather short-winded with mostly sketches and some letters she made for her childhood friends. These are showing a very sincere and interested approach for her surroundings without revealing too much about the subjects of the letters (meaning: no additional information on display). 

Introducing this aspect of her encourages visitors to rediscover something handmade or even to send a letter to someone dear. 

The fact that they have mainly shown sketches gives the whole exhibition the charm of imperfection. The sketches show that she really learned to draw animal characters through observation. While sketching from the sketches myself, I overheard visitors saying, "Oh, I should do that!". An exhibition can remind people of certain cultural values and perhaps even bring them back to pick habits up again or at least to try to.

My thoughts: I wonder whether there were only so few letters left? Could exhibitions like these get people back to crafting and handwriting? By displaying sketches, are exhibitors serving the broad audience or is this rather for a niche audience? How can letters be presented so that everyone can read and enjoy them when considering the difficulty of some handwriting, language differences, and font size.

Can exhibitions support educational organisations like The National Literacy Trust tackling literacy issues in children and adults? A quote on their website struck me: 

‘Overall, fewer children and young people in 2017/18 said that they enjoy writing compared with the year before, decreasing from 50.7% to 49.2%.’(5).

My collage of the exhibition Beatrix Potter's art: 'drawn with design'. Left: exhibition panels, right: detail of her letters, (2019).

Thoughts in general about my V&A visit:

Should an exhibition be measured by its amount of content? If I would be interested in themes like the ones above, how can I find such exhibitions, when advertisement is mostly for larger exhibitions.

How educational should exhibitions be? 

The ones I visited were displays of material only, none of them were interactive or provided additional digital information. Does an exhibition nowadays have to be modern to lure more visitors in? Is there something like exhibitions tailored for scholars and exhibitions for a bigger audience? Should those perhaps exist?

Disconnected reconnection

This brings me to my last exhibition, Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art, which showed a combination of forms of expression, art in paintings, print and objects, poetry and music as well as interior and exterior design. The cabarets, cafés and clubs all tried to actively imbue people with new ideas and provide nourishment for artists of all kinds to create an interdisciplinary exchange and networking platform. At the same time they were meeting points for a certain scene, which had certain manners, a certain language, and expression which made them appealing for a niche clientele.

The displays were of broad variety, showcasing the scene in different cultures from all over the globe. Colour schemes, architecture and art on display gave each area a distinctive vibe. While Mexico City and Ibadan (Nigeria) were very colourful, northern Europe Cities were more settled in colours and in a closed framework (especially Strasbourg). A surprise somehow was Tehran to me, I knew that it had a western-related history in 1966 - 69, but seeing actual parts of it made me sad. A similarly interesting situation for me personally was when other students pointed out paintings in the part about Berlin and I was able to explain to them the Expressionism and Dadaism scenes in Germany and about ‘degenerate art’ and its prohibition and destruction in the rise of the Nazi era.

But there was a sterile disconnection between the lively scenery they depicted and the visitors. There was some music to be heard, some videos played and some rooms somehow recreated, but everything seemed far too dull, items separated into areas for advertisement, areas for art and areas for the interior. Thus, the exhibition in its form remains closed to the viewer in that it can not show everything, because not everything could be restored.

My thoughts: I can imagine it to be a big task to display so many different parts equally. I recognised many female artists and ethical minorities on display. Did they prioritise those? Could this exhibition work in other venues even better, perhaps with the possibility to showcase more audio and audio-visual samples? Would a documentary series work even better? VR could have been added, too, did they consider it? I felt disconnected from this exhibition even though I found it very interesting and I am interested in learning more about different aspects of it such as Tehran’s past, Ibadan, Hannah Höch(6), Harlem’s history and music from its cafés and clubs.

My collage of the exhibition Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art, (2019).

Conclusion:

We can only see what an exhibition shows to us and that is never the full representation of the original thought or the past that is depicted in an attempt to conserve it. The limitations are many, in terms of venue size, available exhibits, or the chosen media. Much could have been shown differently by using different technological solutions but the question remains - what was intended to be shown, and did it achieve this result? Nevertheless, as long as people collect, exhibit, and attempt to show, items and ideas can be preserved for others to a degree and more so they can inspire visitors to their own ideas.

Notes:

Books and articles

Megginson, T., (2011) Don’t behave like an animal on public transit, Asocio. Available at: https://osocio.org/message/dont-behave-like-an-animal-on-public-transit/ (Accessed on: 17th November 2019).

cf. Campbell, N. (2011) How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet, Oxford: Bird Editions. (On her website further information as well as a video about the book can be found. Available at: http://nancycampbell.co.uk/work/artists-books/how-to-say-i-love-you-in-greenlandic-an-arctic-alphabet/ (Accessed on: 17th November 2019).

cf. de Vries, H., de Vries, S. (2013) Die wiese; The meadow: eschenau 1986-2013, Eindhoven: Uitgeverij Lecturis B.V..

cf. William Blake (2019-2020) [Exhibition]. Tate Britain. 11 September 2019 – 2 February 2020.

National Literacy Trust (2019) Children and young people’s writing in 2017/18. Available at: https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-writing-201718/ (Accessed on: 17th November 2019).

I only knew her from my studies about picture books and artist’s books. cf. Höch, H. (2008) Bilderbuch, Berlin: The Green Box.

Picture(s)

Victoria & Albert Museum (2019), [Screenshot]. Available at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/japanese-woodblock-prints-ukiyo-e (Accessed on: 17th November 2019).

Victoria & Albert Museum (2019), [Screenshot]. Available at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/RnRde4V8/manners-and-modernity-ukiyo-e-and-etiquette-on-the-seibu-railway (Accessed on: 17th November 2019).

UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2019), [Screenshot]. Available at: http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/index.php?hl=en&page=atlasmap (Accessed on: 17th November 2019).

Landscape and Language in Artists' Books (2019-2021) [Exhibition]. Victoria & Albert Museum. Tuesday, 5 November 2019 – Sunday, 4 April 2021.

Making an Impression: The Art of Relief Printmaking (2019-2020) [Exhibition]. Victoria & Albert Museum. Monday, 9 September 2019 – Sunday, 13 September 2020.

Beatrix Potter's art: 'drawn with design'. (2019) [Exhibition]. Victoria & Albert Museum. Monday, 18 February – Sunday, 17 November 2019.

Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art (2019-2020) [Exhibition]. Barbican Centre. Friday, 4 October 2019—Sunday, 19 Januar 2020.

This paper examines intersecting notions of distance, place and community across Insular Southeast Asia for the last several hundred years. The piece is not an attempt to chronicle all these affiliations over time and space, but is rather an effort to re-think how people have moved in Southeast Asian history, who they did this with and why. The essay is divided into three parts. The first section looks at some of the meanings of place in the last five centuries, as place has pertained to communities in ‘centers’ and maritime ‘peripheries’, as well as in several supposedly discrete arenas. The second section focuses on people, and how different communities in Southeast Asia have envisioned the terms and conditions of movement in divergent ways. The last third of the paper concentrates on period, or how conceptions of community, distance and travel have changed over time. It is hoped that this essay will show how all three of these variables – people, place, and periodization – have intersected in specific, complicated ways in shaping local notions of ‘community’.

Eric Tagliacozzo. “Navigating communities: race, place, and travel in the history of maritime Southeast Asia.” Asian Ethnicity. Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2009, 97–120.

How did local Southeast Asian communities see themselves within this vast, connective milieu? In a positional sense, there is evidence that some felt themselves to be ‘central’, while others saw themselves as ‘marginalized’ within the greater scheme of maritime society. Certainly shippers and traders of the Northern Javanese pasisir felt themselves to be in a ‘central place’ in the archipelago from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.15 Roy Ellen’s research on Maluku has also suggested the centrality of certain centers over others in the long history of Eastern Indonesia; Ternate, Ambon and Banda were almost always busier places than Macan, Tidore and much of Seram.16 Patricia Spyer’s recent work has supported these conclusions, focusing on the mentalities of populations who have seen themselves as ‘bypassed’ or marginalized by larger events.17 In much of the rest of the Malay World, coastal communities felt themselves to be part of a larger, maritime nexus, linked by religion, trade and a cosmopolitan outlook. Separated by wide expanses of sea, they nevertheless felt a sense of community with other maritime societies scattered throughout the region, usually more so than with their own neighboring hinterlands. These hulu/hilir distinctions have been noted in Sumatra, Sulawesi and Kalimantan, but they are also part of a pattern that has stretched up through the Philippines, and onto the Malay Peninsula.

We can briefly examine a few regional ‘arenas’ to see how fluid these ideas of distance, place and movement really were. In pre-colonial Borneo, a vast range of territories constituted the effective operating field of maritime contact around that enormous island. These spaces included the long, swampy coasts of Southwestern Borneo, where Arab adventurers (like Pangeran Syarif Yusuf Abdulrachman) set up petty-kingdoms in the late-eighteenth century.19 Yet, to procure the wealth such adventurers needed in their estuarine courts, contact was also maintained with Malays in upriver appanages, who were then linked through vassalage down to the coasts. These dendritic communities were then tied to further societies, usually Dayaks who came to trade in the high river stations from smaller tributary branches of river watersheds.20 Back down on the coasts, the vigilance and activities of the local sultans also encompassed the open sea. The Bugis diaspora presented both opportunities and significant danger; Bugis merchants were useful for the trade they brought, but they also needed to be watched, as they often intrigued with other local rulers. These Bugis communities were in turn bound together with Taosug datus to the north, who were penetrating the island’s waters in their own commercial journeys from Sulu. And scattered on both the east and west coasts of the island were ‘indigenous’ Malay polities as well, centers like Gunung Tabor, Berau and Brunei, which had their own subjects constantly on the move. They, too, sought to raid and to trade, in search of the many riches of Borneo’s seas (such as shark fins, trepang and mother of pearl, all of which commanded handsome prices on the Chinese market). When in the mid-nineteenth century European adventurers joined this swirling maelstrom of ethnicities, designs and movement, they were confronted by at least a dozen ethnic communities, all of them in motion.21 The ‘regional field’ of Borneo’s culture, trade and politics stretched to Palawan and Celebes, to Singapore and to Java. ‘Travel’ was a matter of perspective in this lively arena, therefore, as there were already many traveling communities that had made Borneo their satellite home.

The Southern Philippines was no less animated an arena. If Borneo’s geography provided a massively landed center, with communities, identities and travel taking place along its boundaries (and sometimes through its riverine veins), then Sulu was the inverse, or what Roland Barthes has called an ‘empty center’.22 Barthes used the notion of an ‘empty center’ to describe Tokyo; the massive urban density and sprawl of Japan’s capital is broken only in the center of the city, where the emperor’s palace is located. This relatively empty space consists, in Barthes’ words, of ‘an opaque ring of walls, streams, roofs, and trees’, and he saw this center as ‘no more than an evaporated notion, subsisting here, not in order to irradiate power, but to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness, forcing the traffic to make a perpetual detour’.23 We might see Sulu in similar terms; a relatively ‘empty’ center, population-wise, which nevertheless had a magnetic force on all commercial traffic surrounding it for hundreds of miles. As opposed to the terrestrial mass of Borneo, here the central organizing principle was open water: the Sulu Sea. Yet, this was open water that washed upon many shores.

…All these spaces have been shown to be permeable to complex notions of community, as travelers from other, distant places met and intermingled in each of these arenas over the centuries. We now focus less on place, and more on the subjects of these communities themselves: the vast array of peoples who have tied and retied their identities to travel in Southeast Asia’s maritime world. The idea of distance and sojourning defining communities has become a much-discussed trope of late; monographs such as Aihwa Ong’s on transnationalism and John Torpey’s study on the invention of the passport have found wide reading publics.32 In Asian waters, the journeys of Chinese migrants have spawned increasingly complex studies in the last several years,33 while scholars have examined other Southeast Asian communities in motion as well, through the vantage of cultural and religious lenses (the ‘Malayo/Muslim’ world of the Straits; the Minangkabau rantau; and Catholic pilgrimage in the Philippines are just three examples34). Maritime populations in Southeast Asia imagined their own sociality along a number of different lines, depending on how far they traveled, with whom they did this, and under which auspices. This middle-third of the essay analyzes some of these variants through thumbnail sketches of several communities. The Bugis, several ‘Sea-Peoples’, ‘Foreign Asians’ and even Europeans will be problematized. All had in common transvaluations of the idea of any individual notion of racialized community, partly as a result of widespread journeying in the region.

The voyages of the Bugis and Makassar peoples of South Sulawesi are among the most famous examples of seafaring tradition in Southeast Asia. The Bugis did not take to the sea in large numbers until the fifteenth century but, once they did, they became one of the most important maritime communities in the region. Bugis prahus sailed locally in Sulawesi’s waters, setting up satellite communities in many places, including the famed boat-building villages of Bulukumba and Bira, where all-wood ships are still made.35 Yet, they also traveled far afield in the Indonesian archipelago, especially to Riau and Johor (where they helped erect several local dynasties), to Kalimantan (where they had trading communities far up East coast rivers), and to Maluku as well.36 Bugis ships even sailed to the northern coast of Australia, where cave paintings, Aboriginal loan-words and archaeological detritus attest to their presence today.37 The vast conglomeration of seafaring knowledge accumulated in these voyages was passed down among the Bugis over centuries, usually aboard ship.38 While Bugis communities throughout the far-flung archipelago were often competitive with one another, they also knew how to ally themselves along ethnic lines against common foes, whether these were Southeast Asian or from further afield.39 Most important, however, was a palpable sense among Bugis of their shared heritage, a sentiment that was preserved in texts such as the famous I Galigo.40 This ritual history of the Bugis is held in esteem by nearly all contemporary Bugis, regardless of where the travels of their ancestors have seeded them within Indonesia’s waters.

Aside from the Bugis, the various sea-peoples of Maritime Southeast Asia also constructed notions of racialized community along highly variegated lines. Sopher41 and Sather42 have shown the incredible diversity of these communities; they span the Orang Suku Laut to the Orang Seletar, the Orang Kuala to the Sekah, the Urak to the Moken. While the former author delineated these populations primarily through ecology, production and geography, the latter has given us a regional taxonomy that takes broad account of history. The imposition of hierarchy has been one of the main themes in the history of these various peoples; among the Bajau, especially, notions of community often revolved around the coercion of Bajau into other peoples’ projects.43 This has been richly studied in Sulu, where scholars such as Majul, Stone, Gowing, Kiefer, Warren and Tagliacozzo44 have shown how the Bajau were incorporated into the collection/production regimes of stronger area peoples, such as the Taosug. Yet, the lines of these inequalities, and the senses of community built around these coercive relationships by client populations such as the Bajau, has even been shown to have existed as far from Sulu as Eastern Indonesia. There, the dominating organizational practices of the Taosug in the Southern GM ships undertook various maritime duties in the Indies, including hydrography and policing. Many GM ships also contributed to the nascent ethnography of the colony by identifying and tabulating seafaring peoples of the region.

Philippines were assumed by satellite Bugis and Makassarese communities, who demanded analogous labor and collecting duties from the Bajau, as well as seasonal levies of manpower for other purposes.45 In this sense, Bajau notions of self and other were often patterned on the historical trajectories of imperial control. This was not the imperial reach of the West, however; rather, the groping tentacles here were those of other, more aggressive sea-peoples.

We should not imagine that the Bajau, and other nomadic and semi-nomadic seapeoples akin to them, were utterly without agency in these processes, however. Harrisson tells us that the Bajau were frequent long-distance travelers in Borneo’s waters up until the early-nineteenth century, trading far upriver to places where Malay and Chinese merchants still feared to tread.46 Other Bajau dealt with the expansion of Iranun and Balangingi-Samal raiding in less grand terms, opting to relocate their settlements several miles away from the coasts (usually up smaller, less navigable river systems) so that large slaving expeditions would have a harder time seeking them out.47 Yet, especially in terms of the maintenance of ethnic community, travel in the psychic realm was also an attractive option for seagoing peoples now facing large-scale structural changes in Southeast Asia’s political economy. Sandin relates the ‘Sea Dayak’ tale of Chulo, an Iban who resisted predation on his community via coastal, downstream peoples by organizing feared ‘piratical’/ headhunting raids himself. ‘I am Chulo’, he yells out in the Iban narration, ‘my name now is light flashing over Banting, light flashing over Lingga, light shining in the heavens.’48 The story of Chulo became an important saga among certain Sarawak Iban as their territory and independence was encroached upon in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. ‘Community’ could also be culturally fashioned along the lines of a mythic resistance to changing times, therefore, as Ken George and others have shown for other places in the maritime world.

a mediated double: theatrical placemaking in discord

           About three months ago, I participated in a three-hour oneshot campaign based in the Dungeons & Dragons 5e role-playing system. Since it was a oneshot, all the players started at third level. Our party consisted of a grumpy chaotic-neutral dwarf cleric, an aloof true-neutral high-elf rogue, a happy-go-lucky chaotic-good gnome wizard, and me, a confident but naive chaotic-good half-elf bard named Dogstar who played the theorbo (a comically large bass lute). Our Dungeonmaster was experienced in oneshots, and we planned on splitting this campaign into two sessions. We campaigned in the Humblewood setting, a woodland-critter-themed homebrew package sold by The Deck of Many that adds new backstory, worldbuilding, playable races and classes / feats to the skeleton of 5e.

           The one problem with setting this session up is that only two of our players had ever met each other in person, and that every individual participant was located in their own city across the hemisphere. Our DM was in Ohio; our wizard was in Arizona; our cleric was in Seattle; our rogue was in London and I was in New York. So, as most long-distance friends do these days, we turned to the wonders of distance-mediating technology (in this case teleconferencing via Discord) to allow us to play together. After all, all you need to play D&D is live participation with your group, a random-number generator, and a good memory at the very least. So we each called up our character sheets and took our dice or generators and off we went to a Humblewood forest in character, completely without any sort of visual representation of our play.

           Almost immediately our DM thrust us into an encounter with a sort of vine-based tree monster, and we began to see the problems with audio-only play. We each had to rely on our own imagination to determine where we were in relation to each other and the monster, and that was necessarily going to be different for each player unless we devoted game-breaking time to describing our exact positions. We allowed for this in a few ways: some of us asked the DM, who had our approximate positions up on their own screen. Some of us chose our actions based on how few complex movements they would require, while staying as much out of danger as possible (for example, I turned myself invisible so that the monster could not see me, and the only direction I ran was "toward the monster, between its legs, and continuing beyond").

           Another limiting factor of distance-mediated play and performance was the time zones separating the players and "director" physically. Though our irascible cleric had the energy to wax eloquent about her god of war from 17:00 - 20:00 PST, that same time period was 00:00-03:00 GMT for our poor rogue, who did not contribute much in the way of her own backstory. As such, the product of the play was shaped by the play space much as any theatrical performance is limited by its stage.

           But the session wasn't only marked by its differences from traditional D&D play. It was also marked by similarity: namely, the ability of the players to make decisions in character when given access to magical abilities. Most of the players had known each other for at least a year prior to playing, and at the post-session debrief we agreed that many of each player's decisions during the session had surprised the others, based on our understandings of each other's personality. In that classic Artaudian sense, we assumed doubles of ourselves which almost puppeted us on marionette strings. As Antonin Artaud himself said in The Theater and Its Double, "the hieratic quality of the costumes gives each actor something like a double body, a double set of limbs--and the actor stiffly encased in his costume seems only the effigy of himself" (1931-36: 219). However, the interesting twist to this phenomenon was that it could only happen to our voices, and yet it worked all the same. We channeled our characters' voices; our "joys and sorrows [did] not really seem to belong to [us] but rather to obey established rites that were dictated by higher intelligences" (Artaud 1931-36: 219, corrections to grammatical person and tense / aspect to reflect author's experience). My voice became higher in pitch, excitable; it embodied an extroverted, carefree character; this character had no concern for pragmatism and placed themself before the party. Most of these embodied characteristics stood in direct contrast to my own view of myself, yet the other players responded to Dogstar's carefree and self-centered naivete by rolling their eyes (as described vocally by Elithyra's player) or by abandoning a plan that Dogstar came up with.

           In those moments of totally embodying characters who were created in a moment, whose decisions were limited by the circumstances of play, whose imagined activities were totally different in each player's mind, we players developed a sense of what Victor Turner called spontaneous communitas. Turner defines this phenomenon as "'a direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities'" (1974: 79). In such a moment of spontaneous communitas, we players created a space mediated by the Discord server in which there was "'subjectively...a feeling of endless power'" and we were "totally absorbed into a single, synchronized, fluid event" (both Turner 1974: 79). During the debriefing, each player revealed a little of what had changed for them; how they perceived the three-hour event of the session to interact with their very temporal perceptions. Two players remarked that the time seemed to have passed quickly; the DM noted that in other sessions that had to be split for time, picking up where we left off was "important to slide back into the flow."

           "Flow" and "flow-break" are important concepts I'd like to linger on here. Their opposition suggests a boundary between liminal and liminoid states. Here a liminal state is any state in which normativity and conformity is encouraged in order to remain "unmarked" or "transitional;" it is the anti-structure which Turner supposes must permeate all structure in order to contextualize the structure of our lives. As Lao Tzu said in the Tao Te Ching: "Thirty spokes / meet in the hub. / Where the wheel isn't / is where it's useful" (via Le Guin 2011: 11). The liminoid must therefore exist in dynamic opposition to the liminal: where the liminal is transitiven and fleeting, the liminoid is binding. Where the liminal is rule-governed, the liminoid is radical and potentiated. The liminoid looks at the "ideal" state of spontaneous communitas and commidifies it into an experience to strive toward through radical change. Their distinction is highlighted in Turner's second category of  ideological communitas, "a set of theoretical concepts which attempt to describe the interactions of spontaneous communitas...[where] the retrospective look, 'memory,' has already distanced the individual subject from the communal or dyadic experience" (1974: 79). Here Turner says that upon even recalling the infinite power of the spontaneous communitas, one is re-incorporating it into a liminoid, ideological state. Upon pausing our roleplay even to engage in the mechanics of gameplay - e.g. rolling dice, adding proficiency modifiers, performing mental calculations - we "broke flow" as players and had to rely on the theoretical framework of the RPG system to bring us back into a state where we could engage in spontaneous communitas.

           Though Turner might say "that play is an activity - or set of activities - that are categorically uncategorizable, the "anti" by means of which all other categories are destabliized" (Schechner on Turner 1993: 24), Richard Schechner has a more specific set of aims in which to categorize play such as our D&D session. Schechner concludes the introductory section to the second chapter of The Future of Ritual, which he calls Playing, with an extended version of the following thesis: "A coherent theory of play would assert that...play creates its own (permeable) boundaries and realms: multiple realities that are slippery, porous, and full of creative lying...play is performative" (1993: 26-27). Our D&D session certainly met those criteria: the roleplaying itself obviously created a shared space in which our characters lived, which was only accessible to each player and the DM through their own imagination; the game mechanics created another boundary across which the players had to periodically move and "break flow" in order to continue playing by the rules of the game; but also, the audio-only mediation created another boundary, which rendered every action invisible unless explicitly described, highly performed.

             Comparisons of play, ritual, performance, and even trance may also be drawn from a close watching of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's 1952 film, Trance & Dance in Bali. Here I will focus on a clip quoted and discussed by Faye Ginsburg in 2003 as well, "from a sequence at the end of the ceremony...[when a] woman is trying to pull herself out of the trance [that the ceremony brought on]" (Ginsburg 2003: 3).

 FILM SOUNDTRACK (MEAD): "Here is an old woman, 'unwilling' to come back to herself, 'remembering her death [sic: "dance"]' -- until finally the priest brings special offerings to the spirit that possesses her, to persuade it to leave her body...At last, she holds out her hands for the holy water, a sign she is willing to come out of the trance" (Mead via Ginsburg, 2003: 3).

 Even on a superficial level there is nearly a one-to-one correlation between my experience during and after the D&D session and Mead's interpretation of the participants of the Balinese dances. Our debrief served the structural purpose of facilitating the transition "back to ourselves;" the spirits that possessed us were the characters we embodied; the priest was the DM; the offering they brought to the players was the debriefing session; the memories of the dance were recapitulated highlights of the session that we were all particularly impressed with; and the final return to a baseline state of reality occurred with the disconnect from the Discord server.

           The server itself once again sticks out into this interesting space of a facilitator of spontaneous communitas, of Artaudian doubling, of the metacommunicative play-frame à la Bateson. By entering the server, we are communicating the beginning of the metagame: "everything we do is now purposively oriented to facilitating our shared experiences within the D&D session." The server becomes part-temple, part-stage, where our individual subjectivities crystallize and combine into their roles in the higher order of humanity that is the community; what Artaud called a "more pure" level of humanity. Depending on what flavor of nerd you are, I liken this to a metastructure of proteins working as one larger unit, or to Paladins combining their mechalions to form Voltron.

           Tom Boellstorff's ethnography on a Disabled community on Second Life ("The Ability of Place: Digital Topographies of the Virtual Human on Ethnographia Island") is also called to mind: the members of mediated spaces, especially members who share identity markers as Boellstorff's informants and my D&D group did (all members of my oneshot were queer and/or trans), engage in special placemaking practices when their performance and play is located in mediated space. When the space of the imagination becomes shared, communitas that might fit Turner's spontaneous or religious categories might take place, depending on whether that shared space is a temple, a stage, or both. Locating that space in the virtual world, across vast physical distances bridged by a server farm in Virginia, fibre-optic cables, and the sensory data at either end, gives an almost magically intimate quality to the technology that so often separates us into discrete worlds.

works referenced

 Artaud, A., & Sontag, S. (1976). For The Theater and Its Double (1931-36). In Antonin Artaud: selected writings (pp. 215–227). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Boellstorff, T. (2020). The Ability of Place. Current Anthropology, 61(S21). doi: 10.1086/704924

Ginsburg, F. (2003). "Now Watch this Very Carefully..." The Ironies and Afterlife of Margaret Mead's Visual Anthropology. Retrieved from sfonline.barnard.edu/mead/ginsbur2.htm

Schechner, R. (n.d.). 2 - Playing. In The future of ritual: writings on culture and performance (pp. 24–27). Routledge.

Turner, V., & Turner, V. (2008). Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual. In From ritual to theatre: the human seriousness of play. New York, NY: PAJ Publ.

Unit six:

Tw: discussion of sexual assault, abuse, rape.

Rape culture has been a huge topic of discussion in recent news. The me-too movement and discussion of sexual assault and abuse in Hollywood has furthered discussion on trauma and the meaning of consent.

Sexual autonomy and agency are vital in healthy sexual activity for all folks, not just those who are able bodied. It is difficult to determine if an individual is able to know if a situation is safe and empowering or potentially harmful.

Many people define consent as a definitive verbal agreement where both parties say yes. However we often neglect discussion of coercive rapes. We can all understand that no means no. However, it is possible that yes also means no.

In situations with uneven power dynamics, pressure to comply with demands, or in instances where one feels rejecting sexual advances risks safety or privileges they may verbally consent to activities that they truly oppose. If the agreement isn’t enthusiastic, if there are body language cues reflecting hesitation, or if someone changes their mind they haven’t given full consent.

Consent is especially tricky when one or both individuals have disabilities. Cognitive impairments and psychological trauma may alter the ability to deny unwanted sexual encounters or complicate personal judgement and determination. “Competence,” is a term that comes up when we analyze different encounters. Gills piece shares the difficulties that arise in these decisions, especially when the legal system is involved.

In Kalie McArthur’s case, the question of her competency was the main determinant in legal prosecution of her peer-educator. In her experience she developed a sexual relationship with Harris, her peer-educator. She and her peer were assigned janitorial work, but instead had a sexual encounter in the stairwell.

At first in my personal understanding of this matter I had many unaddressed concerns. How does the school account for the fact that they were left unattended? Why are they assigned work outside of the classroom instead of being integrated with other students? It seems as if this places both of their safety at risk and outside of normalized school conduction as well. Gill shares that Kalie’s individual education plan ensured adult supervision at all times. I was surprised that the school was not initially held responsible for the events.

“Yost considered their activity to be sexual and that Harris was abusing McArthur, and Harris was charged with having unlawful sexual relations with a minor, although he was minor himself and younger than McArthur.” While it is an issue that Harris was a peer-educator and had a power advantage, in that regard, there were details left out about the exchange.

It is shared; that Harris, who is later diagnosed and medicated for a cognitive impairment and depression, was portrayed as a predator when he was also vulnerable. The age difference between them means that he was also a minor. Due to this, Kalie was also having sexual relations with a minor. If his diagnosis’ and disabilities were discussed as well, his ability to consent could be equally questioned. “Harris implies that he is as much a victim as McArthur in this situation, punished for his sexual curiosity and unstable mental health.”

By representing Harris as a hormone-filled boy, the public feels justified in protecting Kalie. The representation and controversy of this case share a perspective where men are the aggressors and unable to control sexual drive while women are always victimized. It is possible that both students were unwilling to consent, and in turn both experienced a similar assault. Narrating the proceedings as if Harris is the only guilty party neglects the role of structural measures to ensure students safety.

This case is not clear-cut. It is unclear who is at fault and who is the perpetrator. Regardless, Harris spent time in a juvenile detention center and had to register as a sex offender. The school was responsible for the lack of supervision and preventative methods. “Following Harris’s criminal trial, McArthur’s parents sued D-20 and McArthur’s teacher for negligence in a civil case.” The case was settled with financial payments to the family.

The case gets more tricky when Gill shares what may seem to be consent on Kalie’s behalf. “During the negotiations for this civil case, a professional for the school district claimed that the experience for McArthur was “pleasurable, not traumatic” and that it “ignited her female desires.”” This insertion into the case suggests that she was offered an opportunity to realize her sexual desires through this encounter.

Assumption that the encounter was beneficial to Kalie is informed by sexist, ableist, and heteronormative beliefs. Gill reiterated his stance, “Regardless, we need to be clear that even if McArthur enjoyed the experience, it does not mitigate the unequal power dynamics and assault that she also may have experienced.”

The impact of the event is is represented when Brian Newsome discusses the aftermath. He says that Kalie has experience emotional distress and says, “McArthur frequently asks, “Do I have to take my clothes off?” and repeats, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid.”” This shows the negative impacts this event had on her functioning and emotional well-being.

The determination that she is and was unable to consent is clear in the narration of the events. She was not allowed to testify or speak publicly about her experience or perspective. Adults assumed a protective position and pursued legal intervention without her participation.

One problematic statement in the piece was one from Glen Beck “My faith teaches me that the handicapped are the most valiant among us. My gut tells me, after I volunteered for Special Olympics, that when we get to the end, when we go see God face to face, we’re going to realize that we’re the retarded ones, not those who are fighting with mental disabilities.”

This statement is not only guilty of using a slur, but also feeds into ableist gatekeeping. Beck is under the assumption that all people with disabilities are incapable of keeping themselves safe and need able-bodied individuals to volunteer their efforts to help them gain some able-bodied measure in regard to quality of life. Using the word, “fighting,” is additionally problematic and reflects the medical model of disability where the disabled body (and the disability itself,) is the issue.

He continues, “There is nothing that will put you at the gates of Hell faster than raping a child or raping a handicapped person.” In this elaboration, he uses another slur. Outside of his continued use of inappropriate and demeaning language, I identified a comparison between individuals with disabilities and children. This comparison is an important factor in widespread beliefs about sexuality for those with disabilities.

Individuals with disabilities are often infantilized. Our society views disabled individuals as childlike and unable to make their own choices. Stating that those with disabilities are unable to consent to any sexual activity is harmful. Many desire sexual relationships. It is important that they are able to find willing partners for these encounters who also agree to partake in sexual activities.

Becks contrast between able-bodied people and those with disabilities employs a dichotomous attitude about who is able to agree to sex. As someone with a daughter who has disabilities, he seems to assume that it is his role as a male (especially as her father) to keep her safe. This male-protector status is contradicting with the male-predator perspective exhibited in Kalie’s case.

It is important to remember that anyone is at risk of being taken advantage of, and anyone is capable of perpetrating the assault. Notions of gender roles in sexual activity, ownership and protection of women’s bodies, infantilization of individuals with disabilities, and unwillingness to examine structural inadequacies all pose opportunities for harm.

Limitations on individual choice can pose threats to personhood and ownership of our own bodies and decisions. Safety; both emotionally and physically, are perhaps the most important aspects of sex. When an individual is marked as being unable to say yes, it may be assumed that they also are unable to say no and place them further at risk for assault and abuse. Taking protective roles is helpful in some cases, but it is important to remember that individual levels of understanding vary and many individuals are perfectly capable of consenting and participating in sexual relationships.

Such concrete views on consent and competence set us up for wrongful interpretations of the concepts. Consent is something that must be given, evaluated, and reaffirmed throughout interactions. It is not always clear who is capable of determining their willingness to participate and who isn’t. If we decide anyone with an intellectual disability is a legal minor, an entire group of marginalized individuals are unable to participate in sexual activity altogether. We must view consent and competence in adaptive and fluid ways. The boundaries are not always clear and power dynamics must be continually re-evaluated.

Linking theories with celebrities

The topics which I touched within my project are: Gender and Feminism. I chose these two topics because they are closely related and I believe there are really present nowadays in our lives and you face lots of times during the day some challenge which it requires to place a tag on your gender or sexuality, it can be whilst you’re shopping clothes and it is still a little bit weird to see boys looking in the woman section or girls in the boys section, or children which have it all separated in pink or blue which associates directly hat pink is not a boys colour or blue is the typical colour for boys. Nonetheless, this new non-binary people are starting to be a great part of our modern culture which is much liberal and understanding than others which are close minded and who thought that gender is only classified by the sex you have been born in. Being Non-binary or gender fluid means that you actually feel you are from both sexes, one day they wake up feeling like a man and another day they wake up feeling as a woman, this people are “a minority within a minority” according to The Independent’s article which was shared in class.

According to Butler gender is a performance (Butler, 1990) you act as a girl because you feel or are a girl, this also applies to boys. I personally thought about placing this gender issue into the fashion field because fashion is also a performance, just as the gender fluid change their sex, fashion trends are very dynamic and now with the cruise collections and the winter and summer collections fashion is more ephemerae than ever. Moreover, fashion being a constant performance is one of the key links of the magazine related to both of the main topics, we dress up in a certain way to transmit to people a certain message, as well as the dress codes to certain events or occasions which you will normally don’t get the chance to dress up in a certain way and you feel like a movie star or a James Bond whilst wearing a tuxedo. Fashion is a performing act which mixes a lot of different topic due to the social connotations you give due to the way you are dressed. I found very fascinating how these two cases really look alike and one is fully accepted by society and the other one is not.

Fashion and gender are very linked together because social standard and the idea of how a man looks like and how a woman looks like are implemented in society. As women should look in a certain way, for example, have long hair, go always immaculate to anyplace, wear high heels, wear dresses or skirts, etc. and for men, for example, be manly, be strong, wear trousers, and can’t experiment with clothing because it is very girly or weird that a man can like fashion, etc. typical stereotypes which are nearly never met. Therefore I decided to make it of people who are expected to look in a certain way but still they break the rules and yet don’t look weird or ridiculous by being gender fluid or transsexuals. Just as in the video of The Independent about the couple of non-binary people, Owl and Fox Fisher, which discuss about how they should look, how they should introduce when meeting new people, etc. just little confrontations to boxing themselves and still they are annoying and tedious to being explaining themselves all the time. I chose this topic to create more awareness in society for this minority. (Fenton, 2016)

The second main topic of the magazine, as already mentioned, is feminism. Each of the celebrities that I chose represent in different ways feminism. Jaden Smith represents how women in society are now stronger than they were and are practically equally qualified for any job as men are and this is why he wears skirts, and is not ashamed of it. He is the face for one of the biggest Haut Couture houses, Louis Vuitton, for women’s wear. Nicolas Ghesquière has turned the point of view of last year’s campaign as well as this year’s. The Creative director for LV has placed a man on women’s clothes to show the world that clothes actually don’t have gender but they can be worn by whoever wants to. The son of the actor, Will smith, stated on June in 2016 to be gender fluid “I’m just expressing how I feel inside, which is really no particular way because every day it changes how I feel about the world and myself” (Woolf, 2015). We can see how Jaden belongs to this fourth feminist wave where equality is present.

Hari Nef has a different story; she was born in a male body which she didn’t felt at ease. She changed whilst she was at university and she presented herself to different agencies until IMG chose her due to her personality and magnificent story creating the first transsexual model to sign a contract with IMG models. She represents the power of women; she is clearly the “trans fashion muse of our generation” according to Dazed magazine (So, 2015). She fights for a cause: transsexual people to be seen normal in society and thus, make their sexuality not matter, but what they have to say does as well as encouraging people to explore their gender. Nef is feminine, pretty and a woman who belongs to the fourth wave of feminism, she talks about her sexuality in an open way as she did to Elle magazine “I prefer men who are queer. Not gay men, but queer men – guys with an open mind. Bisexual men, because they're able to understand the different elements of the body without judging that I don't conform to a certain ideal.” (Casparis, 2016). She is concerned about a global issue which is gender, and talk freely about her changing body. She is willing to have a great impact on society and is totally determined to raise her voice.

I chose Erika Linder because of her androgynous style, though she likes being a woman and is comfortable about it, she is more of a tomboy. Furthermore, I picked her due to her fight against being boxed into one sex as there was a time where she only featured in male adverts or campaigns and it was fine for her but she is a woman. Although, she is the type of girl that doesn’t wears much dresses she is still feminine and proud. Nowadays thanks to Louis Vuitton and its creative director Nicolas Ghesquière, she has re-entered the woman section of fashion although she still wants to catwalk for men, as she believes that her male work will stand out more as she is a woman. She, as a female, already represents femininity her way. For me she represents the breaking of the gender box. “Each box has distinctive characteristics that ONLY women or ONLY men should embody.” (Carolina, 2016) This ‘box’ which represents society and social standards and how she defies it by not wanted to be boxed in any way.

I found Pat Dudek researching through the internet looking for different people who could fit into this androgynous alternative look which I wanted and just when I saw him I thought “I found the person who I was looking for”. This student has a lot of potential and is becoming one rising star in this arty/quirky modern culture which people live gender in many different ways and being androgynous is starting not to be a problem but a way to present yourself to society and a way people should accept you. This gender fluid movement which is uprising nowadays, gives more voice to woman as it gives equal possibilities to them as men have by placing them in the same step as men; just as the article I am neither MR, MRS nor MS but MX (Tobia, 2015) which states this “The addition of Mx also represents a significant step forward for the feminist cause. By decentering gender and providing a gender-neutral option to the terms Mrs and Ms, Mx allows women a third option that is not centered around their marital status or patrilineal nomenclature.” By giving woman the chance to choose which gender status they are willing to be referred to as, society is starting to open more boundaries and empower the female figure. Though he is a polish student and hasn’t got any influence yet, he represents fairly well the new artsy modern culture that is approaching and which is more tolerant than the previous generation.

I wanted to focus on the part of my friend Paco, I wanted to show that to be gender fluid you don’t have to be weird looking, but it is more a way you live your life. I wanted to create this section like a statements that anyone can be gender fluid and that is completely normal. That is why I decided to choose the photo which I made of him taking a coffee and place it as the main photograph of his article, just to make him real human being. A person whom you can see perfectly may walk through the street. I try to break that concept of ‘otherness’ (Jensen, 2011), which this topic usually has, as it is a taboo; the stereotype of you must be weird just because you don’t feel part of any gender, the idea of being ‘other’ people the weird ones. I wanted to break all those prejudices and show that they are persons just as you and I which need the same respect as you want for yourself. Therefore this is why the interview I made to him is very significant. I think is very motivating as it is a cheerful story, but it is true that in general it is a topic which is still taboo in our society and even more in the Spanish society which is still influenced by some social standards based in the Catholic Church or Franco, the dictator Spain had until the mid-70’s. I asked him the basic questions that whomever that doesn’t know about the topic would ask, because the magazine can be purchased by whoever wants to, therefore sometimes you have to explain topic since the start. Additionally, it is a way to as already said break the otherness people may have about the topic as with this interview you understand how he lives and what has made him be how he is and probably you can relate to some of the things he might say.

Recruiting the Superstars of Tomorrow: Insights from Today’s Hospitality Leaders

Skift Take: As the global hospitality industry evolves in a more integrated and digitally connected world, it’s demanding that employees have more multidisciplinary skills and nuanced worldviews. However, the industry needs to redefine its value proposition for young talent seeking a rewarding lifetime career with unlimited potential for personal and professional development.

— Jeremy Vargas

One of the most frequent discussions I have with hospitality employers and businesses around the country is that the industry doesn’t properly market itself to prospective future employees and leaders. In a 2016 interview with Skift, I highlighted the stigma around employment in hospitality, including low pay and a mistaken assumption that hospitality means servitude. Yet, we all know how glamorous, fulfilling, and enlightening work in the travel space can be, oftentimes disproving those negative connotations.

Despite this, our recruitment efforts frequently leave us wanting more from our candidates, with the best and brightest being lured to more attractive jobs elsewhere. In order to find and shape a set of exceptional rising talent, the leaders of the industry need to collectively and strategically act now.

Following suit, I interviewed some of the adjunct faculty and advisory board members in the Georgetown University master’s in Global Hospitality Leadership program, all of whom work full-time in the industry. I wanted to gain a better understanding of the state of talent recruitment in hospitality, specifically: who’s doing it right, and what needs to be done to better market ourselves and build a remarkable foundation of leaders that will shape the future of travel.

Here are the questions put forward and a sampling of answers from the faculty and board members:

Which companies are attracting the right talent for the right reasons in this industry?

“Companies that have a focus on innovation and continuous improvement combined with a certain self-autonomy will continue to attract the best talent of the upcoming generations.”

Wolfgang Lindlbauer, former Chief of Global Operations – Marriott International

“Marriott and Hilton are making their sustainability and philanthropic pursuits well known to prospective associates. With millennials so focused on work/life balance and wanting to give back, I think they are answering that call well.”

Shannon Rinella, Sr. Director, Talent Development – Interstate Hotels

“The size and scale of the [hotel] industry welcomes employees attracted to a wide scope of vocations and lifelong job opportunities.That is the main focus of a new American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) campaign, Dreams Happen Here, which underscores this path to upward mobility and showcases the many individual stories of success in our industry.”

Brad Aldrich, SVP Business Development – American Hotel & Lodging Association

What gaps currently exist for hospitality companies that prohibit attracting the right talent?

“In the quest to find the very best talent in hospitality, the industry would be best served to follow in the steps of what leadership and management consulting firms have been doing for decades: using research-based assessments for selection and career development to measure whether or not someone has what I call ‘the hospitality gene.’ Most hiring managers hire people based on relationship, positive projection, and identity with self, and/or an overly biased positive view (the halo effect), rather than the psychological factors that make someone customer-focused and service-oriented. My research shows that when it comes to hiring the best talent, empathy does not register as correlated with customer-centricity — altruism does, as does a high problem-solving ability.”

Mia Mulrennan, VP & Chief Talent Officer – Sun Country Airlines & Founder – Rave-Worthy LLC

“The industry prestige factor continues to be a barrier. We continue to be known as a place where you can have a job, but rarely a career. Hotels are not known as a high-income-generating industry, and sometimes getting highly educated talent to fill our roles — knowing that those individuals may need to start with very low incomes to eventually get to the peak — can be difficult.”

Shannon Rinella

What can a company do to attract the best candidates?

“One thing all of us in the industry need to re-examine is the old growth model where to move up, you had to move around. People seem to be less willing to do that now, so how do you keep great talent engaged, right where they want to be?”

Shannon Rinella

“In order to attract and retain top talent, any industry must stay current about where to find new leaders! At Google, our CEO Sundar Pichai recently made diversity — all types of diversity — a top priority as we grow our workforce globally. This could be applied to the hospitality industry as well. Recruit in new places! Explore opportunities to hire emerging leaders of different backgrounds, from different industries, and new degree programs.”

Carley Graham Garcia, Head of Industry Relations – Google, Inc.

“Over the past few years, the industry has redoubled efforts to ensure that the resources are in place to provide scholarships and apprenticeship programs that will allow hoteliers to foster a strong pipeline of future talent. Recently, AHLA, the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF), and Jobs for the Future (JFF) partnered to create and implement a national Hospitality Sector Registered Apprenticeship (HSRA) initiative for the restaurant, foodservice, and hotel and lodging industries. Apprenticeship is a proven way for employers to build the talent they need and for workers to obtain skills and credentials that put them on a path to successful careers.”

Brad Aldrich

What can aspiring hospitality associates and leaders do to make themselves the best possible fit for this quickly evolving industry?

“The single most important thing aspiring hospitality associate leaders can do to prepare themselves for this industry is to be curious. Whether it be customer needs, technology, or new entrants, to a name a few, this marketplace is rapidly changing. Leaders need to understand what is happening, embrace change, ask questions, and read materials in order to put together a comprehensive strategic plan.”

Douglas Lisi, Hospitality Adjunct Faculty – Georgetown University

“Stay on top of changes and innovations. The world is open, communication is instant and worldwide, and therefore customer expectations are increasing. We need to prepare our current hospitality professionals with those skillsets and the mindset to continuously improve and act. That includes having an awareness of other businesses and industries with the ability to translate advantages for our business.”

Wolfgang Lindlbauer

“Be a voracious learner. Know what’s going on in your property and properties around the country. Some say “adapt or die” but I prefer “adapt and thrive.” Know what may be coming next and push yourself to be aware of emerging trends and technology.”

Shannon Rinella

“While an individual’s career roadmap may outline the titles or roles ones is looking for, an understanding of the skills and expertise required is arguably more important. Careers are increasingly more oriented around gaining new experiences versus title or level. Organizations are becoming increasingly more fluid and role boundaries are blurring. Accordingly, individuals need to be more open to different routes if they can achieve the same end result.”

Douglas Lisi

Even in the hospitality world, not all organizations are the same, but our common struggle to attract the best talent is a real problem we are all facing. The hospitality industry must act as a whole create some standard recruitment practices and collectively market to a new and rising workforce. At the same time, it is imperative for companies to maintain their individual uniqueness and differentiators, not only for prospective guests but also for future employees that will help shape the industry’s future.

— Gray Shealy, Faculty, Master’s in Global Hospitality Leadership – Georgetown University