Moving Memoir Across Markets and Media: A Study of Popular Memoir and Its Genre Effects

This article introduces the novel concept of fictional populism, describing the phenomenon of made-up characters created and performed by real individuals. These imaginary political candidates typically employ fiction, humour (in the forms of parody and satire), and self-scandalization to accentuate their (populist) messages. Building on the concept of celebrity populism that explores the mixture of populism with celebrity culture, this study examines the features of fictional populism. It focuses on two case studies from Croatia and one from Serbia. Qualitative content analysis of case studies’ communication on Facebook during election campaigns is conducted with the aim to understand how they blended elements of celebrity and popular culture to emphasize their populist messages. Moreover, the study explores how these fictional candidates addressed real political issues during campaigns. By employing an iterative approach between theory and analysis, the article offers rich portrayals of each candidate’s performances, illuminating their strategic use of fiction, humour, and self-scandalization to emphasize the populist messages and appeal to the people. The study outlines the broader dimensions and elements that characterize specific communication features of fictional populists.

We start from the assumption that in several Latin American republics there is a previously constructed national identity, which has been reinforced in the cultural celebrations of both the Centenary and the more recent Bicentenary, carried out by the political activity of the government in power. The starting hypothesis is that the political-cultural discourse of cultural celebrations responds to official ideology, aiming to reinforce national identity, adapting it to a new socio-historical context. And how these celebrations have served to further reinforce this national identity, in accordance with the purposes and positions of the official agenda. If we focus on the case study of Mexico's political community, we can see how throughout two key moments in its history, Independence, the Mexican Revolution and their respective acts and cultural demands, a discourse and a reform of this national identity , which consolidated the national project of identity characteristics as a whole, but a constructed whole, not something immanent and previous created, but rather it is the people through their historical path that creates, configures and gives color to this entire set of cultural elements or ingredients that constitute its identity as a people and as a nation. We try to answer what was done during the bicentennial and why it was done that way. To understand how the political-cultural discourse of the bicentennials in its context and purposes, explains and lists its main identity traits in the form of a catalogue.

Reviewed by: Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity Faye Hammill Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.Aaron Jaffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 248. $75.00 (cloth). On the cover of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity is a picture of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses. In his analysis of this image, Aaron Jaffe comments: "Each cultural entity—the celebrity and the modernist—assumes its characteristic form as cultural capital." Like the star image, he explains, the modernist's "textual imprimatur is a metonym for its subject, a metonym that represents it as an object of cultural production, circulation and consumption" (1). This insight, central to the book, is elaborated persuasively through a series of case studies. The first chapter considers modernist stories of literary life, tracing the ideas about literary authority and the writerly persona which are inscribed in Portrait of the Artist and a selection of other texts. The next chapter, a particularly innovative one, analyzes the making of modernist reputation through literary criticism, arguing that the modes developed by Pound and Eliot, and later by Richards and Leavis, "were predicated on certain assumptions about the scarcity of elite literary reputation" (4). Chapter Three turns to collaboration, considering individual relationships between authors and focusing on Eliot's and Pound's editing, framing, and introducing of texts by women modernists. The fourth chapter examines anthologies, suggesting that the Georgian, imagist, and Wheels anthologies, among others, created literary brand names, and exemplified modernist promotional networking. A final chapter "concerns the symbiosis of modernist reputation and the arts and culture superstructure emerging in interwar England" (4), discussing in particular Wyndham Lewis's relation to modernist portraiture. The bulk of the discussion in Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity is devoted to just four authors: Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Lewis. Since Jaffe is concerned with the ways in which modernists fashioned their reputations and created a market for elite textual signatures, he deliberately concentrates on the most high-profile careers, noting that his book "makes the looming presence [End Page 389] of the familiar exchanges of modernist author-geniuses in modernist studies the very object of its analysis" (9). Yet even as it uncovers the market and ideological forces which resulted in a deliberately restricted canon of modernist "masterpieces," the book inevitably reinforces that canon. Recirculating and privileging the names and images of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Lewis, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity becomes itself a channel for the ongoing constitution of major (male) modernists as stars. The account of the four "Men of 1914" is—to be sure—amplified by reference to many other literary figures: editors and critics as well as novelists and poets. Waugh, Isherwood, Upward, Barnes, Moore, and Sitwell receive particular attention. But their persistent placing as "minor" in relation to the modernist canon is re-staged by this book, even as it is analyzed. The whole of the discussion on Barnes, for example, is about the way in which editions of her books are introduced by Eliot. Jaffe's argument about the introducer's enactment of his superiority over the writer introduced is both convincing and thought-provoking, yet I was left with many unanswered questions about how Barnes's own strategies of career fashioning might compare with Eliot's, and to what extent the so-called "minor" modernists contributed to their own marginality through ineffective negotiations with publicity and the marketplace. In addition, Jaffe's perception of "the modernist and the popular partaking in a continuous logic" (200) misses out the whole realm of the middlebrow. Admittedly, most other studies of modernism and popular culture ignore the middlebrow, but it seems a particularly odd omission in a book focussing on celebrity. Joe Moran, in Star Authors (2000), has noted the intimate connection between the advent of the literary celebrity and the rise of middlebrow print culture; moreover, the ambiguous cultural positioning of the celebrity author is in some respects comparable to the location of the middlebrow between the restricted and extended fields of literary production. None of this, however, invalidates any of Jaffe's arguments, and whilst he has not had space to pursue the directions I have mentioned, his book will doubtless inspire other...

[Extract:] Celebrities are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary Western culture. Although the phenomenon of celebrity itself predates the twentieth century, the rise of the modern mass media – popular newspapers, cinema, radio, and television, and more recently the Internet and other digital communication technologies – has done much to promote and circulate public knowledge of celebrities during the last 100 years. The presence of multi-channel digital television, radio, and the World Wide Web in Western households at the turn of the twenty-first century has not only increased the number of places in which celebrities can be seen and heard, but has also required media producers to compete with each other and with alternative leisure activities for the attention of fragmented audiences, an increasingly precious commodity. The rise of celebrity culture is inextricably linked to developments in media systems that operate within capitalist systems of commodity exchange. Most obviously, celebrities provide a well-proven route to attracting and retaining audiences, helping to offset the risks inherent in cultural production. They also play out a fantasy of the individual simultaneously performing within public and the private spheres. As P. David Marshall neatly puts it, celebrities might be seen as a “production locale for an elaborate discourse on the individual and individuality” (1997: 4). However the ubiquity of celebrity culture does not mean that its considerable diversity can be ignored. A cursory glance through the prime-time television schedules, for instance, reveals how one might choose between shows featuring celebrity hosts and guests, contest-based reality television shows that participate in the construction of celebrity, personality driven lifestyle programming, sports shows featuring star athletes and commentators, and even political shows with celebrity journalists. All of this is indicative not just of the pervasiveness of modern celebrity culture but also its diversity and breadth.

The interrelationship between fashion and celebrity is now a salient and pervasive feature of the media world. This accessible text presents the first in-depth study of the phenomenon, assessing the degree to which celebrity culture has reshaped the fashion system. Fashion and Celebrity Culture critically examines the history of this relationship from its growth in the nineteenth century to its mutation during the twentieth century to the dramatic changes that have befallen it in the last two decades. It addresses the fashion-celebrity nexus as it plays itself out across mainstream cinema, television and music and in the celebrity status of a range of designers, models and artists. It explores the strategies that have enabled visual culture to recast itself in the new climate of celebrity obsession, popular culture and the art world to respond adaptively to its insistent pressures. With its engaging analysis and case studies from Lillian Gish to Louis Vuitton to Lady Gaga, Fashion and Celebrity Culture is of major interest to students of fashion, media studies, film, television studies and popular culture, and anyone with an interest in this global phenomenon.

The interrelationship between fashion and celebrity is now a salient and pervasive feature of the media world. This accessible text presents the first in-depth study of the phenomenon, assessing the degree to which celebrity culture has reshaped the fashion system. Fashion and Celebrity Culture critically examines the history of this relationship from its growth in the nineteenth century to its mutation during the twentieth century to the dramatic changes that have befallen it in the last two decades. It addresses the fashion-celebrity nexus as it plays itself out across mainstream cinema, television and music and in the celebrity status of a range of designers, models and artists. It explores the strategies that have enabled visual culture to recast itself in the new climate of celebrity obsession, popular culture and the art world to respond adaptively to its insistent pressures. With its engaging analysis and case studies from Lillian Gish to Louis Vuitton to Lady Gaga, Fashion and Celebrity Culture is of major interest to students of fashion, media studies, film, television studies and popular culture, and anyone with an interest in this global phenomenon.

Effective communication and knowledge sharing across stakeholder groups (e.g., science, government, business, civil society, farmers, and the general public) are essential for more informed water resource management. Visualizations and graphics are powerful tools to engage diverse groups with unfamiliar information. Despite this potential, the design of visuals within applied science settings often does not involve end‐user interaction or explicit consideration of their existing knowledge systems, perspective, requirements, and context of use. As a result, products are often difficult for users to understand and contextualize. While user interaction and the development of tailored visualizations is increasingly promoted as a potential remedy, limited empirical evidence exists that shows the potential impact and can guide the development of specific approaches. We piloted an iterative and user‐centered design methodology toward the tailoring of infographic‐style posters in the context of Peruvian water governance. To test whether tailoring demonstrably improves the perceived effectiveness of products, we designed three products that conveyed similar information but were tailored to three different audiences (an Andean agricultural, urban professional, and urban general). We then compared the tailored posters to those tailored to other audiences by means of interviews and user grading. We found that end‐users perceive products that have undergone tailoring as more interesting, clearer, and more useful than products designed without explicit user consideration. Our findings indicate that identifying groups with shared characteristics and requirements is key for effective tailoring. Our research provides empirical evidence to support the incorporation of user‐centered design methods in water resource management contexts.

This is a case study of the Oscars ceremony 2007, analysing how the awards show works as a mediated ritual within celebrity culture. In the analysis, I characterize the Oscars as an example of a live media event, and then I analyse how it is connected to celebrity culture and, eventually, I discuss whether it can be said to have religious affinities and perhaps even be an example of a replacement strategy for the decline in organized religion. In my analysis I combine sociological analysis of the media event genre as presented by Dayan & Katz, as well as Couldry, with cultural analysis of celebrity culture and stars as argued by Rojek, Turner, Morin and Dyer. On the basis of this analysis, I want to argue that the Academy Awards ceremony can be seen as a re-enchanted evening on several levels: as a live media event, a mediated ritual and as presenting glamorous stars as objects of identification.

Reviewed by: Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present by Jean A. Boyd Travis D. Stimeling Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present. By Jean A. Boyd. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012. Pp. 378. Illustrations, figures, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780896727090, $65.00 cloth; ISBN 9780896727373, $39.95 paper.) Musicologist Jean A. Boyd has, for the past two decades or more, conducted interviews with dozens of western swing musicians and published three monographs documenting the history of the genre and exploring western swing's jazz roots: The Jazz of the Southwest: An Oral History of Western Swing (University of Texas Press, 1998), We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mills (University of Texas Press, 2003), and, most recently, Dance All Night: Those Other Southwestern Swing Bands, Past and Present (Texas Tech University Press, 2012). In Dance All Night, Boyd offers an encyclopedic study of forty-one western swing bands spanning the genre's eight-decade history in Texas and Oklahoma. In so doing, she challenges the historical dominance of the Milton Brown and Bob Wills bands by drawing much-needed attention to the lesser-known regional bands that dominated local radio, dance halls, and festival stages. Boyd divides the genre's history in the region into two epochs: a pre-1945 golden age in which local and regional bands thrived and a post-World War II era in which the dance hall and festival scenes were dominated by revivalists who preserved the music of the earlier generation and crossover acts who brought jazz, mainstream country, and rock and roll into the genre. In her discussion of the golden age, Boyd organizes the study geographically, providing short entries on bands in North, Central, South, and West Texas and in Oklahoma, while the postwar era is divided into two chapters exploring crossover and revivalist groups, respectively. Within each chapter, Boyd presents brief biographical and musical portraits of key bands and bandleaders, each drawing upon her extensive oral history research, musical analysis, and transcriptions of reissued and commercially available recordings. Readers will, no doubt, find Dance All Night to be a valuable resource when seeking information on important Texas and Oklahoma western swing bands. The structure of the book, however, offers little room for broader historical or musical contextualization. Brief introductions and conclusions in each chapter and a broad introduction to the book as a whole provide a backdrop for individual case studies, but a more thorough integration of these case studies may have made it easier for readers to draw connections between bands and between western swing [End Page 406] and the broader popular music landscape. Moreover, one of the greatest strengths of Boyd's study, the musical transcriptions, is underutilized, in large part because they are located in a somewhat awkwardly placed third section. Although the transcriptions offered here can provide valuable information pertaining to the improvisational approaches of many of the musicians under examination, Boyd offers little detail in her musical analysis, leaving the traces of musical innovation and influence largely unexamined. Despite these shortcomings, Boyd has made an important contribution to the western swing literature that will certainly prove useful to scholars, fans, and practicing musicians alike. Written in an accessible tone, the text is approachable, and Boyd's use of extended quotations from oral histories skillfully cedes authority to western swing practitioners. Moreover, musicians will appreciate Boyd's transcriptions, which stand as a valuable ancillary to the original source recordings, despite occasional typesetting errors that make them difficult to read. An ambitious project, Boyd's Dance All Night is essential reading for anyone interested in western swing, musical hybridity, and Texas dance hall culture. Travis D. Stimeling Millikin University Copyright © 2013 The Texas State Historical Association

This paper examines how information technology (IT) can be implemented more effectively and at the same time serve as a means to enable profound organizational change. A framework for effective IT implementation is derived and introduced and backed up by the discussion of two case studies. The findings indicate, that a strong consideration of the organizational culture is a critical factor in IT implementation, while special attention should be dedicated to the alignment of three different subcultures, that can be frequently encountered in most business organizations. It is suggested, that the consideration of the culture, highly integrated with the technological, strategical and structural aspects of IT implementation give access to a new level of accomplishment.

Introduction This paper highlights the efforts of cultural intermediaries operating social networks for pets, known as petworking. Petworking aligns with the ever-increasing use of social media platforms where “one in ten pet owners have a social media account especially for their pet” (Schroeder). Petworking represents the increased affect of connectivity between pets and their owners within the broader pet community. Although it is true that “no one knows you are a dog on the Internet” (Steiner), it is fair to say that petworking is not the work of the animals directly, but the cultural intermediaries who construct the environment for pets to interact with others. Boo the Pomeranian is one example of a highly networked, cute and celebrity pet, whose antics are broadcast across a plethora of online networks including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, to contradict the rhetoric that cats rule the Internet, it is instead the strategic efforts of cultural intermediaries that take the banal activities of Boo and his “petworked individualism” to his global fan base. The research within this paper, through the lens of animal celebrity, extends recent work undertaken in the celebrity studies field that seeks to understand the connection between celebrities and ‘ordinary folk’, or rather ordinary folk as celebrities. In that regard, the connection between ordinary and celebrity animals is explored through the work of the cultural intermediary who capitalises on the authenticity and cute characteristics of animals. This paper also seeks to understand the role of the petworking cultural intermediary by exploring the cyclic process of disintermediation/remediation/intermediation of Internet communication. Celebrity Studies, Cute Culture and Petworking It is appropriate to first outline the connection of cute with celebrity, and how they relate to petworking. In the first instance, the notion of celebrity is primarily a phenomenon associated with humans. Historically, one of the earliest studies on celebrity focused on the “the person who is known for his well-knownness” (Boorstin 57). Further, celebrity has been noted as a construct by the media industries that has developed “entertainment figures as transmitted via the 20th century mass media” (Feeley 468). Celebrity has a history with the 19th and 20th century literature on the Hollywood star system and its transmission of fame to the mass audiences. As media and cultural studies adopted celebrity as a focus, celebrity studies became fascinated with “how the star image was produced and consumed and how it both shaped and reflected social and cultural identity” (Feeley 470). A more contemporary study into the exploration of celebrity is, as Turner suggests, a demotic turn that sees the media create ‘celebrities’ from ordinary folk. Dyer has argued that one of the core characteristics of celebrity is the ability for one to identify and imitate the star. In each of these examples of celebrity studies, it is assumed that the celebrity is indeed a human being. The humanistic value of celebrity then is problematic when considering how it relates to animals, specifically one’s pet. One way of approaching the study of celebrity and pets is through the lens of animal celebrity. There have been numerous cases of famous animals, with one of the earliest records in Hanno, a famous elephant who was a gift for Pope Leo X on his coronation from King Manuel I of Portugal, 1514. More recent animal celebrity has been demonstrated in cases of Paul the octopus whose celebrity status was reached through his ability to predict the winning teams during the 2010 World Cup, or Dolly the sheep who is infamous as being not only the first cloned sheep but also the first cloned being. Other famous pets are struck by celebrity status for non-favourable acts, for example Tilikum, or Tilly as he is known. TIlly is a bull orca that has been responsible for the deaths of three people during his time in captivity. His story, which also represents his association with celebrity, is documented in the 2013 documentary, Blackfish. Each of these cases of famous animals demonstrates that animal celebrity is not a new issue, but highlights the significance between ‘ordinary’ animals and ‘celebrity’ animals. It could be argued it is the impact of the mass media’s depiction of these animals that defines them as celebrity animals beyond their ordinary counterparts. Yet, in attempting to understand the appeal of animal celebrity, Blewitt notes that pets “wear the badge of authenticity that is held to be so important for credible image-management; there is never any question as to whether or not they are ‘being themselves’” (117). The appeal of animal celebrity for humans is represented through the animal’s authenticity because they are incapable of misrepresenting facts. Often the authentic animal characteristic is combined with ‘cute’ characteristics to increase their appeal, or their relational value with humans, and thereby their popularity. This is certainly the case with giant pandas where they “have the credibility of being an endangered species, look cuddly, have big moony eyes and so have automatic non-human conservation charisma” (Blewitt 326). In this scenario, the giant panda represents the popular qualities of animal cuteness which increases their relational value with humans. McVeigh suggests cute is a symbol of daily aesthetic equaling a “standard attribute” (230) to facilitate high reading of cultural texts and goods. Kinsella argues that cute builds on cutie, which “takes cuteness as its starting point, but on top of the basic ingredient of childlikeness, Cutie style is also chic, eccentric, androgynous and humorous” (Fetishism 229). Cute can shift from pop culture signifiers, to high cultural symbols that represent young, amusing and helpless representations. When cute is in dialogue with celebrity, specifically animal celebrity, it is the cute appeal, or the “silent desperation of the lost puppy dog” (Harris 179) that propels humans to increasingly construct and consume celebrity through animals. Distributing the appeal of cute animal celebrities across digital communication technologies provides the opportunity to explore and understand the petworking phenomenon. The authentic representation of cute animals outlined above has demonstrated the increased relational value of animal celebrity in a non-networked environment. However, when contextualised in a digitally connected environment that engages the affordances of social media platforms, the exploration of petworking can answer some animal celebrity questions raised by Giles. In his taxonomy of animal celebrity, Giles defines four categories that distinguish famous pets: “(a) public figures; (b) the meritocratically famous; (c) show business ‘stars’; and (d) the accidentally famous” (118). He suggests the first two categories are exemplified by the pets of politicians, or the biggest or smallest of a species. However he notes “it is impossible to distinguish between the remaining categories since ‘accidental fame’ presupposes that the other famous animals have engineered their own celebrity to some extent” (ibid.). This is precisely the space that petworking occupies. Pets do not engineer their own celebrity; rather, it is the strategic and coordinated efforts of their owners that create “accidentally famous” animals. The example of petworking demonstrates the role of the intermediary who constructs the identity of the non-ordinary pet with high relational value. A pet with high relational value does not occur serendipitously nor is it the work of a famous animal engineering his or her own celebrity. Rather, it is the work of human intermediaries who strategically utilise authenticity and cute as animal characteristics that increase the animal’s appeal, and thereby its popularity. To successfully engage in petworking, intermediaries use social media platforms to disseminate or broadcast the celebrity animal’s characteristics. The following case study of Boo the Pomeranian demonstrates the connection of celebrity studies with cute culture that is disseminated through social media platforms – a petworking example. The Case of BooThe conceptual framework for this research draws from the media’s coverage of petworking. In that environment, petworking is referenced wherever journalists refer to the practice of “cute” animals engaging in social networking activities. Warr suggests petworking represents “people who want to set up personal social profiles on behalf of their pets”. Ortiz suggests petworking aims to “employ a network marketing strategy for social, political or commercial gain using animals, pets, and goods and services related to animals and pets”. Interestingly, much of the discussion of petworking relates to the act of networking through pets to break the ice with other pet owners to engage in more complex interactions. To move the existing work beyond pets to break the ice, Williams notes that “one in 10 of all UK pets have their own Facebook page, Twitter account or YouTube channel” and “14 per cent of dog owners maintain a Facebook page for their pet, whereas 6 per cent boast Twitter accounts”. Regardless of the motivation of pet owners to engage in petworking, there is an increasing presence of pets in an online environment. Boo the Pomeranian, rose to fame as the world’s cutest dog during 2009. His Facebook page has 10,435,458 likes at the time of writing, making him the most popular dog on Facebook and aligning him with the Public Figure page category, a key celebrity indicator. His tagline reads, “My name is Boo. I am a dog. Life is good.” His connection to popularity came on 26 October 2010, when celebrity blogger Khloé Kardashian wrote “OMG, I just found this dog named Boo on facebook and I am seriously in LOVE […] If you are in facebook, go like this page because it’s beyond cute!” Boo’s p

A B S T R A C T • This article sketches a theory of celebrity culture that relies on taking a longer view of its history than has been customary in Cultural Studies. While a number of cultural theorists have analysed contemporary celebrity, and a number of film historians have connected the cultural history of celebrity to the rise of modern cinema, this essay suggests that modern celebrity culture has its roots in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century industrialization of print. It argues that a celebrity's branded identity circulates so extensively in part because it can be appropriated so easily. In order to trace in greater detail the processes of appropriation that drive celebrity culture, the essay takes the reception of Lord Byron (1788—1824) as a case study. The article surveys a number of nineteenth-century commentators who predicted that Byron's work would be unread after his death. It examines in detail the posthumous reprinting of one stanza from Byron's poem Childe Harold in travel guides, school anthologies and elocution manuals, showing how some fragments of Byron's writing were given renewed currency, in part, by becoming embedded in new contexts and refitted for new ideological purposes. It suggests that by understanding the infrastructure of citation, appropriation and redeployment that can turn celebrities from earlier ages into canonical figures for later ones, we can grasp how their original celebrity becomes obscured, and with it the long history of celebrity culture, which seems perpetually to be a recent innovation.

This comprehensive work presents a thorough exploration of celebrity ‘bromances,’ interrogating how bromances are portrayed in media and consumed by audiences to examine themes of celebrity persona, performativity, and authenticity. The authors examine how the performance of intimate male friendships functions within broadly ‘Western’ celebrity culture from three primary perspectives: construction of persona; interactions with audiences and fans; and commodification. Case studies from film and television are used to illustrate the argument that, regardless of their authenticity (real or staged), bromances are useful for engaging audiences and creating an extension of entertainment beyond the film the actors originally sought to promote. The first truly interdisciplinary study of its kind, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of communications, advertising, marketing, Internet studies, media, journalism, cultural studies, and film and television.

<p>Celebrating Difference questions New Zealand’s current civic architecture, and the way we will design these environments in the future. This thesis explores various cultural literary precedents supported by two detailed case studies and a civic scale architectural design project. Firstly, this thesis explores a global stance on multi-culture and difference and investigates a contemporary breakdown of difference, culture and multiculturalism. The reader is then taken through a journey of New Zealand’s civic history, with an emphasis on cultural and social climates, and their acknowledgement or celebration through architectural discourse. Multicultural Australia, Bernard Tschumi’s metaphorical consumption and a literal exploration of food’s contribution in the civic arena are all literary examples examined within the research with an emphasis on re-direction and possibly unseen correlations within civic scale design. These examinations are to question an international field of cultural architectural discourse and identify events and forms that contribute to cultural celebration. The two case studies examined are Federation Square, Melbourne city and Wellington’s CBD, in New Zealand. These studies highlight each space’s exhibition of cultural celebration and aid in defining key characteristics that encourage cultural celebration through architecture. The hypothesis aligns the study’s key findings with the design project, Architectural Conflation within an Urban Fabric. This correlative piece identifies human similarity as a critical point of understanding in the equation of difference. When similarity is acknowledged, a closeness is formed allowing a greater understanding of human difference to be achieved – doesn’t make good sense. A re-discovery of Raw Foods, Landscape and Materiality are determined as key architectural attributes that aid in creating environments that celebrate difference through architectural discourse.</p>

<p>Celebrating Difference questions New Zealand’s current civic architecture, and the way we will design these environments in the future. This thesis explores various cultural literary precedents supported by two detailed case studies and a civic scale architectural design project. Firstly, this thesis explores a global stance on multi-culture and difference and investigates a contemporary breakdown of difference, culture and multiculturalism. The reader is then taken through a journey of New Zealand’s civic history, with an emphasis on cultural and social climates, and their acknowledgement or celebration through architectural discourse. Multicultural Australia, Bernard Tschumi’s metaphorical consumption and a literal exploration of food’s contribution in the civic arena are all literary examples examined within the research with an emphasis on re-direction and possibly unseen correlations within civic scale design. These examinations are to question an international field of cultural architectural discourse and identify events and forms that contribute to cultural celebration. The two case studies examined are Federation Square, Melbourne city and Wellington’s CBD, in New Zealand. These studies highlight each space’s exhibition of cultural celebration and aid in defining key characteristics that encourage cultural celebration through architecture. The hypothesis aligns the study’s key findings with the design project, Architectural Conflation within an Urban Fabric. This correlative piece identifies human similarity as a critical point of understanding in the equation of difference. When similarity is acknowledged, a closeness is formed allowing a greater understanding of human difference to be achieved – doesn’t make good sense. A re-discovery of Raw Foods, Landscape and Materiality are determined as key architectural attributes that aid in creating environments that celebrate difference through architectural discourse.</p>