Symbolic Confrontation Research Articles

“Little wars with the police”: Aesthetic arsenals and intellects of insult

This paper describes the contemporary entanglement of “fuck the police” (FTP) and “all cops are bastards” (ACAB), locating each as examples of a growing rejection of an immiserating police power. We argue that these confrontational phrases emerge from the policed classes as relatively precise political diagnoses of a police power that is elementally concerned with the fabrication of capital’s social, racial, economic, and aesthetic order(s). In our view, the anti-police vitality communicated in these and other crude, combative, and dismissive symbolic confrontations with police is part of the necessary conditions for the revolutionary pursuit of a livable future.

Monstrous Masculinities: Characters' Reactions to Abjection Point to Conflicted Truths in Historical Memory and Gender in Insensibles (2012)

Abstract: Critics read the children with congenital insensitivity in Juan Carlos Medina's Insensibles (2012) as an allegory for Spaniards born into democracy. Just as the film's children cannot feel physical pain, later generations cannot comprehend the trauma of living through the civil war and/or ensuing dictatorship. This article expands this interpretation to note how the postmemory thriller's use of traditional gender markers and abjection offers further insight into the film's disputed ending. Feminine-presenting characters react to abjection (confrontations of the non-self) in ways that exemplify Matt Hills's pleasures of horror and reflect how Spain perpetually grapples with its fascist legacy. These characters react to abject's pain and violence with simultaneous attraction and repulsion, much like Spain's morbid fascination with reexamining its past. In contrast, masculine-presenting characters' disengagement speaks to politically conservative efforts to stymie historical memory campaigns. Protagonist David's "feminization" appears to support these efforts to recover memory. However, the final scene erases all affiliations between gender, abjection, and memory in a timeless, spaceless void, containing David's symbolic confrontation of the past to the hypothetical.

The deterioration of residential neighborhoods and the challenges of developing them in Algerian cities. A case study of a neighborhood of 600 dwellings in the city of M’sila

Urban planning demands that the needs and problems resulting from the dynamics of society and its development should be taken into account, relying on the studies that consider the reality of the city and the factors influencing its daily life, so it can perform its function under favorable circumstances for a better future within the context of durable development. It should be remembered that the first imbalances of the urban space are those that followed the industrial revolution and the doctrines and intellectual trends. However, the modern trend in architecture and urbanization in terms of urban space is the most influential. Urban space becomes a scene of symbolic confrontations between the designer (imposed plans) and the users of space. This situation appears clearly in the deterioration of the urban space giving a significant transfer of a denial, because of its incompatibility with the needs of the population. The Algerian city has experienced, particularly after the independence, the same situation despite the diversity of cultural and cultural heritage because of several factors, including rapid urban growth. These factors marked the course of the reconstruction and thus the urban structure of the Algerian cities, which urged the search for solutions, hastily put in place, to this evolution which led to changes in the society, testifying a blatant failure to reach the ambitions of users when they were excluded during all stages of the urban project. This is why urban space is considered as consumer goods within the user's reach, although it should be considered as a process rather than a product. Our research work is axed on the inadequacy of the productive environment (living environment or urban space) in the city of M'sila and on the way of life of the population that uses this space for its needs and aspirations, which are expressed through unjustified user interventions in the perspective of adapting space to their way of life. The point is to focus on the user and his participation in the creation of a durable and suitable urban environment.

Materializing Humor: Appropriation as Means of Symbolic Confrontation in the 2013 Protest in Turkey

In the 2013 protests, the protesters manifested their claims and emotions with a blend of humor and creativity. The protesters' visual expressions acted as a powerful communication tool that constructed a strong unity among the protesters. Along with other means of expression, the protesters carried out the resistance to the artifacts that they created during the protest. They played with the real-life settings of the artifacts at hand and created new combinations and ways of using them to resist the authorities. Especially the artifacts, which were created through the use of humor, became an essential medium of symbolic confrontation. This article presents visual analysis focusing on the material and expressive aspects of the artifacts and how they served the protest.

Thinking About (and with) Maps: A Reflection on Artistic-Activist Interventions in Contemporary Metropolises

Abstract Hegemonic maps that are guided by political, cultural, and economic interests, name and create visibility schemes that establish representations of goods and natural resources while simultaneously fixing and making invisible the social and spatial dynamics that characterize mapped regions and populations as unique. Many associations and artistic-activist collectives are concerned about this situation and its effects and have started to use open source software in order make visible a set of political issues that are hidden by “official” maps, geared towards control. With regard to this symbolic confrontation, the present article's main objective is to systematically reflect upon political and associative arrangements related to the contemporary dissemination of technological resources aimed at cartographic practices.

Las construcciones de las imágenes de salta. Articulaciones entre noticias y ficciones cinematográficas

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar cómo es que se construyen diversas imágenes de la ciudad de Salta, a partir de la indagación de noticias, como producciones televisivas, y de ficciones cinematográficas. Es decir, modalidades con que se representa visualmente a la ciudad tanto en clave informativa como ficcional. La metodología es cualitativa, emplea la teoría de las Representaciones sociales, la Semiótica audiovisual, los aportes provenientes de la Socio-semiótica, además del estudio de las imágenes y de la construcción de identidades locales. Se toma como corpus de análisis las producciones ficcionales de Alejandro Arroz Luz de invierno e Historias de las orillas y tres piezas informativas audiovisuales que se relevaron de canales televisivos locales y que referencian sobre todo el barrio denominado 'Gauchito Gil', perteneciente a la zona sudeste de la ciudad de Salta. Se espera poder construir una mirada que atraviese formatos audiovisuales diversos y que funcionen como estrategias metodológicas para abordar la topicalización de las ciudades en las producciones audiovisuales en sus diferentes formatos. El trabajo pretende así colaborar con los estudios sobre ciudad, modalidades de representación en el campo audiovisual y las formas en que las memorias se construyen y se reentraman en los procesos identitarios locales atendiendo a dos modalidades de construcción diferenciados, dando cuenta del espesor temporal de las representaciones que se ponen 'en pantalla'. De esta manera, se tratará de caracterizar los modos de la confrontación distributiva simbólica sobre los sentidos de la ciudad de Salta.

Anglo American Corporation and the South African State

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the complex and shifting relationship between the Anglo American Corporation (Anglo) and the South African State (“the State”) as reflected in Anglo’s annual reports.Design/methodology/approachThis paper builds on research on the role of annual reports in ideological conflict. To examine the ongoing relationship between Anglo and the State, the authors read all the annual reports published by Anglo American from 1917 to 1975, looking for instances in which the corporation appeared to be attempting to address, criticise, compliment, or implore the State.FindingsDuring the period under study, despite the apparent struggles between the South African State and Anglo American, the relationship between the two was primarily symbiotic. The symbolic confrontation engaged in by these two behemoths perpetuated the real, physical violence perpetrated on the oppressed workers. By appearing to be a liberal opponent of apartheid, Anglo was able to ensure continued investment in South Africa.Social implicationsThe examination of decades’ worth of annual reports provides an example of how these supposedly neutral instruments were used to contest and sustain power. Thereby, Anglo could continue to exploit workers, reap enormous profits, and maintain a fiction of opposition to the oppressive State. The State also benefited from its support of Anglo, which provided a plurality of tax revenue and economic expansion during the period.Originality/valueThis paper provides insights into the ways the State and other institutions sustain each other in the pursuit of economic and political power in the face of visible and widely condemned injustices. Although they frequently contested each other’s primacy, both benefited while black South African miners suffered.

JESUS COMO SIMBOLISTA E ANTIRREALISTA: SOBRE A INTERPRETAÇÃO SEMIÓTICA DE NIETZSCHE N’O ANTICRISTO

Esse artigo pretende discutir, em um primeiro momento, o sentido, para a psicologia de Nietzsche, da figura de Jesus n’O Anticristo. Mais precisamente, esse artigo parte de uma problematização dessa tipologia de Jesus, para, em seguida, fazer convergir essa estratégia psicológica com uma semiótica, isto é, uma análise do uso dos signos pelo tipo Jesus. Depois de contextualizar a discussão sobre o tipo Jesus como “simbolista” e “antirrealista”, mostramos como Nietzsche, estrategicamente, elabora em suas últimas obras uma efetiva confrontação simbólica entre o tipo Jesus e Dioniso, e a partir disso buscamos indicar algumas conclusões.

Digitalización del libro en México. Confrontaciones simbólicas entre alumnos y profesores

In the near future, electronic devices will have a central place in the classrooms of theprivate schools of basic education. But the present suggests that the majority of teachers are reluctant to include digital resources to their school dynamics, while students, as digital natives, handle with ease and comfort those resources. The major obstacle facing the private education in Mexico is a problem of media coverage, where new technological devices instead of reconfiguring the role of teachers and students in the discursive process of learning, it seems that it has become disconfigured. The purpose of this work will be to explain what are the symbolic confrontations between students and teachers from understanding semiotics of the digital resources. For this it is necessary to devise the digital resource as a metaphor, then as a game, and finally as a relationship where students interact with a system of signs that has a particular discursive arrangement, different from the printed textbook, and from which constructs a new narrative didactics.(Complete article in spanish language).

Crossroads Poetics

Crossroads Poetics

Territorio, lugar y espacio recreativo escolar

Taken as a space of construction, production and symbolic confrontation, school lets come out of multiple ways in which recreation is reveal. Therefore, is intented to show through this written, some considerations regarding school recreational space category, understood as exploration and recreational intervention over physical and interpersonal scopes that allow build and consolidate places and environments with ludic and socio- historical sense.

Muslim Women and the Politics of Religious Identity in a (Post) Secular Society

Women’s bodies, states Benhabib (Dignity in adversity: human rights in troubled times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011: 168), have become the site of symbolic confrontations between a re-essentialized understanding of religious and cultural differences and the forces of state power, whether in their civic-republican, liberal-democratic or multicultural form. One of the main reasons for the emergence of these confrontations or public debates, says Benhabib (2011: 169), is because of the actual location of ‘political theology’. She asserts that within the context of globalization, the concept of ‘political theology’ is complicated by its unstable location between religion and the public square; between the private and official; and between individual rights to freedom of religion versus state security and public well-being. Ultimately, therefore, the nature of the tension between religion as a political theology and the forces of state power can at best be described as a clash between identities of a collective nature (as envisaged by the nation-state) and identities of an individual nature (as manifested in different religions and cultures). Ongoing attempts to counter the ascendancy of religion, and as will be discussed in this article, specifically the ascendancy and visibility of Islamic identity as practiced by Muslim women, has brought into serious debate the notion of a (post) secular society and its implications for religious rights. What emerges from the state’s insistence that individuals not be allowed to enter the public discourse as religious beings, are, on the one hand, the constraints imposed on Muslim women by liberal democracies, and on the other hand, that Islam, as represented by Muslim women, is not constitutive of democratic citizenship. Will the inclusion and recognition of Muslim women, therefore, necessarily augment a democratic citizenship agenda, and will it lead to an alleviation of the conflict? Then, in exploring a re-articulation of an inclusive citizenship—one which is held accountable by its minimization of social inequality—what ought to be the parameters of inclusion and how should it unfold differently to what is already happening in liberal democracies?

Debussy as National Icon: From Vehicle of Vichy's Compromise to French Resistance Classic

In the late summer of 1944, as the army of liberation moved implacably if indeed arduously toward Paris, intellectual Resistance journals were importuning French solidarity, deftly negotiating hostile factions and divisive symbols. Significantly, they sought to do so not through the conventional political vector of ideology, or the mediation of French Republican and nationalist rhetoric, but through a compelling aesthetic discourse uniquely able to enunciate uninterrupted, if reconfigured, French cultural values. Not surprising for those familiar with French history or nationalist leagues, it was a discourse on French classicism construed as synonymous with France, but in a potent new amalgam, the political and cultural agency of which, as the war concluded, is our subject. This kind of classic model is of prime importance, for it was designed not only to emphasize Vichy's political and cultural compromise but to articulate another nationalism that would signify refusal, reconfiguring a new French ethical and communal whole. In this endeavor to employ the classic to articulate new spiritual unity, new national memory, and those distinctive modes of thought and of expression that were endemic to the nation, two major influences merge: reactionary nationalism and the “critical classicism” of France's Left. Also imbricated in the emergence of “Resistance classicism” is the schism within the Ligue de l'Action Française as a result of Vichy's political compromise, as emblazoned for some league members in official discourse on Richard Wagner and his purported enduring influence on Debussy. The Resistance's reconstruction of Debussy as classic paradigm leads us into the history and articulation of different strains or distinct conceptions of classic values within a political–cultural discourse, whose ramifications cross over French cultural fields. We must analyze the structure of symbolic confrontation as well as the negotiation within this discourse—its role in political culture and music as postwar France, and concomitantly its cultural values, were redefined.

FAZER EDUCAÇÃO FÍSICA: uma questão de engajamento ético do educador

This study was constructed from a reflective analysis about the way that physical education should go, while epistemic status, to think / articulate their pedagogical intervention in the school institution as a field of knowledge which is linked to the educational process. Aimed to provide a reflection on the formation of a paradigm shift for the constitution as autonomous and emancipated professional EF. It stamp literature, using thematic analysis and interpretation, plus reminiscent of a cylinder. Placements in itself, they are already involved in a introsubjetividade at the same time, which marks the symbolic confrontation with others and thus the exchange of intersubjectivity and the risk of not being understood. However, the invitation to worry about is done.

Book Review: Donal B. Cruise O'Brien, Symbolic Confrontations: Muslim Imagining the State in Africa (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2004, 243pp., £16.50, pbk. £40.00 hbk.)

Book Review: Donal B. Cruise O'Brien, Symbolic Confrontations: Muslim Imagining the State in Africa (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2004, 243pp., £16.50, pbk. £40.00 hbk.)

Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims imagining the state in Africa (review)

Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims imagining the state in Africa (review)

DONAL B. CRUISE O'BRIEN: Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims Imagining the State in Africa. xi, 243 pp. London: Hurst, 2004. £16.50.

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Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims imagining the state in Africa by DONAL B. CRUISE O'BRIEN London: Hurst & Co., 2003. Pp. 243, £40.00; £16.50 (pbk.).

<b>Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims imagining the state in Africa</b> by D<scp>ONAL</scp> B. C<scp>RUISE</scp> O'B<scp>RIEN</scp> London: Hurst &amp; Co., 2003. Pp. 243, £40.00; £16.50 (pbk.).

Symbolic Confrontations : Muslims imagining the state in Africa

Symbolic Confrontations : Muslims imagining the state in Africa

A Didactic Approach Emphasising the Social Habitat as an Attempt to Meet Growing Social Disintegration: Teaching in classes with youth of conspicuous behaviour using aesthetic and cultural means of communication

The life conflicts of pupils with behavioural disorders can be examined through their pictures. Conclusions can be drawn not only with regards to the psychological effects of art therapy, but also regarding a didactic orientated at life-circumstances. The pictures drawn by these pupils can give impulses for further aesthetic processes and become the basis for reflection and changes in behaviour. Environment-orientated didactics open the way to an active, but symbolic confrontation with manifest social conflicts. Teachers have to open their classrooms to the actual subcultural subjects and practices of their pupils. The pursuit of existential problems and the effort to find solutions can prepare the ground for new factual learning. In reference to social-philosophic theories, the culture-critical contents of these pictures should also be questioned. The images produced at the edge of society very often are pictures of a torn world.