All posts tagged with 'globalization'
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Deepthi Welaratna is a New York-based writer and researcher focusing on media and culture and a graduate student in media studies at The New School. As a strategic communications consultant, Deepthi has directed marketing and communications strategies for a range of nonprofit and for-profit companies. She has worked in radio and TV broadcasting and authored an arts and culture review column for KQED in San Francisco covering music, theatre and film. Recently, she was invited to serve as a judge for the Asian Pacific Fund’s Growing Up Asian in America program, an annual art and essay competition for Bay Area k-12 students.
Metonymic Icons: How Faces Inspire Global Imagined Communities
Human faces have united many imagined communities, both past and present. From religious iconography to royal figures to fictional composites, bodies and faces have historically stood in for nations and religions, functioning as an effective tool of national and ideological representation. In recent years a new, more participatory kind of cooptation of the face has emerged that bridges the divide between convergent and divergent ideoscapes and between the global and the local. This new face is simultaneously representative and unique, and is created, traded, and used under expanded modes of production and consumption. The new face has a more malleable meaning, as a result, belonging to everyone and no one. Using theoretical underpinnings from Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Jean Baudrillard, and Bernadette Wegenstein, I will track the evolution of the face through four examples: Marianne (the face of the French republic), Che Guevara, Barack Obama, and Neda Soltan.
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Colin Nusbaum is an aspiring media artist, theorist, and filmmaker. He received his B.A. degree in Political Theory from The College of Wooster and is pursuing an M.A. in Media Studies and Film at The New School. His research interests include Power and Governance, News Media, Cybernetics, Film Theory and Cinematic Practice. In addition to academic study, Colin also works professionally as an archival researcher and producer for documentary film and television in New York City, and he is a founding member of Rustbelts Media Group.
Cyber-Governmentality in Saudi Arabia: Filtering Online Content toward the Institutional Administration of Life
This report sets out to examine how the philosophical and practical roles of modern governments as online policing agencies can actively sustain institutionalized worldviews. The focus is on the role of Saudi Arabian Internet filters as disciplinary tools of governmentality, as outlined by Michel Foucault. The paper examines the impact of regulated information and social behavior online as it contributes to shared beliefs, values, and mores. Specifically, the research engages the case of Saudi Arabia as it overtly and admittedly impedes access to Internet content that is either socially or politically undesirable. The paper finds that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia engages in the exchange of power in ways that reflect a disciplinary society and a community that resists neo-liberal globalization. Ultimately, the goal of the report is to consider the aims of these of truth-crafting filters and consider citizens’ options for sanctioned dialogue or resistance.