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It is important to address the key social and cultural theorisations around issues such as freedom, democracy, knowledge and instrumentalism that impact the university and its relationship with and to the arts. This book maps out various ways in which the arts and creative practices are manifest in contemporary university-based adult education work, be it the classroom, in research or in the community. It is divided into three sections that reflect the normative structure or 'three pillars' of the contemporary university: teaching, research and service. The focus is on a programme that stems from the university's mission and commitment to encouraging its graduates to become more engaged citizens, willing to think critically and creatively about issues of global import, social justice and inequality. The Storefront 101 course, a free University of Calgary literature course for 'non-traditional' adult learners, aims to involve students in active dialogic processes of learning and civic and cultural engagement. Using the concept of pop-up galleries, teacher education is discussed. The book contextualises the place and role of the arts in society, adult education, higher education and knowledge creation, and outlines current arts-based theories and methodologies. It provides examples of visual and performing arts practices to critically and creatively see, explore, represent, learn and discover the potential of the human aesthetic dimension in higher education teaching and research. A more holistic and organic approach to lifelong learning is facilitated by a 'knowing-through-doing' approach, which became foregrounded as a defining feature of this project.
10 In a new ‘Age of Enlightenment’: challenges and opportunities for museums, cultural engagement and lifelong learning at the University of Glasgow 1 Maureen Park Inspiration and enjoyment are powerful motivators to learning, and the unique importance and extraordinary diversity of the collections held in university museums are undoubtedly a potent resource to this end. (UMG, 2004: ii) D uring the last forty years a revolution has taken place in the role of many of our museums. Once defined as centres of culture and learning, they are now adopting an extra
The politics of labour in the domestic and the professional spheres explored in the previous chapters are expanded upon in the second part of this volume, which widens the space of women’s political and cultural engagements to the level of the nation. The decisions women made in the mid-century about home, childcare, marriage, and employment were
States Information Services. 46 More broadly, of course, it stemmed from the increasing American cultural presence in Britain itself, as in so many other countries. Yet while American sources (like Australian ones) come into this story from time to time, the focus remains on the British cultural engagement with Hong Kong. A second point bears emphasising: this book is based entirely on English
emergent capitalism, which has been consubstantial with subsuming colonialism, has transformed the meaning of the Pacific’s geography. Arif Dirlik is right to highlight the discourse of the ‘Rim’ (1997: 129–45). But the discourse is neither all-powerful, nor pervasive. The Pacific’s past is polycentric and its forms of memory embrace connected centres, a continuous mythology (both temporally and spatially), particular historicities and an unusual mode of inter-cultural engagement. For critical generalisation to be possible, an appreciation of this mode of engagement
hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers,”’ which was purportedly ‘splendidly sung by a Maori choir’. 21 This pattern of cross-cultural engagement continued. Two thousand Pākehā turned out in 1911 to support the equivalent number of Māori for the unveiling of the memorial to Māori leader Tamahau Mahupuku. After the ‘welcome haka ’ was danced, a Māori choir sang hymns in both Māori and English. 22
cultural engagements that characterise the recent resurgence of English folk, in this chapter we will now provide an examination of possible commonalities across this diverse genre. We will highlight some of the key elements of English folk music practice that have been foregrounded, or have developed in profile and significance, within the current resurgence. The list is by no means exhaustive or universally applicable: often, individual artists or groups have emerged as exponents of one or two of these characteristics, whilst engaging less with others. However, overall
that had doubtless been shaped by the experience of British rule. These themes will be further developed in subsequent chapters in the context of analysing the British cultural engagement with Hong Kong. At the same time, Britain’s position in Hong Kong was influenced by its own domestic politics, albeit to a much lesser extent. As noted in the introduction, during the first three postwar decades, Hong
The question of how audiences form to watch specialised and mainstream films within regional film provision goes to the heart of current debates in audience studies. Audience reception studies have made audiences increasingly visible, while audience surveys track trends and film policy makers gather information about audience preferences and demographics. Little attention has been paid to the specific contextual relationships and interactions between films and individuals that generate and sustain audiences. Online film consumption and an increasing array of cultural events mean that the nature and formation of film audiences is changing and that film watching is a diverse and extensive experience. This has sharpened the debate about how to conceptualise audiences and their formation. This monograph extends and develops the conceptualisation of audiences as being interactive and relational by introducing three innovative concepts: ‘personal film journeys’, five types of audience formation, and five geographies of film provision within new theorisation of audiences that sees them as a process. A challenge of audience research is how to capture the richness of people’s social and cultural engagement with film that materialises in broader audience trends within contexts of provision; to achieve this, an innovative mixed-methods research and computational ontology approach is used. The book is significant because it develops new, ground-breaking theory and concepts and an innovative research methodology based on an extensive dataset derived from empirical research in the under-researched area of regional film audiences.
Kunzru’s ironic engagement with the traditions of the ‘Great American Novel’ resonates with what Douglas Coupland has, in his own discussion of Kunzru, called ‘translit’: a contemporary literature defined by an atemporality that pulls together multiple timelines and geographies in a simultaneous present. For Bran Nicol, this tendency – encapsulated in the multiple substories within Gods Without Men – not only captures the volatility of contemporary culture, it also redefines the novel form. Concerned to distinguish ‘translit’ from an earlier postmodern fiction, emphasising the loss of the postmodern celebration of heterogeneity in favour of a much more ambivalent, and tense, relationship to questions of chaos and multiplicity, Nicol argues that multiple subjectivities, unreliability and slippage are not for Kunzru the ’party tricks’ that Coupland associates with postmodernism, but instead are symptoms of a deeply rooted concern for the impact of hyper-globalisation on contemporary life. Drawing attention to the novel’s dominant pessimism, what emerges is an entropic cosmopolitanism and a narrative aesthetic that works against the novel’s echoing structure of connectivity, proximity and cross-cultural engagement. For Nicol, this simultaneous indulgence in and concern for the breakdown of traditional meaning produces fiction that modifies rather than rejects the features of postmodern historiographic metafiction: ‘an alternative to postmodernism within postmodernism’.