<div dir="ltr"><div><div><br></div><div>So many great questions - I'll start with these -- </div><div>>>>>From your perspective as a teacher and activist, do you agree that a more ‘humane’ opportunity comes from the walking the coastline project, as they had hoped, fifty years ago? Or does feminism bring difference in a new register?</div><div><br></div><div>>>>>Now that the climate change crisis is ubiquitously foretold and documented, thanks to big data deployments in mediated information on every level of coding…does this context have feminist opportunity?</div><div><br></div><div>The Boston Coastline: Future Past project is about scaling down the narratives and representations of climate change to the scale of the city on the one hand and to the body on the other hand. As such I definitely consider it to be a feminist approach as it's situating the global disaster narrative into concrete places and bodies and temporalities and asking people to engage with what this means for them, their city, their neighborhood. </div><div><br></div><div>There has been a turn to the "non-human" and the consideration of various kinds of interconnected ecologies, which I fully support over the anthropocentric way of thinking. But we also need to consider that we ourselves are still fundamentally human, we have these perceptual mechanisms that help us make sense of the world that are related specifically to our bodies. High-level abstract views are useful for telling stories but not useful for communicating consequences to bodies, families, communities (which really are the scales with which most of us can operate and take action with effectively in the world). </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>---</div><div>Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization, Emerson College</div><div>Fellow, Emerson Engagement Lab </div><div>Research Affiliate, MIT Center for Civic Media</div><div><a href="http://www.kanarinka.com">www.kanarinka.com</a> | @kanarinka | 617-501-2441</div></div><div><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 3:18 PM <a href="mailto:christina@christinamcphee.net">christina@christinamcphee.net</a> <<a href="mailto:christina@christinamcphee.net">christina@christinamcphee.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
To "actually make stuff that embodies those principles (of feminist ethics)…” — thanks, Catherine d’Ignazio— I’ve copied below the whole quote around this from your introductory post today.<br>
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In your collaborative project with artist Andi Sutton, “Boston Coastline: Future Past” , participants walk past coastline edges through the core of Boston — physically performing the 1630 edge as a score through the city.<br>
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<a href="http://www.kanarinka.com/project/boston-coastline-future-past/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.kanarinka.com/project/boston-coastline-future-past/</a><br>
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In the video, the sound montage of voices delivers something like this…”When you put your body actually on the line… how can we emotionally reconcile ourselves to these various futures that are encroaching on us— an actual movement around the city creates a transformation of your body and your spirit…”<br>
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I wonder, does it also create a transformation of the city (— becoming a question of design)?<br>
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To raise awareness through an affective means like this one— I note your emphasis on ‘reconciliation’ with a future of rising sea levels…. is there an element of feminist ethics in the process of reconciliation? The latter term echoes, strangely and intertextually, in my imagination to the ’truth and reconciliation’ justice hearings in post-apartheid South Africa… making me speculate that, there is a kind of judicial, or anyway, judgement, element to your project? Awareness of the old and future coast lines, as they were caused by urban development to fill in, and now are under threat (perhaps certain) of return to the ocean— is this awareness part of a kind of act of communal healing? as if the infill had been a kind of violent extension of human freehold on a delicate ecosystem? Do you see this kind of work as a form of restitution? reconstitution ? …<br>
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Recalling Kevin Lynch’s way-finding in Boston in the sixties: “Our real task is not to prevent the world from changing but to cause it to change in a growth conducive and life-enhancing direction, ” Lynch wrote in "What Time is This Place.” Do you think that the walking coastline project has a feminist aspect? Playing out the perceptual subject of time— personal and communal sensations—from within the matrix of big data— your project with Sutton follows up on Lynch and also Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s scoring experiments. These precursors hoped that such experiments would generate newly ‘humane’ options for urban designers and planners…<br>
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>From your perspective as a teacher and activist, do you agree that a more ‘humane’ opportunity comes from the walking the coastline project, as they had hoped, fifty years ago? Or does feminism bring difference in a new register?<br>
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Now that the climate change crisis is ubiquitously foretold and documented, thanks to big data deployments in mediated information on every level of coding…does this context have feminist opportunity?<br>
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Catherine wrote,<br>
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"In thinking about data visualization, I think we have a lot to draw on from the histories of critical cartography and indigenous mapping and feminist critique. But I feel like where we can build further is not stopping at critique (which is what academics so often do - point out oppression and leave it there, deconstruct everything and then goodbye) but actually move towards operationalizing critiques of power, feminist ethics into design principles for how to make things more just, more fair, more representative, etc. and then actually make stuff that embodies those principles. “<br>
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— Christina<br>
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<a href="http://christinamcphee.net" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://christinamcphee.net</a><br>
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