Reflexive modernity and the art of public communication

In 2000, Victoria’s largest regional council, the City of Greater Geelong, allocated $200,000 to fund a community art and place-making project in inner Geelong West. The Walk West project was conceptualised and lobbied by a community group for six years. The project addressed the impact of a large section of freeway installed in the seventies and its consequences for quality of life in the locality.

This article reports on an example of highly developed community relations. It examines public art and placemaking as public communication tools and their relationship to political and social activity in post-amalgamation Victoria. In particular it applies the theories of Ulrich Beck and the notion of reflexive modernity in risk society where citizens’ initiative groups will play an increasingly important role in reclaiming the biological and cultural heritage lost as a result of ‘progress’.

Staging modernity: the Semarang international colonial exhibition, 1914

The international exhibitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now generally seen as sites for the dissemination of an evolving discourse on modernity's primary theme: progress. These technological and cultural spectacles represented 'the self-congratulatory pride' of the bourgeoisie in their attainment of world power (Corbey 1994:60). The didactic function of international exhibitions lay embedded in their carefully arranged, itemised and annotated displays, as well as in the very architecture within which such displays were housed. It was a pedagogy palely echoed in every elementary classroom and school textbook of the newly created mass education systems of the day (Cote 2000a). The exhibitions were also modern in their embrace of the mass audience and their intentionally populist focus. An exhibition was intended to provide the visitor, already touched by a modern curiosity, with personal access to the wonders of modernity.

A new roadmap to life: media, culture, and modernity in the United Arab Emirates

Critical to the vision of a new United Arab Emirates is an educated, skilled workforce that fuels the intelligent growth needed in a knowledge-based economy. As the country begins developing its version of that economy, the mediated, transparent environment fundamental to this process will carry with it new visions of (and possibilities for) living life. If peaceful change is to be achieved, a transitional generation faces the conundrum of adapting the best that modernity can offer while retaining the best of tradition. As have others, this study suggests two things: that (1) media literacy, growing in part from education, is correlated with urbanization and a changing infrastructure, and that (2) media in all its forms is inseparable from the outcome of this drive to modernization.

Social inclusion, social movements, and the characteristics of late modernity

In discussing the ideology of social inclusion, this paper demonstrates that the composition of community groups in a period of late modernity is worthy of consideration. Although it would appear, on the surface at least, that previously stable community institutions, such as family, organised religion, trade unions, occupation and residential stability, and so on, are being challenged by a broad rejection of the once powerful tool of tradition, society's attachment to a belief in the symbolic value of community remains strong. In an environment however, in which the interaction and interdependence of human activity is subject to continual re-evaluation as the current processes of industrialisation and globalisation unfold, the template of what constitutes 'community' may need to be re-defined. It is to this end that the present paper is concerned, in that it seeks to identify new community formations. Of particular interest, is the rise and reach of modern day 'social movements', and why, when analysing the subject from a macro-sociological perspective, they have come to assume such a pivotal role in occupying community spaces left vacant by the demise of traditional social institutions. The paper is exploratory in its focus, using relevant literature to posit some broad theoretical themes, with the aim of presenting such themes to encourage a shift in community debates away from traditional concerns about 'who' and 'how many', towards questions of why new community forms are emerging.

Weaving the web - From myth to modernity

The discovery, development or invention of new objects and phenomena by humankind, requires a new set of words to be coined or adopted to describe it. This is also true of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) world. Words are not neutral, regardless of which dialect or language they occur in. They carry with them associations and connotations based on their previous applications and alliances, and augmented by their shapes, sounds, rhymes and rhythms. The subtext that word choice creates, while often not recognised or acknowledged, is important in considering how communication operates in, and shapes Information Technology (IT) environments. Many words that are now embedded in the ICT lexicon continue to be informed by these earlier meanings, some of which, in the English lexis, are drawn from myths. The vernacular of the ICT lexis reflects its openness to new ideas, the nature of its users, its English language roots and its Western cultural origins. This contributes to a particular communication style. But such lexis can prove problematic for non-English speaking background users and/or those from different cultures. As the ICT vocabulary continues to evolve, these language and cultural underpinnings are coming under challenge, suggesting a language and cultural future very different to the past. This in turn, will create a subtext that affects all users.

The animal other : horse training in early modernity

This historical sociological analysis of the training of horses for competition in early modernity draws from the sociology of the body to suggest that animals as we know them are constructed through human social processes. Contemporary horse-care publications are used to demonstrate how equine bodies were shaped through an application of humoral physiological theory. That is, they were made suitable for the human requirements of the time through preparatory procedures informed by models of somatic functioning used widely to understand humans and animals alike. The broader issue canvassed here is that ‘embodiment’ should include animal as well as human bodies. Through selective breeding, raising and care, animals have bodies that are shaped to human requirements – they embody human social processes.