Institute for Cultural Inquiry

Children are excellent museum researchers. The Children’s Board is a working methodology that Cultural Inquiry has been successfully implementing for years in prestigious museums around the world, such as the Swiss National Museum, Creaviva Zentrum Paul Klee, Museum of Solutions in Mumbai or La Rodadora in Mexico, and so on. Through it, the museum team works in collaboration with the children to investigate key aspects such as the challenges they face, the problems and opportunities that exist, the possible solutions that can be implemented, and so on. In this article we present some examples of this collaboration that implies not only a new way of thinking about children’s participation and co-creation in museums but also a new way of research.

This article explores the ways in which popular cinema contributes to the data imaginary. We engage in a close reading of key data-related scenes in Minority Report (2002), Moneyball (2011), and Snowden (2016), and we examine their extensive reliance on formal means that are deeply entangled with cinema’s capacity for scalar distortion. Using critical scholarship on the concept of scale as our interpretative lens, we argue that the distinct aesthetic construction of filmic engagements with data-driven issues is politically performative: The sequences that contribute to the data imaginary evoke what we term the “aesthetics of boundless insight,” eminently aligned with the discourse that presents big data as the key to unlimited potential and as a powerful technology without a predetermined agenda.

The last four decades have witnessed the rise of a human rights-based, judicial-oriented politics that can be christened ‘politics of judicial rights protection’. Legal institutions, rather than the legislature, are called upon to grant effectiveness and visibility to citizens’ rights claims. As such, politics of judicial rights protection is alleged to be detrimental to representative politics. This article makes two claims, one diagnostic and the other normative. Diagnostically, we discuss how the expansion of politics of judicial rights protection has transformed courts into an arena in which people articulate their claims, produce general narratives, and define the political frameworks within which guidelines for legislation are produced. The normative claim is that while there is no democratic deficit resulting from this dynamic, the expanding scope of politics of judicial rights protection calls for greater integration of the legislative and judiciary. Thus, it is imperative that more scholarly attention be paid to this issue to facilitate an effective reform of legislative procedures.

This article investigates the problematic coherence of Franz Kafka’s <i>Alchimistengasse</i> notebooks, focusing on the fragment in which that coherence is both thematized and performed: “At the Building of the Great Wall of China.” By distinguishing the “system of piecemeal construction” used in the building of Kafka’s wall from the Kantian architectonics through which the wall has been interpreted by most critics, the author uncovers a concept of piecemeal coherence that is irreducible to the binary oppositions of traditional aesthetic theory: allegory or symbol, fragment or unity, aggregate or system. By then reflecting the method of Kafka’s wall onto the text in which that method is described, the author develops an aspect of Kafka’s modernism that distinguishes it from the aesthetic programs of both early romanticism and the historical avant-garde. (RS)

In an apparently paradoxical or contradictory way, our new century seems to show two trends: on the one hand, an increasingly informal, disorganized, oftentimes violent spate of uprisings, and on the other hand, a growing exploitation of legal strategies. Given these developments, how do we rethink the relationship between social struggles and law? This article employs a casuistic approach in order to explore current modes of interconnections between law and society. It argues that law is that language that through the institution of norms gives shape to the world of social relations. Through this same language, law performs actions in this world that it institutes through its categories. This piece also proposes a technical understanding of the concept of legal mobilization and argues that the innovative use of legal technique (rather than a political grammar) and the institutions of social cooperation could be seen as elements that re-describe and re-signify legal mobilization.

BRIDGITist der Titel des iPhone-Videos, mit dem Charlotte Prodger 2018 den Turner Prize gewann. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass Prodger einerseits an bereits etablierte Ästhetiken des experimentellen queeren Kinos anknüpft, andererseits aber auch über diese hinausgeht. Die ästhetische Verschränkung von Körpern, Begehren, Wahrnehmung und Selbstwahrnehmung, Landschaft, Zeit und Queerness ist – auch im Medium des digitalen Filmes – skulptural und setzt darin eine virtuelle Kraft frei, die sich den neoliberalen Normalisierungsprozessen und der Nicht-Intelligibilität von queeren Begehrensformen in subtiler Weise widersetzt.

Por su rareza, Sangre de amor correspondido se distingue de las otras siete novelas que publicó Manuel Puig. No sólo porque fue compuesta a partir de la grabación, transcripción y traducción de entrevistas que mantuvo en portugués con un albañil brasilero, sino, y en particular, por los interrogantes que plantea con respecto a la autoría, la economía política del sexo, la sexualidad y la lengua. Esta condensación de elementos le otorga una singularidad que puede funcionar como punto de referencia para estudiar otros textos de la época, la de 1980, mientras aún perduraba en América Latina la creencia en el poder emancipador que le asignaba a la literatura su supuesta autonomía.

Conheci o Pesquisador e Professor Marlon Miguel, em Paris, durante o meu pós-doutoramento. Um brasileiro pesquisador do pensamento de Fernand Deligny (1913-1996). Falávamos da importância deste autor para os estudos em educação. E, também comentávamos que no Brasil, não tínhamos ou pouco temos acesso aos estudos dele. Pensamos esta entrevista como um disparador de algumas ideias do autor, ainda pouco estudado nas pesquisas no Brasil. Atualmente, o Professor Marlon, tem se dedicado com pesquisas entre a filosofia, a arte, a educação, a clínica e a antropologia na Université Paris 8 e no Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), em Berlim.

The subject of work has been gaining ground in recent years among film scholars, thanks in no small part to the work of Ewa Mazierska (see Mazierska 2012, 2013, 2017; Mazierska and Kristensen 2018)...