Cross-cultural trade and exchange in early modern world
Hi everyone! I would like to share a book that I recently came across – The Familiarity of Strangers:The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-cultural Trade in the ...
Wishing away Problems
When reading James Carrier’s Gifts in a World of Commodities, one might initially be surprised by the lack of mention of charitable organizations, especially given the ...
Object Biographies?
'Rather than flow, people and objects bump awkwardly along the paths they create as they go. They grate each other, dodge, stop and go, negotiate obstacles, backtrack ...
Test OiM22
Dear (ex-) OiM-ers, This is a test to check if you are all receiving the alerts when somebody posts on the site. It is also an opportunity for me to say hello to ...
DisobedientBuildings
Hi OiM-ers, The website for my new project about housing, welfare and wellbeing is finally live at www.disobedientbuildings.com. The ideas behind it draw on many ...
OiM 2020 garden party
So nice to see you all yesterday. Thank you for making this year's option a wonderful success; OiM only works well when everyone is motivated, creative and, most ...
How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?
I came across this online exhibition, entitled "How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?", that seems like an interesting complement to the 24/7 exhibition. Link: ...
Week 7 & 8
Dear all, I have been told that you were still unable to access the readings for week 7 and 8. I think I have fixed things now and you should be able to get ...
Matta-Clark’s Anarchitechture
Siyu's recent post about the scaffolding exhibition in New York made me think of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, a New York architect-turned-artist active in the 1970s. ...
Landscapes of Power
https://www.hcn.org/issues/51.4/coal-environmental-victories-dont-guarantee-economic-justice-navajo-generating-station Above is a link to an article which provides some ...
Past “Scaffolding” Exhibition
https://www.centerforarchitecture.org/exhibitions/scaffolding/ A link of pictures from the past exhibition, "Scaffolding," in Center for Architecture in New ...
Is the Washing Machine More Revolutionary than the Internet?
In “Fluid technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw® and microworlds of humanitarian design”, the Bush Pump is considered such a powerful technology that alongside ...
Kowloon Walled City: City of Darkness
When we think about an infrastructure project, we always link it with the build-up of something: railways, airports, public hospitals, dams. However, sometimes the ...
Mitigating Landslides
In 2012, the Central and Western provinces of Sri Lanka experienced a sequence of landslides that caused many deaths and property destruction. In the wake of this ...
What is truly Scandinavian?
Hi all, Following our discussions about Doreen Massey’s (1991) ‘A Global Sense of Place’ yesterday, I saw on Twitter this morning that SAS, the Scandinavian ...
OUSHOP and the construction of authenticity
The Oxford University Shop offers a good example of how capitalist actors make “use of regional identities and aspects of heritage to construct and market cultural ...
Massey’s interpretation of place and “I take of places.” – Yorgos Petrou
In Doreen's Massey's alternative interpretation of place,"what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the face that it is constructed ...
Up the Yangtzee
Yung Chang’s 2007 film, Up the Yangtze, showcases the social and environmental life of the ancient Chinese river at a moment of radical economic and infrastructural ...