Heritage management at the local level: rhetoric and results in the case of Gaziantep,Turkey

Following international trends, Turkey has recently introduced decentralisation reforms to its highly centralised public administration system. These reforms have also applied to the cultural heritage sector, where innovative laws since 2004 have allowed local administrations and private actors to play new entrepreneurial roles. The Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality has been a pioneer in this process, promoting policies that promote cultural tourism as an engine of economic growth. Under its leadership, hundreds of historic buildings have been restored, nine new museums and heritage sites opened, and museum visitors increased tenfold. These positive results make Gaziantep an interesting case of successful decentralisation in heritage management. Despite these successes, however, the disconnection between rhetoric and results, and the fragmentation and ambiguity of responsibilities emerging from the decentralisation process raises serious questions about its sustainability and replicability.     

New Danish Screen – an organizational facilitation of creative initiatives: gatekeeping and beyond

This article looks at how the film consultant directing the subsidy scheme New Danish Screen carries out this job. The aim of the article is to provide an understanding of the function of an organizational representative who succeeds in generating the making of innovative cultural products. The article illustrates how the job of the film consultant does not only imply choosing between different products but also entails involvement in the making of these products. As a result of this, the article argues that to understand the job of the organizational representative the term gatekeeper should be connected to the concept cultural intermediary which highlights involvement in the production process.     

Understanding cultural heritage in Turkey: institutional context and organisational Issues

This paper explores Turkey’s cultural heritage system from the perspective of the ‘Heritage Chain’, which sees the heritage sector as an interconnected series of relationships and activities including protection and conservation, archaeological activity, research and museum presentation. By reviewing quantitative data along each step of the chain, we construct a holistic perspective that shows interrelationships between activities and illustrates which parts of the system are underdeveloped. By demonstrating the effects of Turkey’s distinct combination of bureaucratic fragmentation and centralisation on professional practice among conservators, archaeologists and museums, we argue for increased attention to administrative issues within heritage studies.     

Teaching Global and Social Justice as Transgressive Spaces of Possibility

Abstract: In this article I reflect on introducing critical pedagogy into social justice teaching in an elite UK university as part of the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project. I de‐essentialise Freire's conceptualisation of the human subject and her desire for transcendence with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire. This enables an adaption of critical pedagogy from its original context of popular politics to the individualised elite setting of our project. Our pedagogical objectives become the opening of spaces of possibility which decentre the dominant regime of truth of the neoliberal university and enable imagining and becoming “other”. This involves disrupting normal patterns of classroom performativity in terms of student as consumer and lecturer as producer of commodities, transgressing dualisms between mind/body, intellectual/emotional and teacher/student. Our pedagogical praxis is therefore inherently political as by radically disturbing commodified subjectivities we foster processes that lead to unanticipated, maybe even unspeakable, transgressions.     

‘People don't do odd,do they?’ mothers making sense of the reactions of others towards their learning disabled children in public places

This paper will demonstrate how a focus upon the practices and interactions in and of the everyday lives of mothers of learning disabled children can provide rich insights into the position of a group of children who may not be able to conform to appropriate ways of behaving and using space. This focus will illustrate how the spatial practices and experiences of the mothers and their children are shaped by the reactions of others present and the mothers' interpretations of, and responses to, those reactions. It will, moreover, raise questions about the position of older learning disabled children whose unconventional behaviour in public spaces can threaten disorder.     

Cutting Through Topologies: Crossing Lines at the School of the Americas

Abstract: The School of the Americas (SOA) is a U.S. Army school that trains Latin American military officers. Manuals released detail torture techniques once taught at the school, and thousands of graduates have been linked to human rights abuses. The annual vigil in front of Fort Benning is the largest ongoing protest and civil disobedience against U.S. imperialism being held within the U.S. The movement to close the SOA traces the twisted lines of the topology that shapes spaces of exception in Latin America. It traces those lines back to the SOA, and cuts through them with its own counter‐topographical lines of connection to those Latin Americans that are made into ‘bare life’ by those topologies. This essay looks at the doings of protest space as a form of resistance to the space of exception, and how personal stories, and mourning, can put us beside ourselves, with one another.     

Confronting institutional boundaries to public participation: a case of the Danish energy sector

Although public participation has become an integrated part of planning practice, experience and documents literature still document difficulties in implementing participatory planning processes that provide arenas where citizens can truly influence planning. Based on a combination of institutional theory and action research methodology, this paper focuses on the institutional boundaries to introducing participatory practices by exploring openings and closures to the adoption of participatory planning processes by the Danish energy transmission system operator (TSO). Public participation in the Danish energy sector is characterized by complex institutional arrangements. The study shows how institutional boundaries are perceived by planners and how openings and closures can be identified and developed in an action research approach. The study reveals that citizen involvement has the potential to influence existing power structures but is highly challenged by an instrumentialised and sector-divided planning.