Anders Høg Hansen

Dialogue with conflict: Education and conflict coping in Israel

This article addresses educational encounter projects between Jewish and Palestinian Arab high school students, teachers and facilitators in the state of Israel after the outbreak of the intifada (year 2000). Through the display of ethnographic footage and commentary from particular workshops in a high school encounter program, some of the key obstacles to dialogic engagement, the problems of and potentials of narrative reconfiguration and the limitations of the intergroup approach are illustrated. The particular educational model is practised, with variations, at some of Israels major and pioneering institutions for peace and conflict education. The workshops under scrutiny in this article were taking place at Givat Haviva—a centre for peace and conflict related educational and cultural programs, including language and art courses.

The Globalization of the Pavement

Abstract This article investigates examples of citizen media production and communication (blogs and social media sites in Tanzania and its diasporas) in the immediate aftermath of the Gongo la Mboto blasts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, February 2011. At the centre is the relationship between media use and communication practices of the pavement - drawing from the notion of pavement radio - and the spaceship, i.e. a metaphor for traditional mass media, exemplified by policies and practices of the BBC and its World Service. We argue that new social media practices as digital pavement radio are converging with traditional forms of street buzz and media use. Forms of oral communication are adapting towards the digital and filling information voids in an informal economy of news and stories in which media practices are stimulated by already ingrained traditions. An existing oral culture is paving the way for a globalization of the pavement.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in

This article investigates the representation of memory and dream in selected American TV serial fiction concentrating on 1990s shows that blended the real, the surreal and the supernatural. Departing from Northern Exposure, and moving on to Twin Peaks and The X Files, these shows embarked on an extensive use of vision, dream and memory themes to portray, I argue, negotiations between what Jan Assmann coined communicative and cultural memory (Jan Assmann 1995, 2010). While Twin Peaks and The X Files concentrated on the dark undercurrents or repressed forms of American belief and anxiety, Northern Exposure took a more benevolent route, re-imagining and rewriting alternative American aspirations of belief and coexistence. Key protagonists were portrayed as exiled individuals engaging with their pasts and the communities of which they became part of or estranged from while on roads to self-discovery. Carl Jungs writings formed an inspirational body of thinking for the shows, perhaps most explicitly in Northern Exposure, which also elaborated on Jungian visions of a shared humanity among the many differences inside and between humans. All shows elaborated on the consequences of opening oneself to dimensions of life that formed the shadows (Jung 1958, 1959), human duplex or doubling (Jung 1958), as well as the unused potential of imagination in Western modernity. Roads to self-discovery involving repressed or difficult memory work were also spelled out during the first seasons of a very different contemporary show, Mad Men. This show will be brought into discussion at the end of the article where I elaborate on the consequences of particular forms of American dreaming.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in :: present pasts in 20 years of american TV serial fiction from northern Eeposure to mad men

This article investigates the representation of memory and dream in selected American TV serial fiction concentrating on 1990s shows that blended the real, the surreal and the supernatural. Departing from Northern Exposure, and moving on to Twin Peaks and The X Files, these shows embarked on an extensive use of vision, dream and memory themes to portray, I argue, negotiations between what Jan Assmann coined communicative and cultural memory (Jan Assmann 1995, 2010). While Twin Peaks and The X Files concentrated on the dark undercurrents or repressed forms of American belief and anxiety, Northern Exposure took a more benevolent route, re-imagining and rewriting alternative American aspirations of belief and coexistence. Key protagonists were portrayed as exiled individuals engaging with their pasts and the communities of which they became part of or estranged from while on roads to self-discovery. Carl Jungs writings formed an inspirational body of thinking for the shows, perhaps most explicitly in Northern Exposure, which also elaborated on Jungian visions of a shared humanity among the many differences inside and between humans. All shows elaborated on the consequences of opening oneself to dimensions of life that formed the shadows (Jung 1958, 1959), human duplex or doubling (Jung 1958), as well as the unused potential of imagination in Western modernity. Roads to self-discovery involving repressed or difficult memory work were also spelled out during the first seasons of a very different contemporary show, Mad Men. This show will be brought into discussion at the end of the article where I elaborate on the consequences of particular forms of American dreaming.

Visual Interventions: Film, Ethnography and Social Change

In this chapter we address strategies in a collaborative film production project involving residents in three communities near Dar es Salaam, as well as students and teachers at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Malmo University in Sweden. The purpose of the project was to create films about contemporary social themes and people in selected communities, and to explore ‘theatre for development’-inspired film productions as means of stimulating debates among local residents and stakeholders. The project was an experiment in ‘cultural brokering’ where particular forms of mediation and contact among young filmmakers, residents and teachers were intentionally sought to produce new envisioning of ideas and action, late in the project termed ‘imaginative leeways’ (by Sonderstrup 2011).

City Symphony Malmö: the spatial politics of non-institutional memory

ABSTRACT City Symphony Malmö was a collaborative documentary that engaged citizens of Malmö in recording short film sequences. The Symphony’ video material was also performed at the art and performance centre Inkonst where electronic musicians improvised to VJ’s digital and analogue live mixing of the material. A remediation of the performance was streamed live on the Internet with live footage from the performance. All clips were released under the creative commons licence and made available for remixing through The Pirate Bay. This article explores what it can imply to hand over the means of film production to citizens. The discussion concentrates on participatory and spatially distributed filmmaking and screening of non-institutional memories, produced in the symphony. The analysis merges influence from silent cinema and Soviet Montage [Vertov, Dziga. 1929. A Man with a Movie Camera. Documentary/City Symphony Film], theories of public memory [e.g. Casey, Edward. 2004. “Public Memory in Place and Time.” In Framing Public Memory, edited by Kendall R. Phillips, 17–46. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press; Young, David E. 2000. At Memory’s Edge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Bodnar, John. 1992. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], new media [Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press; Manovich, Lew. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.] and place [Appadurai, Arjan. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers; Harvey, David. 1993. “From Space to Place and Back Again.” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Exchange, edited by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, 3–29. London: Routledge]. It describes the complexities of creating non-institutional memory and archiving practices and argues that such citizen-driven and non-institutional memories may challenge official history and societal memory production, yet also reproduce typical and iconic images which reveal spatio-material hierarchies. Such complexities demonstrate the value of an analysis of participation and spatio-material dimensions of public memory as unfolded in the article.