serendipityoucity

Why do i put myself through such pain and agony!  The thing is on its way!  Long winded as usual, overabitious, could be tighter, the material could more integrated and there are most probably some wonky sentences!  But alas!  This part is done and next week I defend!

Here is the abstract! 

Discuss and Critically Assess Community Built Communication Infrastructures as Possible Solutions for Contested Territories: With Nagaland and its Environs as a Case Study.

By: Tracey P. Lauriault June 25, 2008

Abstract

Infrastructures have traditionally been built by experts, politicians, technocrats and entrepreneurs with little or no input by citizens or understanding of the values embedded within them nor the context within which they are constructed. Communication infrastructures like transportation, water, and power infrastructure are complex social, cultural and technological systems found in all human habitats. Humans communicate and have developed communications, media and infrastructures to transmit information, knowledge and stories. The infrastructure and the stories it technologically mediates is an agent in the creation of a community’s collective consciousness, archive, and imagination. These communications can assist with maintaining community cohesiveness, a shared identity and forming a social space. Community communication networks / infrastructures (CCN/Is) are emerging as significant grassroots technosocial movements worldwide. These can be a Wireless Local Area Network, a sneaker net, or a fully connected Internet mesh network. Irrespective of the infrastructure’s architecture, CCIs are community created and maintained. CCIs often consciously and sub-consciously embed local, social, cultural and political values in the technological and social infrastructures being constructed. The expertise, commitment of members, the spirit of open source coding, hacker/tinkerer ethic and free culture associated with these and the unique mix of citizens involved, combined with the propagation of knowledge, support, and inexpensive technology is quite unique and characteristic of the Web 2.0 ethos. Infrastructures are complex social, technical and culturally specific artifacts that are shaped by and in turn shape societies. It is suggested that citizens can be active agents in the creation and maintenance of as opposed to passive recipients of infrastructures. It is argued that the social and technological innovations of CCIs, relatively easy access to ad hoc yet very powerful networks of experts and literature combined with the ability to build low cost solutions for a variety of contexts may provide people living in contested territories with the means to construct their own communication infrastructures as part of pre-existing information ecologies, social spaces, local knowledge and physical geographies. The research approach is for this paper is analogous to Activist scholarship, positioned objectivity and experiential learning. Nagaland is the contested territory investigated.

Imagine my surprise!  I am sleepless, feeling a little scratchy, I have been writing about this relatively unknown place in India called Nagaland in India’s North East non stop for two weeks.  It is the last stretch of this comprehensive paper that has been hanging around for to long.  So I decide to throw all caution to the wind and waste a few minutes by perusing the New Times on line, go to the Arts section to find that one of the remote tribal villages, Shillong in Meghalaya in the North East is considered India’s Rock and Roll capital!

I called my Naga friends living in Ottawa who shrieked with laughter!  Yup!  Music got them into the news not the civil war, the human rights abuses, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, insurgents nor peace talks, but this 61 year old cut off jeans wearing long gray haired Lou Majaw guy who is devoted to celebrating Bob Dylan’s Birthday Every Year by putting on a Roots Festival!  Unbelievable!

On Mr. Dylan’s birthday weekend a visitor could drive down a narrow, rain-soaked road and hear young men with guitars serenading, or stumble upon thousands gathered under a Christian revival tent, singing modern gospel in their native Khasi. On a football field, at twilight, you might be pulled into a mosh pit of teenagers dancing to a Naga tribal blues guitarist, or on a Sunday morning find schoolchildren in a chorus of 19th-century hymns in a prim Presbyterian church.

And then I find out about this guy Rewben Mashangva, who is the leading exponent of HAO music and performs on the the Tingtelia, a violin type instrument which he modified to suit his music, as well as the modern Acoustic guitar and harmonica. Whenever he performs in and around his hometown, his son Saka Mashangva joins him as percussion player.

and pictures of the kids being alright!

Mr. Carlin defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society. “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

I remember listening to his records as a kid with my brother along with Cheech and Chong records, and happily recall laughing our heads off at the dave’s not home skit.

We thought we were soooooo baaaaaaaaaaad listening to the 7 words you cannot say on television skit. And to this day, i still really love feeling that kinda bad, where you know that what you are doing is just so not socially acceptable, you sit in the shadows, close the curtains, only let your best friend in on the secret, hush hush wink wink sorta stuff. It was subversive, a feeling and way of being that I learned at a very young age.  I somehow knew what was and what was not socially acceptable, but i did not always get the logic behind most of what we were and are still not allowed to do in some settings.  Most is harmless, just titilating stuff, yet it just feels soo gooooooood to be baaaaaad! Thank goodness for subversives like George Carlin for revealing the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of so many taboos. 

I was reading the Morung Express this morning (Nagaland’s First Online newspaper), and I came across a contemporary Naga Art Exhibit - Beyond the Morung: An art Exhibition by contemporary artists of Nagaland also here, and here. This was a spectacular find at a very opportune time.  I have been sitting for days reading old, dry, boring, racist and parochial chronicles and anthropological studies about the Naga that were devoid of the rich Naga culture I have briefly been exposed to.  Each of these books did however make reference to the Naga high sense of aesthetics, and craftsmanship in woodworking, weaving, basket making, monoliths, architecture, colourful dances and attire. 

My friend Peingam here in Ottawa is a superb photographer, and one of the most creative dressers I have ever seen.  The Nagas I met in New Delhi were also super hip, and really good looking.  People only had a few items of clothing, but what they had was put together in a very funky way.  Montrealers beware you have rivals in the Himalayas!  Yet this side of the Nagas is rarely seen.

This art exhibit has confirmed my intuition of the presence of contemporary Naga artists.  These works re-affirm what the old books said (not the racist parts!) of representing traditional folkarts - woodworking, weaving, architecture, village life and culture - in a different light.   Life Stones by Ajungla Imchen was a very nice surprise indeed as it was reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s work that I had just recently seen in Mexico City. Her piece speaks of the importance of family lineage and references the Naga Monoliths erected in many villages.

The following piece by B. Ao is a wonderful representation of the ongoing practice of war dances.  I would love to talk to him to see if he was at all inspired by North American Indian images, particularly the way the young men are seated and I would like to know more about the other images in this painting to assess if they are from his imagination as they remind me of African Tribal shields or if these are in fact referring to Naga artifacts.

I discussed over the Years with Lui and Pei about the need and yearning to see images and text that shined the Naga in a positive light.  I have been explaining that the world is busy with all sorts of struggles and the Naga one is but one of many, and for people to want to care one has to reach their hearts and imagination or else, they just won’t care.  Seeing this art has provided me with new inspiration to keep going on about this little place hidden deeply in the Himalayas that barely ever makes it to the surface of our public imagination.

to climb the cliff behind parliament hill in Ottawa! I have been running them twice every second day now and next week it will be three times! Eeek!

Hell being a superb academic would be easy if all one had to do was eat, read, write, run and sleep.  Hell if it were not for friends, gardening, fun, kids, earning a living, and day to day things like cooking, shopping, cleaning, and sports I would be so very very smart but potentially also a little boring!

There are times in your life where you just work at stuff with all your heart and you never really know if it is going anywhere or is of any use.

For instance, today, as I have been done for the past 8 years, i weeded, dug and planted flowers in the centre of this derelict roundabout by the city living housing project near where i live.  The tree is finally growing, the city now protects it in the winter with fencing and the original perinials i put in are doing great.  So are the weeds!  So I spend a 1/2 a day +/- while writing to endeavour to clean it out and pilfer plants from the hood to reguvenate the spot.  This is more for me than the hood, however, the long term benefit is a nice looking spot that eventually will look really nice and will uplift that part of the city a teeny tiny way.  It also sparks conversations with strangers and encourages guerrilla gardening and local place based responsibility.  But all this is in my imagination and is an intangible.

Today, I got notice from Ted at the SPNO of a new Homelessness Hub created by the Federal Homelessness Secretariat and et voila the Homelessness Indicators that I helped develop as a researcher with Acacia Consulting and Research are featured.  Developing indicators is no small thing and they are never perfect, nonetheless, these are now in their 5th year of data collection and this is for 22 cities.  What I hope will happen next is that key purse string holders will actually make some decisions based on these numbers!  The facts do speak for themselves!

Au Québec the new news anchors are:

• TVA - Sophie Thibault
  
• Radio Canada - Céline Galipeau

The 20s and 30s inspired the most incredible industrial social commentary art.  I just finished reading a short biography of Diego Rivera after seeing his murals in Mexico and visiting he and his wife’s - Frida Kahlo - house.  The state commissioned political and revolutionary muralists like himself for the purpose of public education for the illiterate.  I will read more about him and other Mexican muralists later after my exam.  Also of this time we had vorticists and the weimar school aka bauhaus, and today i just came across New Objectivity - Neue sachlichkeit which opposed expressionism and included two subgroups the verists and the magical realists.  The precisionists/immaculates

approach and a wider social context were strong ones. In the later 1910s and 1920s, the United States was expanding its communications technology, industrial production, and construction in urban settings. (The changing cityscape was documented by Strand and Sheeler in 1920, in their short film Manhatta.

A fast list of verist artists:

• Otto Dix
  
• George Grosz
• Rudolf Schlichter
• Karl Hubbuch
• Christian Schad
• Karl Hubbuch
• Max Beckmann,

and magical realists:

• Anton Räderscheidt, 
• Georg Schrimpf, 
• Alexander Kanoldt,
  
• Carl Grossberg 
  

Precisionists/immaculates:

• Elsie Driggs,
  
• Charles Demuth, 
• Edward Hopper, 
• Charles Sheeler,
  
• Georgia O’Keeffe

Very political, critical and reflexitive of the time.  I will need to go to a decent art library soon and look this stuff up.  I am very fascinated by these groups of subversives.  I see little art like this at the moment, it is all quite tame or shall I say site specific - according to an art historian i met at a lecture given by Trevor Pinch, this is supposed to be a tired form.  I have no clue, what is and is not hip intellectually or otherwise in art, but i am beginning to see a pattern of what i like,  what i find thought provoking and what elicits new questions or helps me comprehend a concept or the ethos of a time! I certainly want to increase my exposure to this form of visual communication as it really helps me reinforce what i read in words.

Ken was so fantastic today at Canada’s Dance Festival!  I’ll post photos & more thoughts later!

I met Wataru Watanabe when he was an Industrial Design student at Carleton a few years ago.  We hired him as a coop student in the research lab where I work and he developed the look of our atlas frameworks, the look and feel of our wiki and helped with the CD for the Cybercartography book.  Since that time he has generously designed the ogWiFi logos, and for a small fee these new Judo crests and other logo material for my judo club.  We have an entire series of blog headers, speacial crests for masters and word crests for our sleeves.  I am always so impressed with his ability to translate ideas and to work with a group until which time the entire group is happy. 

I think this is the first time a Judo Club has a female crest!  The hairdo was inspired by one of our national competitors Jennifer Landry from New Brunswick to whom I have donated my body for her competitions training (i like thinking a piece of me is at those national & international tournaments!). She somehow manages to train like a fiend while going to med school!  Anyway, she really has those pony tails!

Thanks Wataru! I can’t wait to get these embroidered onto my gi!