03 November 2008

Victoria Foundation halts grants

Sandra McCulloch, Times Colonist

Published: Saturday, November 01, 2008

The venerable Victoria Foundation has fallen victim to turbulent financial markets and announced yesterday that until the economic situation improves it will not hand out funds.

Chuck Burkett, chairman of the foundation board, said no grants have been given out since the end of August, when the markets began their plunge.

Last year, the Victoria Foundation bestowed $7 million in grants to more than 300 individuals and groups involved in charitable activities.

Click above for link to the entire article.


Ephemeral experience might be the next economic currency

Ephemeral experience might well become the next economic currency, or so says Harvard Business School professor John Quelch. How about that - a perfect entryway for dance to stand up and shout "We are fleeting! We're expensive! We're an experience! Come here!"

It'll all make sense when you read the article at Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge website: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6067.html His post is based in part on Professor Quelch's Economist article "Too Much Stuff."

John Quelch is Senior Associate Dean and Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Here's a taster:

The Next Marketing Challenge: Selling to 'Simplifiers'

Watch out for a new brand of consumer in 2008: the middle-aged Simplifier.

She finds herself surrounded by too much stuff acquired. She is increasingly skeptical in the face of a financial meltdown that it was all worth the effort. Out will go luxury purchases, conspicuous consumption, and a trophy culture.

Tomorrow's consumer will buy more ephemeral, less cluttering stuff: fleeting, but expensive, experiences, not heavy goods for the home...


Transversal web journal - translations

Transversal web journal is currently looking at translation. This is interesting to dance as countries and citizens buckle down into their national and international identities in reaction to 'economic disaster' discourses, and reinvent themselves and reidentify themselves in realms of expression. I've heard of some work being done in Wales and Switzerland about multilingual nations affecting expression and identity in dance - this is certainly parallel to Canada and could readily be considered not only in the official languages (English, French, plus Aboriginal languages) but also all the mother tongues of immigrants that have populated this country since early colonial days (you pick a language, we have it here).

I like keeping in touch with Transversal's thinking. You too can get on their e-list. It's always interesting to see what they're up to - some great minds coming together and clashing (like cymbals, music and noise all at once)....

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talks on translation | gespräche zur übersetzung

transversal web journal

“Talks on translation” is in fact a cluster of six interviews discussing the topic of translation from different angles: philosophy, cultural and literary theory, political activism, critical reflexion on migration, globalization, European integration, etc. The partners in the dialogues are a British philosophy professor curious about how modernism functions beyond its allegedly original context; an Indologist and feminist philosopher, herself a cosmopolitan migrant, speculating on the notion of mother tongue; a German cultural theorist who wrote a book about “cultural turns” (and a “translational turn” among them); an American professor of Slavic and Comparative literature who is the author of “A Manifesto of Cultural Translation”; a theorist from Paris, director of the famous international journal of critical thought “Transeuropéennes” and political activist who reflects on translation in the context of European integration; a professor from Tamkang University (Taiwan), an ex-American living in East Asia, interested in heterolinguality and the phenomenon of broken languages. What do they all have in common? At least the fact that in each of their particular fields translation has a problem to solve.

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0908

Boris Buden in conversation with:
Doris Bachmann-Medick
: Cultural Studies – A Translational Perspective
Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes
: Europe – A Construction Site of Translation
Rada Iveković
: Place of Birth: Babel
Tomislav Longinović
: The Answer is in Translation
Peter Osborne
: Translation – Between Philosophy and Cultural Theory
Jon Solomon / Hito Steyerl
: Mission Imbpossible - Jon Solomon in Conversation with Hito Steyerl about the Project „DeriVeD“


New texts in the issue „Borders, Nations, Translations“:

Boris Buden
: A Tangent that Betrayed the Circle. On the Limits of Fidelity in Translation
Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez
: "Lost in Translation" - Transcultural Translation and Decolonialization of Knowledge
Stefan Nowotny
: The Multiple Faces of the “Civis”. Is Citizenship Translatable?
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
: More Thoughts on Cultural Translation
Michaela Wolf
: Translation – Transculturation. Measuring the perspectives of transcultural political action

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608


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ending a hiatus

With the early onset of winter in Ottawa (hello again snow!) I'm returning to this site after a hiatus that left me with lots of unfinished thoughts. Prepare for a bit of sporadic spew in the next few posts as I get the most prominent interests out of my head and into collated cyberspace.

Like before, mostly this is a collation of material that interests me and that I want to return to. It's handier to me than bookmarking, and for anyone else out there who wants a glimpse into the early stages and inner workings of my idea synthesis, voila.

Hello world. Welcome back.