The latest issue of Public, the journal of the York-based Public Access Collective, was released at a launch party on Oct. 18. Edited by York Professor Janine Marchessault, Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, and Saara Liinamaa and Christine Shaw, both doctoral students in York’s Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, Public issue number 29 features articles by several members of the York community looking into the idea of locality as both a dwelling space and an imaginative horizon.
Right: Janine Marchessault
In the introduction written by the editors, locality is called an “expressive metaphor for the distinctiveness of cultures shaping and shaped by the global urban landscape.” The theme is intended to recognize “globalization as a process that has given rise to creative forms of social life and political activism located in and around cities.” The editors go on to say “this issue of Public approaches the concept of locality in a dialectical fashion – seeing in it new possibilities for translocalism, diverse coalitions, and critical engagements as well as new reactionary articulations of market fundamentalism, and commodified difference.”
Faculty participants include Professor Fuyuki Kurasawa of the Department of Sociology, Brenda Longfellow of the Department of Film & Video, Faculty of Fine Arts, and author Steve McCaffery, English professor in the Faculty of Arts. Other York contributors to the latest edition include Alex Ferentzy, Bryce Goebel, Pierre Oullet, as well as Liinamaa and Shaw; doctoral students Chris Smith and Charles Finley, in the York-Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communications and Culture; and artist and York alumnus David Harris Smith (MFA ’04).
Public is an interdisciplinary journal that explores contemporary cultural issues by bridging scholarly and critical studies with artistic practices. The Collective was founded out of a shared need to be part of a community-based organization that is open to innovative ways for curating the visual arts in the public domain. Working to organize its projects, the group functions mainly in curatorial and research capacities.
Current members of the collective include York faculty members Chloë Brushwood-Rose, visual artist and postdoctoral fellow in the Graduate Program in Communications and Culture, Caitlin Fisher, Canada Research Chair in Digital Media in the Faculty of Fine Arts, and Marchessault, who is president.