Browsing by Author "MacDonald, Michael B."
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Item American goddess: a modern apotheosis(2011) MacDonald, Michael B.Since the 1970s America has inherited Britain's place as the world center of modern paganism. One of America's significant contributions to neopaganism is the transformation of Wicca into a feminist spiritual practice. Some American feminist witches have suggested that the roots of witchcraft may be found in goddess polytheism. American goddess worship seems to differ, however, from other named-goddess worship elsewhere in the world, in that the goddess of much American paganism has no single name or identity... Exploring the development of goddess worship in the United States since 1970 will show how this nonhierarchical, nondogmatic, spiritual practice has developed into very personal and community spiritual practices that celebrate the goddess. [Taken from work]Item Ark: a return to Robson Valley(2022) MacDonald, Michael B.What follows is a fictional conversation with a reviewer about the cinematic research-creation film Ark: A Return to Robson Valley(MacDonald 2022, dir.) published in this first issue of JAVEM. The purpose is to begin to discuss the value of fiction/neorealism in knowledge creation. The title and form of the essay riffs off of Brian Massumi’s (2008) “The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: A Semblance of a Conversation.” In this conversation I am addressing comments from both reviewers, though playfully use the name Reviewer 2 to make a point about what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call conceptual personae from “What is Philosophy?” that: “names are intrinsic conceptual personae who haunt a particular plane of consistency” (1994:24). Authors quite often make jokes about the critical nature of Reviewer 2, and some will possibly have an affective response to the name, which may open further the space I am trying to flow through with this essay.Item Back to the garden: territory and exchange in western Canadian folk music festivals(2010) MacDonald, Michael B.Until now folk music festivals in western Canada have not been systematically surveyed nor has their operation been theorized as a mode of creative production. This work develops a historically grounded approach to folk music as a means of social production and challenges the idea that folk music is only a music genre. I conclude, using a theoretical approach developed by Deleuze and Guattari, that contemporary folk music festivals make use of social capital to establish a folk music assemblage. This assemblage provides an alternative, non-centralized, and increasingly global alternative for the flow of music capital. Folk music is no longer a style of music but a mode of doing business in music that is socially oriented and politically and economically potent.Item "The best laid plans of Marx and men": Mitch Podolak, revolution, and the Winnipeg Folk Festival(2008) MacDonald, Michael B.Mitch Podolak said, “Pete Seeger and Leon Trotsky lead to everything in my life, especially the Winnipeg Folk Festival.” This article discusses the creation of the Winnipeg Folk Festival (WFF) in 1974 as Podolak’s first attempt to fuse his ten years of Trotskyist political training with his love for folk music. His intention was to create a Canadian folk festival which would embody the politically resistant nature of the Trotskyist international movement for the purpose of challenging the Canadian liberal capitalist democratic system on a cultural front. Heavily influenced by the American Communist Party’s use of folk music, Podolak believed that the folk song and its performance were socially important. This importance, he believed, stemmed from the social cohesion that could be created within a festival performance space. This space, when thoughtfully organized, could have the ability to create meaning. The relationships between the artistic director, the folk singer, the folk song and the festival audience become intertwined to dialectically create the meaning of the song and the space simultaneously defining folk musicItem CineWorlding: scenes of cinematic research-creation(2023) MacDonald, Michael B.Using cine-ethnomusicology as a focus, Cineworlding introduces readers to ways of thinking eco-cinematically. Screens are omnipresent, we carry digital cinema production equipment in our pockets, but this screen-based technological revolution has barely impacted social science scholarship. Mixing existential phenomenological fiction about social science digital cinema research practice followed by theoretical reflection and discussion of methods, this book has emerged from a decade-long inquiry into cineworlding and a desire to help others produce digital media to engage creatively with the digital networks that surround us.Item Citizen science on the Bras D'Or(2016) MacDonald, Michael B.Citizen Science is a community based approach to ecology research. One afternoon in the summer of 2016 Bras D'Or Watch organized an opportunity for the general public to learn how to do citizen science. This short film introduces citizen science and some of the interesting scientific questions that face the Bras D'Or Lakes, Cape Breton Island's UNESCO Biosphere Reserve (blbra.ca). 3:35 minutes. Retrieved from: http://www.michaelbmacdonaldfilms.ca/Item Collaborative projection and the twin ecstasies of DIY cineworlding(2023) MacDonald, Michael B.The notion that ethnographic practice needs to be normative in order to be rigorous is problematic, especially when the partners in that research are producing experimental and resistant DIY cultures. Nonnormative ethnographers are “activist” in their critical engagement with dominant regimes of truth and must contend with digital disruption and platform capitalism that has vastly expanded DIY production. It is no longer possible to identify DIY culture with self-production because digital self-production is simply demanded for the “digital citizenship” of platform capitalism. In this article, the psychoanalytic concept of projection is turned upside down and understood as a socially performed digital-bodying that worlds. The screen becomes a location of dissensus, projecting the ecstatic truth of Modern/capitalist worldings or Altermodern/anti-capitalist worldings. Cinematic research-creation, CineWorlding, is an activist cinematic posthumanographic study of the interstices that infold concepts, bodies, social, technological, and environmental ecologies into worldings.Item Cultural studies of youth culture: aesthetics as critical aesthetic education(2014) MacDonald, Michael B.This chapter presents a study of Hip Hop Kulture aesthetics, and lays out a call for students, teachers and community arts practitioners to engage in a practice of critical aesthetic education.Item Flow(2012) MacDonald, Michael B.A short piece on the concept of "flow" as it applies to the works of Gilles Deleuze.Item Fold(2012) MacDonald, Michael B.A short piece on the concept of "fold" as it applies to the works of Gilles Deleuze.Item Hip-hop citizens: local hip-hop and the production of democratic grassroots change in Alberta(2012) MacDonald, Michael B.The purpose of this chapter is to capture my involvement with the young artists and presenters who are involved in emancipatory forms of hip-hop in Edmonton. The first part of the chapter documents how I became connected with the research partners in this project and an overview of some of the obstacles inhibiting the hip-hop community in Edmonton and impoverished sections of Edmonton. Next, I highlight how we became aware of how neoliberalism is responsible for inhibiting the development of the hip-hop scene in Edmonton as well as the development of 118 Ave. Third, I flesh out how the research team formulated a research methodology and pedagogy to revitalize the hip-hop scene in Edmonton and our urban community itself. Finally, I suggest how this project impacted the individual members of the research team, the hip-hop community, and this urban context. At the same time, I also highlight some of the obstacles of sustaining a cultural ecology that has the potential to raise critical awareness, inside and outside of the hip-hop world, of what causes oppression and how to dismantle it.Item Knowing Pandora in sound: acoustemology and ecomusicological imagination in Cameron's Avatar(2013) MacDonald, Michael B.Using the music in James Cameron's Avatar, and drawing upon four case studies on ethnomusicology, this chapter reflects upon a way of knowing-through-sound called acoustemology.Item Letters to Attawapiskat(2016) MacDonald, Michael B.; Cipher5The story of tragedy at the Attawapiskat First Nations brings up issues of colonization, truth and reconciliation in a very personal way for a group of hiphoppas in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. A film by Michael B. MacDonald; A CIPHER5 Production; 31:11 minutes. Retrieved from: http://www.michaelbmacdonaldfilms.ca/Item Megamorphesis: the hip hop quest for enlightenment(2016) MacDonald, Michael B.Every week Dre Pharoh and iD meet with young Edmonton hiphoppas at a local community centre. Together they make a knowledge cypher called Cipher5 where they work towards developing both skills and better selves. This is a film about one of those meetings where they talk about HipHop Kulture and build a new hip-hop track about their transformation to a higher self, Megamorephesis. A Cipher5 production; a Michael MacDonald film; 29:46 minutes. Retrieved from: http://www.michaelbmacdonaldfilms.ca/Item Minor(2012) MacDonald, Michael B.A short piece on the concept of "minor" as it applies to the works of Gilles Deleuze.Item Nomadic(2012) MacDonald, Michael B.A short piece on the concept of "nomadic" as it applies to the works of Gilles Deleuze.Item Pimachihowan(2015) MacDonald, Michael B.; Lertzman, DavidThe product of three years of work in Northern Alberta that explores the traditional Cree philosophy of Pimachihowan that roughly translates into living with the land. The northern Cree are First Nations (Indigenous Canadians) living in the Boreal forest, second in size and ecological importance only to the Amazonian Rainforest, an indispensable resource to maintaining life. A Michael MacDonald film; written and produced by Dr. David Lertzman; director, editor, sound: Michael MacDonald; featuring Dr. David Lertzman, Conroy Sewepagaham, and Willard Tallcree; 33:03 minutes. Retrieved from: http://www.michaelbmacdonaldfilms.ca/Item Playing for change : music festivals as community learning and development(2016) MacDonald, Michael B.Playing for Change – performing for money and for social justice – introduces a critical pedagogy of arts-based community learning and development (A-CLD), a new discipline wherein artists learn to become educators, social workers, and community economic development agents. Challenging the assumption that acculturation into a ruling ideology of state development is necessary, this book presents a version of CLD that locates development in the production of subjectivities. The author argues that A-CLD is as concerned with the autonomous collective and the individual as it is with establishing community infrastructure. As a result, a radical new theory is proposed to explain aesthetics within arts movements, beginning not by normalizing music cultures within global capitalism, but by identifying the creation of experimental assemblages as locations of cultural resistance. This book offers a new vocabulary of cultural production to provide a critical language for a theory of anti-capitalist subjectivity and for a new type of cultural worker involved with A-CLD. Drawing from a four-year study of thirteen music festivals, Playing for Change forwards A-CLD as a locally situated, joyful, and creative resistance to the globalizing forces of neoliberalism.Item Remix and life hack in hip hop : towards a critical pedagogy of music(2016) MacDonald, Michael B.Many hiphoppas labour to sustain Hiphop Kulture in their communities far from the big stages, world tours, and hit singles enjoyed by a shockingly few American hiphoppas. The creative labour of these few mega stars is calculated in billions of dollars. But for most hiphoppas, their creative labour may never get expressed in economic terms. Instead it is expressed in social capital, the production of collective and individual subjectivities, the bonds of love that build and hold communities together, and the healing of broken hearts, broken homes, and broken neighborhoods in broken cities. Hiphop Kulture is not a music genre, it is much more, and exploring how the sharing of aesthetic resources builds community, and how situated learning plays a necessary role in cultural sustainability draws out questions that may lead to a model of community located cultural education, and a starting point for a critical pedagogy of music