Residents, business owners, and others will have an opportunity to reflect on this question as the FoundFutures:Chinatown project culminates at the end of this week. HRCFS is staging a free futures workshop in the city this Saturday afternoon, to coincide with the end of the Alternative Urban Futures exhibition at The Arts at Marks Garage.
Here's the text of the above flyer that we're distributing around the neighbourhood to draw interested parties out of the woodwork. By all means, pass this around and encourage people to attend if they wish.
EXPLORE CHINATOWN'S FUTURES
Cultural museum, corporate investment engine, outpost of a new global power, quarantined ground-zero, transformed society?
Utilizing innovative techniques, and building on the response to the distributed installation of "artifacts from the future" in and around Chinatown, the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS) invites you to expand your thinking about possibility and participate in a guided exploration of alternative futures for the district. Led by renowned futurist Jim Dator and FoundFutures:Chinatown creators Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, this workshop offers residents, community leaders, business owners, and others a unique chance to think beyond short-term concerns and dig deeper into Chinatown's past, present, and possible futures.
The workshop is free of change, and takes place at The Arts at Mark's Garage [cnr Nuuanu and Pauahi, in Chinatown], this Saturday 17 November from noon to 4pm. Space is limited, please RSVP to info at foundfutures dot com or call 808.956.2888.
The Department of Political Science and the College of Social Sciences have approved the creation of a new public-policy/futures studies tenure-track position and are currently accepting applications.
Assistant Professor, Position No. #82278, Department of Political Science, College of Social Science, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, full-time, 9-month, tenure track appointment, to begin August 1, 2008.
Duties: Teach graduate and undergraduate courses in public policy and futures studies; conduct and publish research; share in advising; contribute to departmental, college, and community life and to the development of the public policy concentration; seek extramural funding.
Minimum Qualifications: Ph.D. in Political Science or a related field. [ABD with all requirements for degree completed by August 1, 2008, considered]. Demonstrated ability to teach and conduct research in public policy.
Desired Qualifications: Applicant should demonstrate the ability to identify and analyze continuing and emerging issues in policy analysis in contexts of accelerating change and uncertainty in the near- and long-term, and to use critical and futures-oriented approaches to address major questions such as globalization, climate change, energy, new technologies, health, and demographic change and mobility. The ability to contribute to one or more of the other parts of the Department's curriculum such as political theory, governance, comparative politics, indigenous politics, and global politics is also highly desirable. Selected candidate should be committed to innovative educational strategies and work with students with diverse backgrounds and experiences. The College is committed to excellence in scholarship and favors candidates who are collegial and attentive to issues of race, gender, sexuality and other dimensions of diversity.
Salary Range: Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.
To Apply: Send a dossier that includes a curriculum vita, a writing sample, a sample course syllabus, a statement of teaching philosophy, and at least three letters of reference, to Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Chair, Political Science Department, 640 Saunders Hall, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822.
Closing Date: Review of applications will begin on January 10, 2008 and will continue until the position is filled.
The FoundFutures:Chinatown project has received quite a bit of attention. See links and excerpts below.
David A.M. Goldberg reviews the gallery show in this Sunday's Honolulu Advertiser:
In the same spirit with which Kalakaua went to centers of European power to negotiate on behalf of colonized Pacific Island people, the group FoundFutures samples and repurposes the visual language that colonizes us today. From recognizable branding strategies to government-style posters, FoundFutures projects look at current political, ecological and socioeconomic situations and projects them forward by 10 to 20 years.
"Birdcage," the story of the 2016 H8N2 or "Hang Ten Flu" flu epidemic in Hawai'i, is the most thoroughly realized. FoundFutures, led by University of Hawai'i graduate students Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, crafted everything from the government's quarantine zone maps to this-property-is-condemned posters, to the 9/11-style missing-persons fliers that citizens would post in the wake of forced quarantines. The finishing touch is a tourism poster for Maui (unscathed by the flu, how?) which proudly declares that the island is "Still Paradise."
Typically cinema is the chosen medium for visualizing the future. By installing elements of their projects in the urban fabric itself, FoundFutures turns Chinatown into a movie set of sorts, approaching the level of production design that goes into films like "Children of Men."
"It is unique and surprising and stretches the expectation of what to find in a gallery."[-Richardson.]
The exhibit actually began outside the gallery on the streets of Chinatown in early October, when Marks Garage helped the collaborative multimedia group FoundFutures present four scenarios of the district's future via agitprop (political perspectives communicated through art).
Fictitious ads were plastered along Chinatown streets that had some folks worried. One scenario, titled "McChinatown," for instance, utilized posters announcing the arrival of such franchises as Starbucks.
Two earlier articles about the 'ambient' installation in Chinatown:
Coming soon to Chinatown: a Starbucks, TGI Friday's, American Apparel and luxury lofts priced at $2.5 million each?
No, but that's what several signs announced earlier this month in what turned out to be a controversial campaign by two University of Hawai'i doctoral students to get Chinatown residents talking about their community's future.
It was part public installation art, part social experiment, and only the first of more scenarios to come.
The intention, according to Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, was to manifest a possible future for the district, and simulate a real scenario to get business owners, residents and others engaged in a discussion about what they would like the neighborhood to become.
Their goal was to get a conversation started -- and the dialogue has begun.
Reactions were both emotional and intellectual. Many were fooled by the hoax, some angry, some apathetic and yet others amused.
The pair fielded a range of public responses, from those who were perfectly appalled at the corporate invasion, to those who welcomed Starbucks as a sign of economic achievement.
