Tag Archives: discourse

In Sweden, a long-standing and pervasive discourse delineates the significance of design—especially “Swedish design”—within a distinctly political framework. Just as the social democratic welfare state is in large part organized to “care” for its citizens, design in Sweden is supposed to “care” for the users of everyday goods. I explore this claim in several sociocultural domains in which different aspects of Swedish design are reproduced. I also present an argument for working with design and designing as ethnographic objects of inquiry.

Community radio and hip-hop constitute sociopolitical agency in the (sub)urban, working-class neighborhoods of São Paulo. Practitioners and performers have defined themselves, in part, by their success in “conquering space” and, in turn, have created a productive public sphere. Members of both groups consistently describe what they do as public exchange, a viable and visible option on the part of the disenfranchised to engage in a Habermasian ideal sphere of civic agency. In this article, I argue that it is this epistemology of knowledge as exchange coupled with a sociogeographical presence that make hip-hop and community radio provocative to local residents and periodically irritating to state authorities.