Julia Christensen - Böcker

Housing, Homelessness, and Social Policy in the Urban North brings together leading scholars on northern urban housing across the Canadian North, Alaska, and Greenland. Through various case studies, the contributors examine the ways in which housing insecurity and homelessness provide a critical lens on the social dimensions of northern urbanization. They also present key considerations in the development of effective and sustainable social policy for these areas. The book kickstarts a conversation between multiple stakeholders from different cultural and national regions across the North American north. It asks key questions including these: What are the common problems of, and responses to, housing insecurity and homelessness across these northern regions? Is a single definition of "homelessness" even possible, or desirable? And if not, can a shared language around how to end the housing crisis and homelessness in our northern regions still occur?The contributors explore how experiences of northern towns and cities inform an overall understanding of urban forms and processes in the contemporary world, and speak directly to the emerging body of literature on cities. Highlighting key limitations to federal, state, and provincial policy, Housing, Homelessness, and Social Policy in the Urban North raises important implications for developing policy that is responsive to northern realities.

Technological evolution and obsolescence on Earth and in outer space, in a new project by artist Julia ChristensenThis volume documents an ongoing investigation by artist Julia Christensen (born 1976) into how our relentless "upgrade culture"—the perceived notion that we need to constantly upgrade our electronics to remain relevant—fundamentally impacts our experience of time. In a personal narrative interspersed with related interdisciplinary artwork and conversations with experts from different fields (other artists, archivists, academics), Christensen takes readers along a path from the international "e-waste" industry to institutional archives, eventually leading her to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).At JPL, Christensen began a dialog with a group of exo-planetary scientists, engineers and machine learning experts to develop long-lived space mission concepts that include an update of the Voyager spacecrafts’ 1977 "Golden Record," to be embedded on a hypothetical future interstellar spacecraft. She and the scientists are designing an artwork generated by an extraterrestrial system that tells a distinctly new story of life on Earth. In taking on this challenge, Christensen—a female pioneer redefining the intersection of art, technology, and outer space—must envision an artwork for an evolving, autonomously-upgrading spaceship headed toward a potentially habitable planet in another star system. Her years-long investigation into upgrade culture leads to design concepts that potentially transcend technological obsolescence altogether.