Socioplastics 11830 A Concept Crosses a Border and Changes Direction
A concept can travel intact while the work it performs changes. DiscourseRefraction follows this shift as ideas pass through institutions, media, professional conventions and territorial conditions. “Resilience,” for example, may move from ecological description into municipal policy, where it becomes a procurement criterion, an expectation placed on residents or a way to describe public adaptation. The word carries its history into each new setting, even as its practical effects change. Stuart Hall’s work on representation and cultural meaning, Homi K. Bhabha’s account of cultural translation, Walter Mignolo’s writing on local histories and global designs, and Jennifer Robinson’s approach to ordinary cities offer distinct ways to study conceptual travel. Their work helps show how a term acquires meaning through the people and institutions that use it. Translation can create new relations and redistribute responsibility. A study could trace one concept through policy documents, professional guidance, public meetings and local accounts. At each stage, it would record who introduced the term, which definition was used and what decision followed. Comparing these records would show whether the concept retained its earlier implications, gained new ones or supported a different allocation of authority. Contributors could review the interpretation of local usage. DiscourseRefraction treats conceptual movement as an urban event with observable consequences. It helps researchers explain how ideas travel, how they change in use and how their history informs present decisions. A concept becomes more accountable when its route through institutions remains traceable.
REFERENCES
Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Hall, S. (ed.) (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE.
Mignolo, W.D. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Robinson, J. (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html