Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in Istanbul.The text in this edition is edited from essays and notes Ulus Baker wrote between 1995 and 2002. In these essays, Baker criticizes the sociological research turning into an analysis of people’s opinions. He explores with an exciting clarity the notion of ‘opinion’ as a specific form of apprehension between knowledge and point of view, then looks into ‘social types’ as an analytical device deployed by early sociologists. He associates the form of ‘comprehension’ the ‘social types’ postulate with Spinoza’s notion of ‘affections’ (as a dynamic, non-linguistic form of the relation between entities). He finally discusses the possibilities of reintroducing this device for understanding our contemporary world through cinema and documentary filmmaking, by reinstating images in general as ‘affective thought processes’.Baker’s first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of ‘big data’, and the pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and infographics.
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README.first is a bilingual collection of mini-essays, published in the run up to the Plokta filmfestival. We’ve asked writers, researchers, theorists, artists, programmers, and others to pick an online video that functions as a stepping stone for their thought and practice and to comment shortly on why they find the video so significant, funny, or outright disturbing. The resulting reflections speak about Silicon Valley obsessions, our mediated social lives, the impact of technology on centuries old games, and more.Plokta showcases film as a frame of socio-technological themes and discussions. With these essays we want to broaden the scope to one of the most significant developments in visual culture of the past decades: the rise of online video. At the Institute of Network Cultures (INC), online video has been a research topic already since 2007, in a continuous project named Video Vortex. Together, Plokta and INC, hope to stimulate reflections before, during and after the festival on what the moving image has to say to us.
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The focus of my research is how Bartholomeus Guesthouse (BG), founded in 1407 by Willem van Abcoude, has organized care over more than 600 years for the elderly and elderly sick people in the Centre of Utrecht. After the reorganization of 1817 -by Royal Law- the 7 (9) Guesthouses were merged to one Board called “College van Regenten der Vereenigde Gods-en Gasthuizen” .They have had their domicile in Bartholomeus Guesthouse. This Guesthouse survived as elderly care centre on particular foundation, which has meant until today that people from different religions were welcome. The properties of the other guesthouses came under supervision of the Board of “Vereenigde Gods-en Gasthuizen”. The heritage of the other foundations was , in terms of property and land, considerable. In my paper I will present the following items: -An inventarisation of the situation after 1817 and the ‘cameren’ (vrij woningen) of the different guesthouses in Utrecht and what their (living) conditions were at that time; -the Policy of the Board supervising the Free Houses/ Cameren for Elderly during this area; the observation of the archive manager S.Muller Fz.is good illustration of the situation in 1900; -the inhabitants of the ‘vrij woningen’; the selection and the rules as part of the social housing policy; - a more general analysis: the policy of poor relief and the debate of who had to take care of the poor? - all subjects give an answer to the question whether or not poor relief can be regarded as a safety valve for the (lower) middle class, in the ninetheenth century.
