Cultural studies Books

Book SynopsisThis frank and courageous book explores the persistence of failure in today’s urban schools. At its heart is the argument that most education policy discussions are disconnected from the daily realities of urban schools, especially those in poor and beleaguered neighbourhoods. Charles M. Payne argues that we have failed to account fully for the weakness of the social infrastructure and the often dysfunctional organisational environments of urban schools and school systems. The result is that liberals and conservatives alike have spent a great deal of time pursuing questions of limited practical value in the effort to improve city schools. Payne carefully delineates these stubborn and intertwined sources of failure in urban school reform efforts of the past two decades. Yet while his book is unsparing in its exploration of the troubled recent history of urban school reform, Payne also describes himself as “guardedly optimistic.” He describes how, in the last decade, we have developed real insights into the roots of school failure, and into how some individual schools manage to improve. He also examines recent progress in understanding how particular urban districts have established successful reforms on a larger scale. Drawing on a striking array of sources—from the recent history of various urban school systems, to the growing sophistication of education research, to his own experience as a teacher, scholar, and participant in reform efforts—Payne paints a vivid and unmistakably realistic portrait of urban schools and reforms of the past few decades. So Much Reform, So Little Change will be required reading for everyone interested in the plight—and the future—of urban schools

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Book SynopsisIn the last 25 years of the nineteenth century, around two hundred thousand visitors from Australia landed in Britain. As members of the colonial elite, they sailed to the Old Country to experience their Britishness: they toured Westminster Abbey; they visited graves of parents; they threw snowballs at Christmas. As one visitor expressed it on arrival in London in 1889: Spotted St Pauls in the distance & felt at home.' Using unpublished diaries and letters, this book offers a unique and cross-disciplinary approach to Cultural History. It considers both British and Australian national identities as the products of cultural displacement.Table of ContentsContents: Introduction; Neither English nor Foreign: Australian Colonial Identity; Familiar and Yet Strange: First Experiences of Britain; Aborigines at the Crystal Palace: Portable Colonial Spaces; Roast Beef and the Epsom Derby: Social Status and National Identity; Cleopatra's Needle: Antiquity, History and Modernity in Britain and the USA; A Disgusting Climate: Being Australian in Wales, Ireland and Scotland; Australia has more of a Continental Atmosphere: Twentieth-Century Visitors to Britain.

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Book SynopsisThis book -- an edited collection of new contributions from distinguished Australian academics -- contextualises, illuminates, and explains the contemporary politics of Australian Jewry. It critically analyses the three broad themes above through relevant case studies and source material, and situates the politics of Australian Jews through comparisons with general patterns in Australian politics, the politics of other minorities in Australia, and the politics of other Western Jewish communities. Contains a detailed appendix of Jewish Parliamentarians, 1849 to the Present.Trade Review"This is an excellent collection by some outstanding Jewish social scientists. It should be included in any Australian politics course, where studies of 'ethnic politics' are still very marginal." -- James Jupp of the Australian National University, in the Australian Journal of Political Science Volume 43, No.3.Table of ContentsCONTENTS: Acknowledgements; Introduction: Jews and Australian Politics; Jews in Australia -- A Demographic Profile; Who Speaks for Australian Jewry?; Jews and the Australian Labour Party; Jews and the Left; Jews and the Liberal Party of Australia; Political Conservatism and the Australian Jewish Community; Anti-Semitism and Australian Jewry; Pro-Israelism as a Factor in Australian Jewish Political Attitudes and Behaviour; Mending the World from the Margins: Jewish Women and Australian Feminism; Jews and Aborigines; Jews and Australian Multiculturalism; Inside AIJAC -- An Australian Jewish Lobby Group; The Hanan Ashrawi Affair: Australian Jewish Politics on Display; Conclusion: Australian Jewish Politics in Comparative Perspective; Appendix: Jewish Parliamentarians in Australia, 1849 to the Present; Notes on Contributors; Index.

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Book SynopsisThe Jewish Cultural Studies series offers a contemporary view of Jewish culture around the globe. Multidisciplinary, multi-focused, and eclectic, it covers the cultural practices of secular Jews as well as of religious Jews of all persuasions, and from historical as well as contemporary perspectives. It also considers the range of institutions that represent and respond to Jewishness, including museums, the media, synagogues, and schools. More than a series on Jewish ideas, it uncovers ideas of being Jewish. This volume proposes that the idea of 'Jewish', or what people think of as 'Jewishness', is revealed in expressions of culture and applied in constructions of identity and representation. In Part I, 'Expression', Elly Teman considers how the kabbalistic red string found at sites throughout Israel conveys a political and psychological response to terrorism. Sergey Kravtsov examines Jewish and non-Jewish narratives concerning a synagogue in eastern Europe. Miriam Isaacs looks at expressions of cultural continuity in DP camps in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and Jascha Nemtsov discusses how Jewish folk music was presented as high art in early twentieth-century Germany. In Part II, 'Identity', Joachim Schlor enquires how the objects taken by emigrants leaving Germany for Palestine after Hitler's rise to power represented their identities. Hanna Kliger, Bea Hollander-Goldfein, and Emilie Passow examine how survivors' narratives become integrated into family identities. Olga Gershenson offers close readings of how the identities of Jews as enacted in post-perestroika films highlight conflicting Russian attitudes towards Jews. Ted Merwin considers commercial establishments as 'sacred spaces' for Jewish secular identities. Part III, 'Representation', opens with stories collected in Israel by Ilana Rosen from Jews who lived in Carpatho-Russia, while Judith Lewin considers the characterization of the Jewish woman in French literature. Holly Pearse and Mikel Koven, respectively, decode the Jewishness of modern radio comedy and Hollywood film. The idea of Jewishness is applied in the volume with provocative interpretations of Jewish experience, and fresh approaches to the understanding of Jewish cultural expressions. CONTRIBUTORS Simon J. Bronner, Olga Gershenson, Bea Hollander-Goldfein, Miriam Isaacs, Hannah Kliger, Mikel J. Koven, Sergey R. Kravtsov, Judith Lewin, Ted Merwin, Jascha Nemtsov, Emilie S. Passow, Holly A. Pearse, Ilana Rosen, Joachim Schlor, Elly TemanTrade Review'These essays often get to the heart of how Jewish cultural identity is still constructed today by Jews-religious and secular-and by non-Jews ... Recommended.' S. Ward, ChoiceTable of ContentsNote on Transliteration Preface SIMON J. BRONNERIntroduction: The Chutzpah of Jewish Cultural Studies SIMON J. BRONNER Part I: Expression1 The Red String: The Cultural History of a Jewish Folk Symbol ELLY TEMAN2 A Synagogue in Olyka: Architecture and Legends SERGEY R. KRAVTSOV3 Yiddish in the Aftermath: Speech Community and Cultural Continuity in Displaced Persons Camps MIRIAM ISAACS4 'National Dignity' and 'Spiritual Reintegration': The Discovery and Presentation of Jewish Folk Music in Germany JASCHA NEMTSOV Part II: Identity5 'Take Down Mezuzahs, Remove Name-Plates': The Emigration of Objects from Germany to Palestine JOACHIM SCHLA-R6 Holocaust Narratives and their Impact: Personal Identification and Communal Roles HANNAH KLIGER, BEA HOLLANDER-GOLDFEIN and EMILIE PASSOW7 Ambivalence, Identity, and Russian-Jewish Culture OLGA GERSHENSON8 The Delicatessen as an Icon of Secular Jewishness TED MERWIN Part III: Representation9 Hasidism versus Zionism as Remembered by Carpatho-Russian Jews between the Two World Wars ILANA ROSEN10 The Sublimity of the Jewish Type: Balzac's Belle Juive as Virgin Magdalene aux Camelias JUDITH LEWIN11 As Goyish as Lime Jell-O? Jack Benny and the American Construction of Jewishness HOLLY A. PEARSE 12 Jewish Coding: Cultural Studies and Jewish-American Cinema MIKEL KOVENNotes on ContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisFor a Jew, describing a place as 'home' conveys connotations of heritage as well as of residence. Additionally, feeling 'at home' suggests a sense of comfort in one's social surroundings. The questions at the heart of this volume are: what things make a home 'Jewish', materially and emotionally, and what is it that makes Jews feel 'at home' in their environment? The material dimensions are explored through a study of the symbolic and ritual objects that convey Jewishness and a consideration of other items that may be used to express Jewish identity in the home-something that the introduction identifies as 'living-room Judaism'. The discussion is geographically and ethnically wide-ranging, and the transformation of meaning attached to different objects in different environments is contextualized, as, for example, in Shalom Sabar's study of {h.}amsa amulets in Morocco and Israel. For diasporic Jewish culture, the question of feeling at home is an emotional issue that frequently emerges in literature, folklore, and the visual and performing arts. The phrase 'at-homeness in exile' aptly expresses the tension between the different heritages with which Jews identify, including that between the biblical promised land and the cultural locations from which Jewish migration emanated. The essays in this volume take a closer look at the way in which ideas about feeling at home as a Jew are expressed in literature originating in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, and also at the political ramifications of these emotions. The question is further explored in a series of exchanges on the future of Jews feeling 'at home' in Australia, Germany, Israel, and the United States. Jews at Home is the first book to examine the theme of the Jewish home materially and emotionally from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including literature, history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, art history, and folk and popular culture. The essays in the collection use the theme of home and the concept of domestication to revise understanding of the lived (and built) past, and to open new analytical possibilities for the future. Its discussion of domestic culture and its relevance to Jewish identity is one with which readers should feel right at home.Table of ContentsNote on TransliterationPreface and AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Dualities of House and Home in Jewish Culture SIMON J. BRONNERPart I: In and Out of the Home1 The Domestication of Urban Jewish Space and the North-West London Eruv JENNIFER COUSINEAU2 Every Wise Woman Shoppeth for her House: The Sisterhood Gift Shop and the American Jewish Home in the Mid-Twentieth Century JOELLYN WALLEN ZOLLMAN Part II: Sacred, Secular, and Profane in the Home3 Reimagining Home, Rethinking Sukkah: Rabbinic Discourse and Its Contemporary Implications MARJORIE LEHMAN4 From Sacred Symbol to Keychain: The Hamsah in Jewish and Israeli Societies SHALOM SABAR5 770 Eastern Parkway: The Rebbe's Home as Icon GABRIELLE A. BERLINGER6 From the Nightclub to the Living Room: Party Records of Three Jewish Women Comics GIOVANNA P. DEL NEGROPart III: Writing Home7 Samuel Rawet's Wandering Jew: Jewish Brazilian Monologues of Home and Displacement ROSANA KOHL BINES8 Home in the Pampas: Alberto Gerchunoff's Jewish Gauchos MONICA SZURMUK9 Domesticity and the Home(Page): Blogging and the Blurring of Public and Private among Orthodox Jewish Women ANDREA LIEBERPart IV: Forum: Feeling at HomeIntroduction10 Culture Mavens: Feeling at Home in America JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELITResponses11 At Home in the World DAVID KRAEMER12 The Co-Construction of Europe as a Jewish Home JOACHIM SCHLÖR13 'Culture Mavens' from an Australian Jewish Perspective SUZANNE D. RUTLAND14 There's No Place Like Home: America, Israel, and the (Mixed) Blessings of Assimilation MICHAEL P. KRAMER15 The Last Word: A Response JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELITNotes on ContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisFrench cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio is best known for his writings on media, technology, and architecture. Gathered here in "A Winter's Journey" are four remarkable conversations in which Virilio and architectural writer Marianne Brausch look at a twentieth century characterized by enormous technological acceleration and by technocultural accidents of barbarism and horror. The dialogues in "A Winter's Journey" - structured loosely around the dates 1940, 1950, 1960, and 1980 - chart Virilio's intimate intellectual biography, from his childhood lived against the unstable backdrop of a heavily bombed, wartime Nantes to maturity in a crisis space that is neither entirely militarized nor yet fully civilian, but somewhere between the two. In the course of these conversations, Virilio and Brausch ultimately find hope that in understanding the events of the last century and the cultural responses spawned by them, we can create a more humane era that is more adept at handling the transformations of its technology and culture. "A Winter's Journey" is a revealing and engaging look into the intellectual life and ideas of one of the most influential theorists of contemporary civilization.Trade Review"Virilio is an impressive commentator on the conditioning power of the mass media....He flits from image to image like a poet and usually builds to a profound climax." -Guardian "If Walter Benjamin had one true intellectual descendant who extended his inquiries into the second half of the twentieth century, this must be Paul Virilio."-Lev Manovich, author of The Language of New Media"

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Book SynopsisModernity offers people choices about who they want to be and how they want to appear to others. The way in which Jews choose to frame their identity establishes the dynamic of their social relations with other Jews and non-Jews - a dynamic complicated by how non-Jews position the boundaries around what and who they define as Jewish. This book uncovers these processes, historically, as well as in contemporary behavior, and finds explanations for the various manifestations, in feeling and action, of 'being Jewish.' Boundaries and borders raise fundamental questions about the difference between Jews and non-Jews. At root, the question is how 'Jewish' is understood in social situations where people recognize or construct boundaries between their own identity and those of others. The question is important because this is by definition the point at which the lines of demarcation between Jews and non-Jews, and between different groupings of Jews, are negotiated. Collectively, the contributors to the book expand our understanding of the social dynamics of framing Jewish identity. The book opens with an introduction that locates the issues raised by the contributors in terms of the scholarly traditions from which they have evolved. Part I presents four essays dealing with the construction and maintenance of boundaries - two by scholars showing how boundaries come to be etched on an ethnic landscape and two by activists who question and adjust distinctions among neighbors. Part II focuses on expressive means of conveying identity and memory, while, in Part III, the discussion turns to museum exhibitions and festive performances as locations for the negotiation of identity in the public sphere. A lively discussion forum concludes the book with a consideration of the paradoxes of Jewish heritage revival in Poland, and the perception of that revival by Jews and non-Jews. *** ..".these essays help us understand the social dynamics of Jewish identity and how identity is constructed in modern life." -- AJL Reviews, February/March 2015 (Series: Jewish Cultural Studies - Vol. 4) [Subject: Jewish Studies, Cultural Studies]Table of ContentsNote on TransliterationIntroduction: Framing Jewish Culture  Simon J. BronnerPART I: BOUNDARY CONSTRUCTION AND MAINTENANCE1 Representing Jewish Culture: The Problem of Boundaries  Jonathan Webber2 Trickster’s Children: Genealogies of Jewishness in Anthropology  Jonathan Boyarin3 Selective Inclusion: Integration and Isolation of Jews in Medieval Civic Space  Samuel D. Gruber4 The Question of Hasidic Sectarianism  Marcin WodzinskiPART II: NARRATING AND VISUALIZING JEWISH RELATIONSHIPS5 Framing Father--Son Relationships in Medieval Ashkenaz: Folk Narratives as Markers of Cultural Difference  Magdalena Luszczynska6 Sites of Collective Memory in Narratives of the Prague Ghetto  Rella Kushelevsky7 Wearing Many Hats: The Boundaries of Hair-Covering Practices by Orthodox Jewish Women in Amish Country  Amy Milligan8 Chronic Dissatisfaction: Negative Interfaith Romances and the Reassertion of Jewish Difference  Holly PearsePART III: EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES OF JEWISH CULTURE9 ‘The Night of the Orvietani’ and the Mediation of Jewish and Italian Identities  Steve Siporin10 Jewish Museums: Performing the Present through Narrating the Past  David Clark11 Framing Jewish Identity in the Museum of Moroccan Judaism  Sophie Wagenhofer12 The Framing of the Jew: Paradigms of Incorporation and Difference in the Jewish Heritage Revival in Poland  Magdalena WaligorskaPART IV: HOW REAL IS THE EUROPEAN JEWISH REVIVAL?13 Beyond Virtual Jewishness: Monuments to Jewish Experience in Eastern Europe  Ruth Ellen Gruber14 Unsettling Encounters: Missing Links of European Jewish Experience and Discourse  Francesco Spagnolo15 Virtual Transitioning into Real: Jewishness in Central Eastern Europe  Annamaria Orla-Bukowska16 Virtual, Virtuous, Vicarious, Vacuous? Toward a Vigilant Use of Labels  Erica Lehrer17 Response  Ruth Ellen GruberContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisHow Jews use media to connect with one another has profound consequences for Jewish identity, community, and culture. This volume explores how the use of media can both create communities and divide them because of how different media shape actions and project anxieties, conflicts, and emotions. Taken together, the essays presented here consider how Jewish use of media at home and in the street, as well as in the synagogue and in school, affects the individual’s sense of ethnic and religious affiliation. They include closely observed case studies, in various national contexts, of the role of popular film, television, records, the Internet, and smartphones, as well as the role of print media, now and historically. They raise fascinating questions about how Jews and Jewish institutions harness, tolerate, or resist media to create their sense of social belonging as Jews within the wider society.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Media, Mediation, and Jewish CommunitySimon J. Bronner and Caspar BattegayPart I. The Impact of Texts on, and in, Jewish Community1. Sixteenth-Century Jewish Makers of Printed Books and the Shaping of Late Renaissance Jewish Literacy Pavel Sládek 2. Settings of Silver: The Feminization of the Jewish Sabbath, 1920--1945Amy K. Milligan3. Contemporary Israeli Midrash and the Construction of a Dialogic Intragroup DiscourseTsafi Sebba-ElranPart II. Media, Performance, and Popular Discourse in the Formation of Jewish Community4. The Jewish Atlantic: Diaspora and Popular MusicCaspar Battegay5. The Hidden Legacies of Jewish Traditions and the Global Allure of Psychotherapy: A Case Study of the Israeli TV Series BetipulDiana L. Popescu6. Propagating Modern Jewish Identity in Madagascar: A Contextual Analysis of One Community’s Discursive StrategiesNathan P. Devir7. Telling Jokes: Connecting and Separating Jews in Analogue and Digital CultureSimon J. BronnerPart III. Virtual Spaces for Jews in a Digital Age8. Going Online to Go ‘Home’: Yizkor Books, Cyber-Shtetls, and Communities of LocationRachel Leah Jablon9. The Second Life of Judaism: A History of Religious Community and Practice in Virtual SpacesJulian Voloj and Anthony Bak Buccitelli10. Rethinking Jewishness in Networked Publics: The Case of Post-Communist HungaryAnna ManchinContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisIn 1923, a reporter asked George Mallory why he wanted to summit Mount Everest. “Because it’s there”. Today the question "why do this?" is included in nearly every mountaineering story or interview. Meanwhile, interest in climbing is steadily on the rise, from commercial mountaineering and climbing walls in university gyms and corporate workplaces to the flood of spectacular climbing imagery in advertising, cinema, and social media. Climbing has become the theater for imagining limits—of the human body and of the planet— and the nature of desire, motivation, and #goals. Covering the degradation of Everest, the banning of climbing on Australia’s Uluru, UNESCO’s decision to name alpinism an Intangible Cultural Heritage, the sudden death of Ueli Steck, and the commercial and critical success of Free Solo, Mountains and Desire chases after what remains of this pursuit – marred by its colonial history, coopted by nationalistic chauvinism, ableism, and the capitalist compulsion to unlimited growth – for both climbers and their fans.Trade Review"In this beautiful book, Margret Grebowicz examines the many meanings of mountaineering, then and now: what these meanings tell us about ourselves, and what they tell us about mountains as well.""A philosophical speed-climb, a topo map of our new Terra Incognita. I finished it grateful for a new sense of clarity.”"A treasure trove of insights exploring and critiquing the idea of climbing – upward pursuit -– in all its forms. Generous, fascinating, and written in sharp and lucid prose, Mountains and Desire illuminates an intoxicating and dangerous obsession through a startling range of material.""A fascinating attempt to answer the eternal question – why are you going up there? – for a new century. It will spur many to think more deeply."“Offers a timely appraisal of our relationship with high places.”

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Book SynopsisWe Are the Mutants is a critical reassessment of what is arguably the most discussed and beloved stretch of movies in Hollywood history. Documenting the period between the arrival of US combat troops in Vietnam and the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, the book forgoes the usual and restrictive exemplars of “auteur cinema,” and instead focuses on an eclectic selection of films and genres — horror, documentary, disaster, vigilante action, neo-noir, post-apocalyptic sci-fi — to track this period's tumultuous transformation in American life, culture, and politics. By exploring cult classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Escape from New York, as well as studio blockbusters like The Exorcist and Fatal Attraction, We Are the Mutants rewrites the history of modern American cinema and, in doing so, the history of America itself.Trade Review“A highly enjoyable read for film fans hungry for an alternative point of view. The writing is intelligent, detailed, and well-researched without drifting into the academic and dry, and its arguments are frequently invigorating and thought-provoking.”"An intriguingly sharp and offbeat study of US cinema from the 60s to the 80s."

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Book SynopsisIn 2010, while working on a PhD in South Korea, Andray Abrahamian visited the other Korea, a country he had studied for years but never seen. He returned determined to find a way to work closely with North Koreans. Ten years and more than thirty visits later, Being in North Korea tells the story of his experiences helping set up and run Choson Exchange, a non-profit that teaches North Koreans about entrepreneurship and economic policy.Abrahamian was provided a unique vantage into life in North Korea that belies stereotypes rampant in the media, revealing instead North Koreans as individuals ranging from true believers in the system to cynics wishing the Stalinist experiment would just end; from introverts to bubbly chatterboxes, optimists to pessimists. He sees a North Korea that is changing, invalidating some assumptions held in the West, but perhaps reinforcing others.Amid his stories of coping with the North Korean system, of the foreigners who frequent Pyongyang, and of everyday relationships, Abrahamian explores the challenges of teaching the inherently political subject of economics in a system where everyone must self-regulate their own minds; he looks at the role of women in the North Korean economy, and their exclusion from leadership; and he discusses how information is restricted, propaganda is distributed and internalized, and even how Pyongyang’s nominally illicit property market functions. Along with these stories, he interweaves the historical events that have led to today’s North Korea.Drawing on the breadth of the author’s in-country experience, Being in North Korea combines the intellectual rigor of a scholar with a writing style that will appeal to a general audience. Through the personal elements of a memoir that provide insights into North Korean society, readers will come away with a more realistic picture of the country and its people, and a better idea of what the future may hold for the nation.

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Book SynopsisA long-awaited textbook that introduces the major schools, teachings, and practices of Daoism, this work presents a chronological survey that is thematically divided into four parts: Ancient Thought, Religious Communities, Spiritual Practices, and Modernity.The work offers an integrated vision of the Daoist tradition in its historical and cultural context, establishing connections with relevant information on Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism, popular religion, and political developments.It also places Daoism into a larger theoretical and comparative framework, relating it to mysticism, millenarianism, forms of religious organization, ritual, meditation, and modernity. The book makes ample use of original materials and provides references to further readings and original sources in translation. It is a powerful resource for teaching and studying alike.Trade ReviewComprehensively covers all main topics and periods of Daoism. It does not stop after the Tang as earlier works tend to do, but goes all the way into the present and also to some extent discusses Daoism in non-Chinese cultures. It is clearly and lucidly written and addresses a broad audience - not necessarily of sinological background. - Stephan-Peter Bumbacher, Tubingen University

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Book SynopsisBy most estimates, as much as 90 percent of the archaeology done in the United States today is carried out in the field of cultural resource management. The effects of this work on the archaeological record, the archaeological profession, and the heritage of the American people would be difficult to overemphasize. CRM archaeology affects a wide range of federally funded or authorized developments. It influences how archaeologists educate their students, work with indigenous people, and curate field records and artifacts. It has yielded an enormous wealth of data on which most recent advances in the understanding of North American archaeology depend. This is "public" archaeology in the clearest sense of the word: it is done because of federal law and policy, and it is funded directly or indirectly by the public. The contributors hope that this book will serve as an impetus in American archaeology for dialogue and debate on how to make CRM projects and programs yield both better archaeology and better public policy.

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Book SynopsisThis book adds a major culture-based study to the field of Irish history. It addresses a topic and touches on themes that continue to be relevant and debated in contemporary Ireland. It makes a major contribution to the “New Military History” of Ireland and adds the memory of the First World War of one of the “small nations” that emerged in the wake of that conflict to the numerous memory studies that exist for the primary combatant nations (Britain, France, and Germany). This revised paperback version of the original monograph also includes illustrations of memorial sites in some detail.One of the most useful aspects of book is that it gives life to the culture of a minority sub-community in Ireland and addresses the challenges this community faced in order to remain active, and the way that community interacted with the majority of Irish people throughout the twentieth, and into the twenty-first century. Therefore, this project is not simply a snapshot of a specific event in Irish history, but examines the way that the memory of the war and those who retained that memory changed and evolved over the course of a century.

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Book SynopsisThis edited collection showcases an international mix of activist scholars who maintain that a vegan studies perspective is an important addition to the cultural studies landscape. Through a Vegan Studies Lens broadens the scope of vegan studies by engaging in a variety of texts and contexts and examines vegan pedagogical praxis and vegan publishing, as well as intersections between vegan theory, critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and feminism.

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Book SynopsisEnergy Culture is a provocative book about oil’s firm grip on our politics and everyday lives. It brings together essays and artwork produced in a collaborative environment to stimulate new ways of thinking and to achieve a more just and sustainable world.The original work collected in Energy Culture creatively engages energy as a social form through lively arguments and artistic research organized around three vectors of inquiry. The first maps how fossil fuels became, and continue to be, embedded in North American society, from the ideology of tar sands reclamation projects to dreams of fiber optic cables running through the Northwest Passage. The second comprises creative and artistic responses to the dominance of fossil fuels in everyday life and to the challenge of realizing new energy cultures. The final section addresses the conceptual and political challenges posed by energy transition and calls into question established views on energy. Its contributions caution against solar capitalism, explore the politics of sabotage, and imagine an energy efficient transportation system called “the switch.” Imbued with a sense of urgency and hope, Energy Culture exposes the deep imbrications of energy and culture while pointing provocatively to ways of thinking and living otherwise.Trade Review“An exemplary multidisciplinary approach to entangled questions of energy, politics, and aesthetics. Energy Culture should excite and inspire an interdisciplinary community of scholars, artists, and activists; it not only points to possible ways forward for thinking and acting, but also offers tangible, provocative examples of what our creative and critical practices might do.”- Thomas S. Davis, author of The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday LifeTable of Contents Introduction Part I: Mapping Energy Culture Oil on Water Trespassage The Ocean and the Cloud: Material Metaphors of Hidden Infrastructure Walking Matters: A Peripatetic Rethinking of Energy Culture Several Documents Pertaining to the Cascade Energy (transition) Park Corporation Corporation (CORPCORP) Sustaining Petrocultures: On the Politics and Aesthetics of Oil Sands Reclamation Part II: Figuring Energy Culture Capitalism in the Corpse of a Whale Tilting at Windfarms: Towards a Political Ecology of Energy Humanism and the Literary Aesthetic Embodied Actants, Fossil Narratives The Energy Apparatus Aeolian Survey Anecdotal Encounters on Driveways: The Aesthetics of Oil in Northern Alberta and Newfoundland Energy Meets Telepathy Aesthetics and Materialist Consciousness Part III: The Politics of Energy Culture Rejecting Solar Capitalism The Switch Beyond Carbon Democracy: Energy, Infrastructure, and Sabotage Strike Energized Antagonisms: Thinking Beyond ‘Energy Culture’ Vortex of Light (Ice Memoriam)

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Book SynopsisThis book explores how the media frame environmental and scientific disputes faced by American Indian communities. Most people will never know what it is like to live on an Indian reservation in North America, or what it means to identify as an American Indian. However, when conflicts embroil Indigenous folk, as shown by the protests over a crude oil pipeline in 2016 and 2017, camera crews and reporters descend on “the rez” to cover the event. The focus of the book is how stories frame clashes in Indian Country surrounding environmental and scientific disputes, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline construction, and the discovery of an ancient skeleton in Washington. The narratives told over social media and news programs often fail to capture the issues of key importance to Native Americans, such as sovereignty: the right to self- governance. The book offers insight into how the history of Indian-settler relations sets the stage for modern clashes, and examines American Indian knowledge systems, and how they take a back seat to mainstream approaches to science in discourse.Table of Contents1. Introduction.2. Buckshot for Brains: Cultivation of the American Indian Mind.3. Hunting for Trophies and the Underbelly of Race.4. The Underpinnings of Discourse.5. We Came to Fight a Black Snake.6. How resistance crystallized to resilience in the Kennewick Man controversy.7. Concluding Remarks.

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Book SynopsisIn Chinese, the term wanghong refers to creators, social media entrepreneurs alternatively known as KOLs (key opinion leaders) and zhubo (showroom hosts), influencers and micro-celebrities. Wanghong also refers to an emerging media ecology in which these creators cultivate online communities for cultural and commercial value by harnessing Chinese social media platforms, like Weibo, WeChat, Douyu, Huya, Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishuo. Framed by the concepts of cultural, creative, and social industries, the book maps the development of wanghong policies and platforms, labor and management, content and culture, as they operate in contrast to its non-Chinese counterpart, social media entertainment, driven by platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch. As evidenced by the backlash to TikTok, the threat of competition from global wanghong signals advancing platform nationalism.Trade Review“The book’s six chapters cover topics such as policy, platform, and culture of Wanghong industry, providing in-depth analysis of the current popular Chinese Wanghong industry in an accessible way. … the monograph develops a rich and thorough account of the birth and evolution of the Chinese Wanghong industry … . the monograph inspires readers to reflect on the role of government and the state in the cultural and digital industries in the context of a normalized global epidemic.” (Bojia He, Journal of Popular Culture, 2022)Table of Contents1 Introduction.- 2 Policy and Governance.- 3 Platforms.- 4 Creators.- 5 Culture.- 6 Global Wanghong.

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Book SynopsisThis book provides a concise, interdisciplinary perspective on the emotion and practice of ‘hope'. Based on the idea that hope is a dream that we carry in different ways, the five chapters draw on the author’s original research and align it with literature on the sociology of culture and emotion, to explore the concept in relation to cultural and community practices and mental health.The climate crisis, violence, hostility, pandemics, homelessness, displacement, conflict, slavery, economic hardship and economic downturn, loneliness, anxiety, mental illness – are intensifying. There is a need for hope. There is also a need to confront hope - what is hope and what can, and cannot, be achieved by hoping. This confrontation includes distinguishing hope from wishful thinking and blind optimism. Using examples from different spheres of social life, including health, religion, music therapy, migration and social displacement, the book sets the idea of hope in context of situations of uncertainty, challenge and pain, and goes on to highlight the practical application of these ideas and outline an agenda for further research on ‘hope'. Table of Contents1. Hope – A Critical Introduction.- 2. Hope as a Form of Activity.- 3. Hope, Health and Well-being.- 4. Cultures of Hope.- 5. What Can't Hope Do?

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Book SynopsisThis book integrates research in positive psychology, Islamic psychology, and Muslim wellbeing in one volume, providing a view into the international experiential and spiritual lives of a religious group that represents over 24% of the world’s population. It incorporates Western psychological paradigms, such as the theories of Jung, Freud, Maslow, and Seligman with Islamic ways of knowing, while highlighting the struggles and successes of minoritized Muslim groups, including the LGBTQ community, Muslims with autism, Afghan Shiite refugees, and the Uyghur community in China.It fills a unique position at the crossroad of multiple social science disciplines, including the psychology of religion, cultural psychology, and positive psychology. By focusing on the ways in which spirituality, struggle, and social justice can lead to purpose, hope, and a meaningful life, the book contributes to scholarship within the second wave of positive psychology (PP 2.0) that aims to illustrate a balance between positive and negative aspects of human experience. While geared towards students, researchers, and academic scholars of psychology, culture, and religious studies, particularly Muslim studies, this book is also useful for general audiences who are interested in learning about the diversity of Islam and Muslims through a research-based social science approach.Table of ContentsChapter 1: Introduction to the Psychology of Islam and Muslims: A PP 2.0 JIHADNausheen Pasha-Zaidi Part I - Designing and Doing Research Chapter 2: Spiritual Assessment: Building Positive Resources for the Distressed SoulsRabia Dasti, Dr. Aisha Sitwat, and Amna Anwaar Chapter 3: Research with American Muslim CommunitiesMunir Shah and Nasreen Shah Chapter 4: Thoughts on the GCC National Research Context: Challenges to Developing a Local PsychologyLouise Lambert, Saad Ibrahim Yaaqeib, Annie Crookes, Brettjet Cody, & Semma Saad Part II - Connecting Secular and Islamic Perspectives Chapter 5: Islamic Psychology and Wellbeing: Bridging Western and Eastern WorldviewsSyed Rizvi Chapter 6: Ways of Knowing and Being: Theoretical Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi & C. G. Jung’s PsychologyMansoor Abidi Chapter 7: The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to a Positive Islamic PsychologyBeyhan Bozkurt and Nausheen Pasha-ZaidiPart III - From Being to Wellbeing: Approaches to Health and HealingChapter 8: Islamically-Informed Principles of Psychotherapy with Muslim American ClientsNasreen ShahChapter 9: Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World: An Existential Focus of Islamic PsychologySyed RizviChapter 10: The Heart of Autism: Building A Positive Islamic Model of Cognitive DisabilityLaila S. DahanPart IV - Social Justice and Community Building Chapter 11: Socially Engaged Islam: Applying Social Psychological Principles to Social Justice, Faith-Based Activism and Extreme Altruism in Muslim SocietiesAnisah Bagasra Chapter 12: Decolonizing Muslim Same-Sex Relations: Reframing Queerness as Gender Flexibility to Build Positive Relationships in Muslim CommunitiesSarah Shah, Maryam Khan, and Sara Abdel-Latif Chapter 13: Afghan Hazara Asylum Seekers in Athens: Positive Affirmation through Service and ProtestMelissa Kerr Chiovenda Chapter 14: The Struggle of Chosen Identity Amongst Uyghurs While Living Under the Chinese StateKamla Hsin TungPart IV - Islamic Feminism, Gender and SexualityChapter 15: Working towards a Positive Islamic Identity for Muslim American WomenTasneem MandviwalaChapter 16: Sexually Diverse Muslim Women Converts: Where Do They Stand?Maryam KhanChapter 17: Muslim Media Psychology and its Effects on Society: The Role of Pakistani TV Serials in Promoting Women’s RightsIqra Iqbal and Nausheen Pasha-Zaidi

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Book SynopsisThis book, the first of its kind, surveys the career of the renowned Australian-German theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky. Its nine chapters provide multidisciplinary analyses of Barrie Kosky’s working practices and stage productions, from the beginning of his career in Melbourne to his current roles as Head of the Komische Oper Berlin and as a guest director in international demand. Specialists in theatre studies, opera studies, musical theatre studies, aesthetics, and arts administration offer in-depth accounts of Kosky’s unusually wide-ranging engagements with the performing arts – as a director of spoken theatre, operas, musicals, operettas, as an adaptor, a performer, a writer, and an arts manager. Further, this book includes contributions from theatre practitioners with first-hand experience of collaborating with Kosky in the 1990s, who draw on interviews with members of Gilgul, Australia’s first Jewish theatre company, to document this formative period in Kosky’s career. The book investigates the ways in which Kosky has created transnational theatres, through introducing European themes and theatre techniques to his Australian work or through bringing fresh voices to the national dialogue in Germany’s theatre landscape. An appendix contains a timeline and guide to Kosky’s productions to date. Table of ContentsChapter 1: It Begins with the Theatre: Barrie Kosky’s Workshop.Chapter 2: “Very much a laboratory”: Barrie Kosky and the Gilgul Ensemble 1991–1997.Chapter 3: “Aesthetic Ideas”: Mystery and Meaning in the Early Work of Barrie Kosky.Chapter 4: Something for Everybody? Art, Community, the Unfamiliar, and Barrie Kosky at the Adelaide Festival.Chapter 5: Dramaturgies of Repetition and the Denial of Catharsis: Traumatic Breaking Points in Barrie Kosky’s Approach to Character.Chapter 6: When All Else Fails, Sing: Barrie Kosky’s The Women of Troy.Chapter 7: Barrie Kosky’s Grotesques and the Ecstasy of Theatre.Chapter 8: “Es klang so alt und war doch so neu”: Barrie Kosky and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.Chapter 9: (Not) Repeating the Past in Barrie Kosky’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

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Book SynopsisThe book investigates the theme of Modernism (1920-1960 and its epigones) as an integral part of tangible and intangible cultural heritage which contains the result of a whole range of disciplines whose aim is to identify, document and preserve the memory of the past and the value of the future. Including several chapters, it contains research results relating to cultural heritage, more specifically Modernism, and current digital technologies. This makes it possible to record and evaluate the changes that both undergo: the first one, from a material point of view, the second one from the research point of view, which integrates the traditional approach with an innovative one. The purpose of the publication is to show the most recent studies on the modernist lexicon 100 years after its birth, moving through different fields of cultural heritage: from different forms of art to architecture, from design to engineering, from literature to history, representation and restoration. The book appeals to scholars and professionals who are involved in the process of understanding, reading and comprehension the transformation that the places have undergone within the period under examination. It will certainly foster the international exchange of knowledge that characterized ModernismTable of ContentsModernist movement.- Manufacture of the modern period and the digital age.- Innovative materials for Architecture and Engineering.- Urban furniture to bridges and tall buildings.- 3D digital mappings.- Architectural heritage through 2D and 3D digital models.- Photogrammetry and laser scanning.- GIS methodology.

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Book SynopsisThis book is about the entanglement of heritage and resistance in different situations of conflicts, and the opportunities this entanglement may provide for social justice. This entanglement is investigated in the different contributions through theoretical and empirical analyses of heritage-led resistance to neoliberal economic development, violation of the subaltern, authorised narratives and state-invented traditions, colonialism and settler colonialism, and even dominating discourses of social movement, to name just a few. Crossing the disciplinary boundaries of heritage and resistance studies, these analyses bring new insights into several timely debates, especially those concerned with the interrelated critical questions of displacement, gentrification, exclusion, marginalization, urbicide, spatial cleansing, dehumanization, alienation, ethnic cleansing and social injustice. Following our purposeful and future-driven approach, we wish to bring new energy to the field of heritage studies through the focus on the potential of heritage and resistance for hopeful change rather than adding to the field yet another overwhelming engagement with conflict and war.Table of Contents1. Chapter 1: Linking Heritage to Resistance.- 2. Chapter 2: Exercising our rights to the past: Emergent heritage activism in Istanbul.- 3. Chapter 3: Acting Out the Future of the Albanian National Theatre: New Heritage at the Intersection of Resistance and New Media.- 4. Chapter 4: Mapping more-than-nostalgia of the ‘pits’: co-production as creative resistance to the flattening of coal-mining communities.- 5. Chapter 5: Authenticity and struggle: historicising skateboarding as ‘action art’ on London’s South Bank.- 6. Chapter 6: Imagining Heritage Beyond Proprietorship, Contesting Dispossession Beyond the Power Resistance Binary: Occupy-style Protests in Turkey, 2013-14.- 7. Chapter 7: Fighting denial of the right to the past: heritage-backed bodily resistance and performance of refugeeism and return.- 8. Chapter 8: Reproductions, Excavations and Replicas: New Materialities in Response to Destruction.- 9. Chapter 9: Ethnoscaping Green Resistance: Heritage and the fight against fracking.- 10. Chapter 10: The epistemic work of decolonisation and restitution: a conversation with Ciraj Rassool.- 11. Chapter 11: Methodological approaches and challenges of conducting research on heritage and resistance.

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Book SynopsisCountries aspiring to participate fully in the global knowledge economy require high-quality education and research that leads to innovation, entrepreneurship and development. In spite of the large number of institutions higher education institutions, the Arab World failed to capitalise in research and development. This book will examine the current position of university research and development in the Arab region, note the main themes, their international impact, and propose new directions. Crucially, it will examine the underlying reasons for the underperformance, including specific government research policies, university-appointment and governance processes to stimulate research, funding assessment and allocation processes, resource limitations, and public attitudes. By substantially upgrading the research component of Arab universities along with the quality of education generally, the Arab world will have the vehicle to transition into peaceful, stable, and members of leading global economies. There are opportunities for inter-university cooperation and the establishment of regional university-linked research institutes with specialist facilities.Table of ContentsAn Overview of Research and Development in AcademiaUps and Downs of STI Indicators in Arab CountriesReflections on researchResearch in the 21st Century: Towards a new ParadigmRole of Arab Universities in Technological Development and Innovation in the Arab WorldBolstering Economic Growth in the Arab Region through Commercialization of Research OutcomesAssessing the social impact of scientific research in/on the Arab WorldResearch Possibilities in Computational Modeling as a Low Cost Alternative to Traditional Experimental ResearchInnovation and Scientific Research at Jordanian Universities: The University of Petra as a Case StudyResearch Policy in Morocco and the Impact on National DevelopmentResearch and Development from the Perspective of Oman and Sohar UniversityResearch, Development, and Local Impact: A Case Study of the Australian College of Kuwait Three Decades and beyond of Strategic Planning for Research and Development in Kuwait: Toward Achieving S&T Vision 2035The Challenges and Opportunities of Interdisciplinary & Transdisciplinary Research: A Case Study from the University of SharjahManaging Creativity on a Budget: The Future of Academic Research and Development in LebanonContemporary Challenges Confronting Scientific Research in the Humanities in the Institutions of Higher Education in the Arab WorldAcademic Research in Support of Post-Conflict Recovery in Syria

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Book SynopsisThis collected volume is based on the proceedings of a symposium held in 2018 at York University, Canada, which was held to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Israel. This symposium highlighted contemporary Jewish identity, Israel-Diaspora relations, and how Jewish life has been transformed in light of various types of antisemitism. The book considers the diasporic Jewish experiences through examining the intersections between various Jewish communities sociologically, historically, and geographically.The text covers world Jewry in general, and each of the diaspora and Israeli Jewries more specifically in the context of mutual responsibility, but also focuses on areas of tension concerning values and political matters. The challenges of antisemitism, racism, and nationalism are explored in terms of the relationship of the Jewish diasporas to their host countries. This text also covers antisemitism, which may take the form of traditional antisemitism or of the new antisemitism in the era of anti-Israel activity related to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The latter movement is especially prevalent on university campuses and has an impact on students, faculty, and staff. This volume is unique in its international perspective in examining issues of Jewish identity, Israel-diaspora relations, and antisemitism and will appeal to students and researchers working in the field.Table of ContentsIsrael at 70 and World Jewry: One People or Two?.- Israel-Diaspora Relations in the 21st Century: Continuities and Discontinuities.- The Evolution of North American Jews’ Relations with Israel from Adolescence to Adulthood: The Bar/Bat Mitzvah Class of 1994-95 (5755).- The COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Potential Impact on Jewish Young Adults’ Relationship to Israel and Jewish Identity.- Segmented and Transnational Identity Formation in the Israeli Diaspora.- Keeping the Flame Alive: The Formation of Transnational Identities among Jewish Emigrants from Israel.- Holocaust, Memory, Migration: The Burden of Catastrophe among Israelis in Germany.- The Faculty Assault on Academic Freedom (USA).- Antisemitism, Anti-Israelism, and Canada in Context.- Jewish Students’ Experiences in the Era of BDS: Exploring Jewish Lived Experience and the New Antisemitism on Canadian Campuses.- Is Anti-Israelism Antisemitism? Evidence from Great Britain.- The BDS Movement in Australia.- Epilogue: Summary, Discussion, and Looking Beyond.

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Book SynopsisThis book describes three years of work by the Culture and Communities Mapping Project, a research project based in Edinburgh that uses maps as an object of study and also a means to facilitate research. Taking a self-reflexive approach, the book draws on a variety of iterative mapping procedures and visual methodologies, from online virtual tours to photo elicitation, to capture the voices of inhabitants and their distinctive perspectives on the city. The book argues that practices of cultural mapping consist of a research field in and of itself, and it situates this work in relation to other areas of research and practice, including critical cartography, cultural geography, critical GIS, activist mapping and artist maps. The book also offers a range of practical approaches towards using print and web-based maps to give visibility to spaces traditionally left out of city representations but that are important to the local communities that use them. Throughout, the authors reflect critically on how, through the processes of mapping, we create knowledge about space, place, community and culture.Table of ContentsChapter 1. Introduction: The Global Festival City Chapter 2. Theories and Methods of Cultural Mapping Chapter 3. Cultural Mapping in the City of Edinburgh Chapter 4. Neogeography, Software Sorted Geographies and Web Maps Chapter 5. Maps, Memories and Stories of Place

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Book SynopsisThis book examines the link between sensual austerity and moral leadership—a topic largely neglected in contemporary academic scholarship and public policy—by exploring the comparative cross-cultural perspectives of Plato, Confucius, and Gandhi, on this theme. Despite the diverse cultural contexts that gave rise to their respective philosophical perspectives, they shared similar views on what might constitute a universal and perennial basis for individual moral development in any harmonious political order. They all agreed that sensual austerity is necessary for the realization of a flourishing society and political culture: recognizing that control over sensual desire is both a vehicle for individual moral self-cultivation and social-political progress. Sensual austerity is thus an essential aspect of any morally governed person, institution, state, or society. The book also argues that further examination of this theme may assist scholars and policymakers in developing more peaceful and harmonious national and global communities.Table of Contents1. Introduction2. The Philosopher King: Body, Mind, and Eros3. Moral Social Order and the Ideal Ruler, the Sage-King4. Brahmacharya, Nonviolent Social Praxis, and Leadership5. Parallels, Variations, and Pathways

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Book SynopsisThis textbook explores the mystery of human origins in the Arabian Peninsula, the lost Southern Crescent where humanity took its first steps toward civilization. Under Arabia’s surface of sand and stone lies a primordial realm of rolling grasslands, freshwater lakes, and river floodplains. This book aims to restore a critical missing chapter in the prehistory of our species that played out in this forgotten place of plenty. The author has carried out more than twenty years of fieldwork in Yemen and Oman, weaving his research together into an unorthodox tapestry of archaeology, environmental science, genetics, and Middle Eastern mythology. This volume peers beneath Arabia’s abandoned deserts, revealing a land that once served as a bridge between prehistoric worlds. This textbook is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students as well as all readers who are interested in learning about Arabian prehistory.Table of Contents1. The Time before Time.- 2. Arabia Arcadia.- 3. Studying Stone in the Stone Ages.- 4. Roots of the Human Tree.- 5. Becoming Human.- 6. The Lost Crescent.- 7. People of 'Ad'.- 8. Epistrophe.

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Book SynopsisWe live in an era of experimentation – both if we look at the broader social world of politics, media and art and at the narrower context of academic knowledge production. This collection consists of 14 chapters by leading scholars in affect studies. They explore the affective dimensions of experimental practices related to, for example, activism, the COVID-19 pandemic, populism, sustainability, patient communities, music streaming, Jamaican dancehall, gangs, leadership, tourism and minority youth cultures. Experiments are understood as intentionally crafted milieus aimed at (re)presenting unnoticed aspects of the world, as non-linear processes with unpredictable outcomes, and as ways of giving the future a provisional form. The collection responds to a pressing need to understand the intersection between affect, experimentation and sociocultural change by offering empirical strategies to explore how, and with what consequences, experimentation is affective.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Methodologies of Affective Experimentation by Britta Timm Knudsen, Mads Krogh and Carsten Stage Part I: Understanding Affective Experimentation as a Method of the Social 2. Affect as Disruption: Affective Experimentation, Automobility and the Ecological Crisis by Paul Schuetze, Kilian Jörg, Imke von Maur and Jan Slaby 3. Populism as Para-politics: Play, Affect, Simulation by Christoffer Kølvraa 4. Interspecies pedagogies: More-than-Human Experiments with Leadership in/of the Anthropocene by Dorthe Staunæs and Sverre Raffnsøe 5. Engines of Affect: Experimenting with Auditory Intensities in the Jamaican Sound System Session by Julian Henriques 6. Experimentation in and with the Stream: Music, Mood Management and Affect by Mads Krogh 7. Experimentations in Pandemic Boredom by Susanna Paasonen Part II: Understanding Affective Experimentation as a Research Method 8. Worlding with Glitter: Vibrancy, Enchantment and Wonder by Rebecca Coleman 9. Affective Writing Experiments by Signe Uldbjerg and Natalie Ann Hendry 10. Problematising Shame: Affective Experimentation on Social Media by Carsten Stage 11. Affective Experiments: Card Games, Blind Dates and Dinner Parties by Sophie Hope 12. Wind as Elementary Attraction: Case: An Avant-Garde Experiment on the West Coast of Jutland, Denmark by Britta Timm Knudsen 13. The Tombstones that Cried the Night Away: An Allegory by Phillip and April Vannini 14. Activating limit as method: An affective experiment in ethnographic criminology by Christina Jerne

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Book SynopsisNeo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality—including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects—and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volume offers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.Table of Contents1. Introduction: Stuff and Things: Introducing Neo-Victorian Materialities2. Objects and Memorabilia in Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects3. “Around the Mizzenpole”: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and African Americanizing the Neo-Victorian-at-sea4. Touching, Writing, Collecting: Opium Paraphernalia and Neo-Victorian Material Culture5. An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner6. “Wilful Phantoms”: Haunted Dress, Memory, and Agentic Materiality in Colm Tóibín’s The Master7. The Thing About Haunted Houses: In The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents and The Haunting of Hill House8. There’s Something in the Tea: Murder and Materiality in Dark Angel9. Criminal Things: Sherlock Holmes’ Details of Detection and Their Neo-Victorian Revisions10. The Sleight of Hand: Appearance and Disappearance of Things in Neo-Victorian Magic

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Book SynopsisThis edited book brings together new perspectives on fashion, the body, and politics. The intention of this collection is to explore the cultural intersection between bodies, fashion, and transgression, often in the most unlikely of locations. Bodies are political players in culture and the authors gathered here ask a range of pressing questions. What role do fashioned bodies play in resistance, in meeting governmental boundaries or institutional power? Arguably, fashion is an aspect of modern warfare and style can defend and attack in cultural space. So, how do fashioned bodies occupy the grey area between social control and the resistance to power? This book is interdisciplinary and international, with contributors situated within a broad range of disciplines including Art History and Critical Practice, Cultural Studies, Fashion Critical Studies, Film and Literary Studies, Performance Studies, Politics and International Studies, Sociology, Gender, Queer, LGBTI, and Critical Race Studies. Table of Contents1. Introduction: Fashion, Bodies, Transgression, Royce Mahawatte and Jacki WillsonSection 1, Dangerous Surfaces2. Contagion and the Excess of Gender, Race, and Commodity, Nigel Lezama, Cardi B’s Nails3. “Let me be your Stimmy Toy”: Fashioning Disability, Cripping Fashion, Jana Melkumova-Reynolds4. “Under False Colors”: Nineteenth-Century Masquerading Laws and Black Disabled Transgender Embodiment in Post-Civil War Memphis, Ardel Haefele-Thomas5. “One Club Fits All”: Male Embodiment in an Age of Homonormativity, Royce MahawatteSection 2, Fashion and Spatial Transgression6. The Politicisation of Palestinian Embroidery since 1948, Rachel Dedman7. Polish ‘Black Protests’: political dress and the politics of fashion, Alicja Raciniewska8. Performative Elegance: The Windrush Generation, Fashion and the Politics of Respectability, Telecia Kirkland.- Section 3 Embodiment and Abstract Boundaries9. Non-Norm-(Hard)-Core: Hood by Air’s Porn Archive, Francis Summers10. Consuming (beyond plain) Vanilla: ‘straight’ coupledom and illicit performativities on popular culture TV show Love Island, Jacki Willson11. Terrifying Beauty – Theatrical Self-Performance in Leonor Fini’s Art and Life, Andrea Kollnitz

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Book SynopsisThis book argues that there are constant formations of online public spheres in present-day China, prompted by never-ending news. It contends that these publics are chronic, although individually they are usually transient. They are networked, which enables them to go viral in hours, and they may engender unexpected consequences. These features explain why online public spheres survive in China even though censorship and information manipulation are pervasively and strategically maneuvered to guide or manufacture “public opinion”. The book also proposes that there are deeply entangled structural factors bolstering China's online news-prompted public spheres: the continuous flow of news information, the countless public spaces facilitated by China’s digital infrastructure and the rise of rights-conscious netizens. Pushing forward a new way of conceptualizing the idea of public spheres, this book contends clearly that public spheres are most often sparked by chronic news in today's media-saturated societies. Delving into the life cycles of public spheres, it goes beyond static analysis of individual public spheres and instead studies their five qualities, which, except for the networked quality, have never been systematically addressed in scholarship. Table of ContentsChapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. The Theory of News-Prompted Public Spheres and their Features.- Chapter 3. The Application of Public Sphere Theory in China.- Chapter 4. Structural Factors Fostering China’s Online NewsPrompted Publics.- Chapter 5. Everyday News-Prompted Publics on WeChat.- Chapter 6. Surprise.- Chapter 7. Ephemerality.- Chapter 8. Networked Public Spheres.- Chapter 9. Unintended Consequences.- Chapter 10. Rethinking Online News-Prompted Public Spheres./

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Book SynopsisThis open access book examines how and why the UK's approach towards increasing cultural participation has largely failed to address inequality and inequity in the subsidised cultural sector despite long-standing international policy discourse on this issue. It further examines why meaningful change in cultural policy has not been more forthcoming in the face of this apparent failure. This work examines how a culture of mistrust, blame, and fear between policymakers, practitioners, and participants has resulted in a policy environment that engenders overstated aims, accepts mediocre quality evaluations, encourages narratives of success, and lacks meaningful critical reflection. It shows through extensive field work with cultural professionals and participants how the absence of criticality, transparency, and honesty limits the potential for policy learning, which the authors argue is a precondition to any radical policy change and is necessary for developing a greater understanding of the social construction of policy problems. The book presents a new framework that encourages more open and honest conversations about failure in the cultural sector to support learning strategies that can help avoid these failures in the future.Table of ContentsIntroduction.- Histories of failures.- Thinking about failing.- The failures of policy.- Failing at the frontlines.- Failing the participant.- A failure framework.

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Book SynopsisThis book brings together from four years of study on Nigerian contemporary art's internationalization. The monograph integrates voices of African (Nigerian) artists and art market players into the growing discourse on the emerging art markets in the global South. It explores the logic of competition and dynamics of power relations in the global markets, focusing on the internationalization of contemporary art forms from peripheral regions. The book confirms that the internationalization of contemporary art form from Nigeria is limited due to systematic marginalization in the artistic field, which in this case based on postcolonialism, and debilitating socio-economic factors such as outmoded art education, unstructured support system and weak mechanism for local validation, and an inefficient political framework for art governance.It will therefore be useful to students and researchers in the sociology of art, art market studies, art history and culture polity. Table of Contents1.Introduction.- 2.Sub-Saharan Africa in the global art market’s structure.- 3.The Development of Contemporary Art in Nigeria.- 4.Aesthetic Influences of Cultural Nationalism and Decolonization.- 5.Transnational influences, authenticity censure and postcolonial exclusion.- 6.Evolution of the Market for Contemporary Art.- 7.Contemporary Art from Nigeria in International Spaces.- 8.Systems of Art Governance.- 9.Power Dynamics and Alternative Systems.-

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Book SynopsisThis open access book adopts a cultural sociology of materiality to explore the hallmark of the female athlete: the ponytail. Studying a wealth of news articles about ponytails in sports and society, Broch uncovers this hairstyle’s polyvocality and argues that it is a total social phenomenon. By separating his approach from the cultural studies tradition, Broch highlights how hair is imbued with codes, narratives, and myth that allow its wearers to understand, maneuver, and criticize social gender relations in deeply personal ways. Using multiple theories about hair, bodies, myths, and icons, he creates a multidimensional method to show how icons are imitated and used. As women navigate their practical lives, health issues, and gendered expectations, the ponytail materializes their dynamic maneuvering of cultural and social environments. Sporting a ponytail—itself an embodiment of movement—is filled with a performativity of social movements: a cultural kinetics that is never apolitical. Table of Contents​Introduction: Imagining the PonytailObjectExpectationsHealthPracticalitiesMovementsExperienceCharge

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Book SynopsisThis book was written by Kenneth M. Heilman, a neurologist with a long and productive clinical and academic career, including being a researcher and teacher.  Based on his experiences and achievements, as well as his frustrations and failures, he examines the challenges of healthcare, including what problems exist and how these problems may be improved.  Each chapter in this book focuses on integral areas of medicine, including research, creativity, career development, patient-physician relationship, wellness, medications, social considerations such as race, and medicine''s future.   Changes in Medicine offers a unique view to the rapidly evolving field of neurology and practicing medicine.

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Book SynopsisThis book presents a collection of double-blind peer reviewed papers under the scope of sustainable and resilient approaches for rebuilding displaced and host communities. Forced displacement is a major development challenge, not only a humanitarian concern. A surge in violent conflict, as well as increasing levels of disaster risk and environmental degradation driven by climate change, has forced people to leave or flee their homes – both internally displaced as well as refugees. The rate of forced displacement befalling in different countries all over the world today is phenomenal, with an increasingly higher rate of the population being affected on daily basis than ever. These displacement situations are becoming increasingly protracted, many lasting over 5 years. Therefore, there is a need to develop more sustainable and resilient approaches to rebuild these displaced communities ensuring the long-term satisfaction of communities and enhancing the social cohesion between the displaced and host communities. Accordingly, chapters are arranged around five main themes of rebuilding communities after displacement. Response management for displaced communities The Built environment in resettlement planning Governance of displacement Socio-Economic interventions for sustainable resettlement Table of ContentsOpening Introduction Session 1: Understanding and managing for better response provision for displaced communities Session 2: Governance of displacement/ Efforts to prevent and respond to internal displacement Session 3: Understanding and managing for better response provision for displaced communities Special Session: Cultural Complexities and Displacement Session 4: Understanding and managing for better response provision for displaced communities Session 5: Resilience and Environmental consideration of resettlement planning Session 6: Social cohesion between displaced and host communities Session 7: Economic and policy interventions for sustainable resettlement Conclusions and Outlooks

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