Search results for ""Author Simon"

A new crew of the legendary Serenity face new enemies, reunite with old friends, and travel to the EARTH THAT WAS for the first time in Firefly history!Firefly jumps forward in time after the battle with the Reavers that left Wash & Book dead. Serenity soars again, with Kaylee captaining a crew including River, Jayne and the bandit Leonard Chang-Benitez. They’ll soon find themselves drawn into a shocking conflict that puts them on an interception course with old friends… and new enemies! In an attempt to evade the Alliance the crew of Serenity find themselves stranded on The-Earth-That-Was, a strange world filled with ancient artifacts, a new civilization and…maybe some semblance of hope. As strangers in a strange land they encounter individual and shared challenges galore! The groundbreaking future of Firefly by New York Times best-selling writer Greg Pak (Darth Vader) and an all-star group ofartists including Pius Bak (The Magicians), Ethan Young (NANJING: The Burning City), Simona Di Gianfelice (Power Rangers), Jordi Perez (Queen of Bad Dreams), and Jahnoy Lindsay (Marvel’s Voices) is collected for the first time in a special deluxe edition hardcover! Collects Firefly #25-36.

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In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

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This volume celebrates one of the best known and most loved Italian directors in the world, one of the great masters of tension and horror: Dario Argento. Over the years his cinema has established itself - among cinephiles but not only - for its visionary power, for the search for an aesthetic dimension which is reached through excess. And this excess is not so much what materialises in the virtuosity of the staging of murder and death, as in treating such a brutal and disturbing material in such a way that it becomes something abstract, almost a baroque stylisation. The volume, full of critical essays that investigate the poetics and imagination of Dario Argento, retraces the director’s complete filmography. It also welcomes the testimonies of collaborators and the statements of great directors and actors who shared his long career. Biographies complete the volume. With texts by: Mick Garris, Domenico De Gaetano, Marcello Garofalo, Stefano Della Casa, Piera Detassis, Roberto Pugliese, Alan Jones, Domenico Monetti; testimonianze di: Stefania Casini, Franco Bellomo, Luigi Cozzi, Claudio Simonetti, Sergio Stivaletti, Luciano Tovoli, Antonello Geleng, Pupi Oggiano; fotogrammi tematici: Grazia Paganelli, Matteo Pollone, and Fabio Pezzetti Tonion. Text in English and Italian.

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Throughout the twentieth century housing displays have proven to be a singular genre of architectural and design exhibitions. By crossing geographies and adopting multiple scales of observation - from domestic space to urban visions - this volume investigates a set of unexplored events devoted to housing and dwelling, organised by technical, professional, cultural or governmental institutions from the interwar years to the Cold War. The book offers a first critical assessment of twentieth-century housing exhibits and explores the role of exhibitions in the codification of notions of domesticity, social models, policies, and architectural and urban discourse. At the intersection of housing studies and the history of exhibitions, The Housing Project not only offers a novel angle on architectural history but also enriches scholarly perspectives in urban studies, cultural and media history, design, and consumption studies. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer Review Content). Contributors: Tamara Bjazic Klarin (Institute of Art History, Zagreb), Gaia Caramellino (Politecnico di Milano), John Crosse (Independent Scholar), Stephanie Dadour (ENSA Grenoble, MHAevt/EA 7445, ACS/UMR AUSser), Rika Devos (Universite Libre de Bruxelles, BATir Department), Fredie Flore (KU Leuven), Johanna Hartmann (Institute for Art History-Film Studies-Art Education, University of Bremen), Erin McKellar (Royal Holloway, University of London), Laetitia Overney (ENSA Paris-Belleville, IPRAUS/UMR AUSser 3329), Jose Parra (University of Alicante), Mathilde Simonsen (Oslo School of Architecture and Design), Eva Storgaard (University of Antwerp), Ludovica Vacirca (Independent Scholar)

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In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld that is driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates.

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In Always More Than One, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation?

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Italian-born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564) was a tormented, prodigiously talented, and God-fearing Renaissance man. His manifold achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and engineering combined body, spirit, and God into visionary masterpieces that changed art history forever. Famed biographer Giorgio Vasari considered him the pinnacle of Renaissance achievement. His peers called him simply “Il Divino” (“the divine one”). This book provides the essential introduction to Michelangelo with all the awe-inspiring masterpieces and none of the queues and crowds. With vivid illustration and accessible texts, we explore the artist’s extraordinary figuration and celebrated style of terribilità (momentous grandeur), which allowed human and biblical drama to exist in compelling scale and fervor. Through the power hubs of Renaissance Italy, we take in his major commissions and phenomenal capacity for compositional schemes, whether the famous Medici library in Florence, or the extraordinary 500-square-meter ceiling (1508–1512) in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. From the towering David to the aching grief and faith of The Pietà and the vivid drama of the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment, this is a succinct, dependable reference to a true giant of art history and to some of the most famous artworks in the world.

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The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is increasingly gaining the prestige that its astonishing inventiveness calls for in the Anglo-American theoretical context. His wide-ranging works on the history of philosophy, cinema, painting, literature and politics are being taken up and put to work across disciplinary divides and in interesting and surprising ways. However, the backbone of Deleuze's philosophy - the many and varied sources from which he draws the material for his conceptual innovation - has until now remained relatively obscure and unexplored. This book takes as its goal the examination of this rich theoretical background. Presenting essays by a range of the world's foremost Deleuze scholars, and a number of up and coming theorists of his work, the book is composed of in-depth analyses of the key figures in Deleuze's lineage whose significance - as a result of either their obscurity or the complexity of their place in the Deleuzean text - has not previously been well understood. This work will prove indispensable to students and scholars seeking to understand the context from which Deleuze's ideas emerge. Included are essays on Deleuze's relationship to figures as varied as Marx, Simondon, Wronski, Hegel, Hume, Maimon, Ruyer, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, Reimann, Leibniz, Bergson and Freud.

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The widespread international interest in the Nordic region and the mobility of Nordic brand imaginaries calls for more research into the global relevance of Nordic place branding practices. This book offers a timely attempt to unpack the specificity of the Nordic in regards to place branding by gathering different transdisciplinary accounts written by researchers in marketing, tourism, geography, communication, sociology, and political science. Chapters are organized according to three themes of poetics, practices and politics, which deal with the construction, enactment and appropriation of the Nordic place brand and branding. The contributions consolidate Nordic place branding scholarship and its scientific engagement with processes of de-politicization, consensus making, collaboration and transparency. At the same time, Nordic ideals, policies and values offer a critical lens to explore hitherto unexplored issues in place branding such as feminism, post-colonialism, sustainability, and equality. Solidly grounded in contemporary geopolitical and sociocultural challenges within and beyond the Nordic region, The Nordic Wave in Place Branding will enhance theoretical, methodological and practitioner perspectives in in international place branding. This timely book will be of interest to advanced students of branding and place management, as well as policy makers, regional developers and researchers within the fields of tourism, destination marketing, branding, and media and communication. Contributors include: M. Andéhn, L.P. Andersen, L.R. Bjørst, R.B. Broegaard, S. Brorström, S.H. Cassel, T. Chekalina, S. Degerhammar, J. Edlom, J. Eksell, A. Fjällhed, M. Fuchs, U.P. Gad, A. Heith, O.H. Jørgensen, M. Kavaratzis, B. Kramvig, L.H. Larsen, D. Laven, F. Lindberg, L. Margaryan, M. Meldgaard, T. Nielsen, J. Östberg, J.C. Pasgaard, C. Ren, K. Seppel, K. Simm, K. Simonsen, K. Tamm Hallström, P. Tammpuu, S. Taylor, K. Topsø Larsen, P. Varley, A.M. Waade

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In the first book to examine the role played by textile manufacturing in the development of fashion in Italy, A New History of ‘Made in Italy’ investigates Italy’s transition from a country of dressmakers, tailors and small-scale couturiers in the early post-Second World War period to a major producer of ready-to-wear fashion in the 1980s. It takes the reader from Italy’s first internationally attended fashion show in 1951 to Time magazine’s Giorgio Armani April 1982 cover story, which signalled the fashion designer’s international arrival, and Milan’s presence as the capital of ready-to-wear. Chapters focus for the first time on the material substance of Italian fashion – textile – looking at questions including the importance of manufacturing quality, design innovation, composition, production techniques, commerce and the role of textile on the country’s overall fashion system. Through these, Lucia Savi brings to light the importance of synthetic fibres, previously little-known players, such as the carnettisti (a type of textile wholesalers) as well as re-investigating well-known couturiers and designers such as Simonetta, Gianfranco Ferré and Gianni Versace. By looking at how things are made, by whom, and where, this book seeks to unpack the ‘Made in Italy’ label through a focus on making. Informed by extensive archival materials retrieved from a wide range of sources, it brings together the often-separated disciplines of fashion, textile and design history.

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In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

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'Remarkable...a rip-roaring adventure novel with a true depth of feeling' Sunday Times'A joy to read' HeraldThe First World War ended the day Sam Simoneaux's regiment reached France, but he saw more than enough of its ravages. Returning to New Orleans, he determines to put mayhem and destruction behind him, and to make a fresh start with his wife. But when a little girl is abducted on his watch at a department store, he has no choice but to help find her. Steeped in the langorous rhythms and music of Prohibition-era Louisiana, The Missing vividly evokes a ragged frontier nation where violence is normal and the law easy to dodge. Relentlessly suspenseful and profoundly affecting, this is an enthralling tale of vengeance, conscience and redemption by an exceptional writer.

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Poetry in archaic and classical Greece was a practical art that arose from specific social or political circumstances. The interpretation of a poem or dramatic work must therefore be viewed in the context of its performance. In Poetry, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece, Lowell Edmunds and Robert W. Wallace bring together a distinguished group of contributors to reconstruct the performance context of a wide array of works, including epic, tragedy, lyric, elegy, and proverb. Analyzing the passage in the Odyssey in which a collective delirium comes over the suitors, Giulio Guidorizzi reveals how the poet describes a scene that lies outside the narrative themes and diction of epic. Antonio Aloni offers a reading of Simonides' elegy for the Greeks who fell at Plataea. Lowell Edmunds interprets the so-called seal of Theognis as lying on a borderline between the performed and the textual. Taking up proverbs, maxims, and apothegms, Joseph Russo examines "the performance of wisdom." Charles Segal focuses on the unusual role played by the chorus in Euripides' Bacchae. Reading the plot of Euripides' Ion, Thomas Cole concludes that the task of constructing the meaning of the play is to some extent delegated to the public. Robert Wallace describes the "performance" of the Athenian audience and provides a catalog of good and bad behavior: whistling, shouting, and throwing objects of every kind. Finally, Maria Grazia Bonanno stresses the importance of performance in lyric poetry.

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Bioart -- art that uses either living materials (such as bacteria or transgenic organisms) or more traditional materials to comment on, or even transform, biotechnological practice -- now receives enormous media attention. Yet despite this attention, bioart is frequently misunderstood. Bioart and the Vitality of Media is the first comprehensive theoretical account of the art form, situating it in the contexts of art history, laboratory practice, and media theory. Mitchell begins by sketching a brief history of bioart in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, describing the artistic, scientific, and social preconditions that made it conceptually and technologically possible. He illustrates how bioartists employ technologies and practices from the medical and life sciences in an effort to transform relationships among science, medicine, corporate interests, and the public. By illustrating the ways in which bioart links a biological understanding of media -- that is, “media” understood as the elements of an environment that facilitate the growth and development of living entities -- with communicational media, Bioart and the Vitality of Media demonstrates how art and biotechnology together change our conceptions and practices of mediation. Reading bioart through a range of resources, from Immanuel Kant’s discussion of disgust to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of affect to Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “individuation,” provides readers with a new theoretical approach for understanding bioart and its relationships to both new media and scientific institutions.

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In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry wrote of a ‘crisis of spirit’, brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marx’s theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a ‘pharmacology of the spirit’. Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living.

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This scholarly and important volume has an impressive interdisciplinary and international scope. We hear from psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, and economists. These refreshing chapters broaden our understanding of human innovation, contributing to a developing sociocultural approach to the study of creativity. These chapters directly challenge the myth of solitary genius, by documenting the social and cultural systems within which new ideas emerge.'- Keith Sawyer, Washington University in St Louis, US'This penetrating volume both summarizes compellingly what we know about creativity and examines critically loose concepts of creativity, cases where creativity does harm, and deceptive hype about creativity. This volume neither romanticizes creativity nor reduces it to the servant of economic and cultural development, offering instead a differentiated and penetrating examination of the nature of creativity and its diverse positive and sometimes negative roles.'- David Perkins, Harvard Graduate School of Education, USThis comprehensive yet concise Handbook provides an overview of innovative approaches to, and new perspectives on, the study of creativity.In this timely work, creativity is not defined by an ideal, rather it encompasses a range of theories, functions, characteristics, processes, products and practices that are associated with the generation of novel and useful outcomes suited to particular social, cultural and political contexts. Chapters present original research by international scholars from a wide range of disciplines including history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, education, economics and interdisciplinary studies. Their research investigates creativity in diverse fields including art, creative industries, aesthetics, design, new media, music, arts education, science, engineering and technology.Containing cutting-edge research the Handbook of Research on Creativity will strongly appeal to academics and advanced students in cultural studies, creative industries, art history and theory, experimental music and performance studies, digital and new media studies, engineering, economics, sociology, psychology and social psychology, management studies, and education particularly visual arts education and music education. Policy makers, managers and entrepreneurs will also find much to interest them in this fascinating work.Contributors: S. Banaji, T. Barker, D. Berry, C. Bilton, N.C.M. Brown, P. Burnard, J. Chan, S. Cranmer, A.J. Cropley, D.H. Cropley, C. De Cock, L. Denti, D.R. Eikhof, K. Essl, C. Gibson, V. Giorgini, R. Gonsalves, S. Harnow Klausen, S. Hemlin, j. jagodzinski, V. Johnson, J.C. Kaufman, N. Kawashima, R. Korde, J. McGuigan, P. McIntyre, J. Mecca, P.-M. Menger, R. Miettinen, D.P. Miller, M.D. Mumford, T. Oiyama, L. Olsson, P.B. Paulus, C. Perrotta, A. Power, A. Quemin, A. Rehn, E. Scheer, E. Schubert, D.K. Simonton, T. Smith, J. Steers, S. Taylor, K. Thomas, E. Zimmerman

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Explores the concept of multiplicity in Deleuze and Guattari's work and its relevance to artistic practice. Western philosophy has habitually privileged notions of identity, essence and static existence. The importance of Deleuze and Guattari is that they critically interrogate this pattern, and instead emphasise multiplicities. This collection of essays from a range of philosophers and art practitioners, such as Mieke Bal, James Williams, Laura Marks, Gary Genosko and Eugene Holland, engages with the philosophical concept of multiplicity in novel ways.Divided into two parts, the first section includes theoretical essays on the concept of multiplicities, on affect and politics as well as the thought of Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon. The second section presents essays on specific art practices such as the plastic arts, theatre, performance and music.Illustrated with eight fascinating case studies of unusual and marginalised forms of artistic practice such as Islamic talismanic magic, refugee theatre and Aboriginal ritual, and featuring 18 illustrations by virtually unknown Eastern European avant-garde artists amongst others, the articles of this volume are at once a work of 'practical philosophy' in the Deleuzian sense and also a polyphonic artwork.

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As industrial societies increasingly evolve into knowledge-based economies, the importance of education as a lifelong process is greater than ever. This comprehensive book provides a state-of-the-art analysis of adult learning across the world and within varying institutional contexts. The expert contributors examine the structures of formal and non-formal adult learning in different countries, and investigate the levels of success those countries have experienced in encouraging participation and skill formation.The book offers a cross-section of international perspectives, with chapters focusing on Australia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Spain, Sweden and the United States. Using empirical, longitudinal data from each of these countries, the contributors identify which types of learning are converted into positive labor market outcomes and assess the potential of adult learning for reducing social inequalities.This book will be of great use to both academics and policymakers with an interest in adult learning, sociology, education and inequality, and the economics of work.Contributors: P. Barbieri, C. Barone, H.-P. Blossfeld, S. Buchholz, S. Buchler, J. Chesters, G. Csanádi, A. Csizmady, G. Cutuli, J. Dämmrich, C. Elman, D. Hamplová, M. Haynes, A. Higginson, E. Kilpi-Jakonen, Y. Kosyakova, M. Lugo, P. Martikainen, P. McMullin, P. Miret-Gamundi, V. Myrup Jensen, E. Reichart, P. Robert, E.-L. Roosmaa, E. Saar, S. Scherer, S. Schuhrer, N. Simonová, O. Sirniö, A. Stenberg, M. Triventi, J. Unfried., M. Unt, D. Vono de Vilhena, S. Wahler, F. Weiss

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Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts.Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem

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The age of gene-centrism and mechanism is slowly passing. In its place, the biological sciences increasingly recognise that life isn't simply a genetically determined programme but is centrally a matter of information and communication systems nested in larger communicative systems. The latter include both internal and external, and natural and cultural, environments. But 'information' is an under-unanalysed term in relation to living systems. Accordingly, a new interdiscipline, biosemiotics, has grown up to study the ontology of sign relations in biological, aesthetic and technological ecologies. From the Greek bios for life and semeion for sign, biosemiotics is the study of these intertwined natural and cultural sign systems of the living. Expecting the Earth draws on the semiotic philosophy of the American scientist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, the semiotic ethology of Jakob von Uexkull's Umwelt Theory, Gregory Bateson's cybernetic ecology of mind, Jesper Hoffmeyer's development of biosemiotics, and briefly upon philosophical precursors such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Gilbert Simondon, as well as the growth of ecological developmental biology more widely. In this book, Wendy Wheeler formulates a history and theory of biosemiotic and proto-biosemiotic thinking in order to open up new possibilities of contemporary social, philosophical, aesthetic and technological engagement. This is essential reading for those interested in these groundbreaking new developments, and is relevant to the environmental humanities, social ecology and the life sciences more generally.

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Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism-either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive-space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem

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The Five of Us is a captivating tale of adventure, friendship and teamwork from one of Britain's best-loved illustrators. Angie, Ollie, Simona, Mario and Eric are five fantastic friends, each of whom has an unusual ability. Disaster strikes on a day out to the countryside but, working together and combining their individual powers, the Fantastic Five save the day. Teeming with Quentin Blake's characteristic sense of fun and his exuberant illustrations, The Five of Us is a powerful, though subtle, reminder that the world is a better place when we can focus on what we can do, rather than what we can't.

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When Fracking Comes to Town traces the response of local communities to the shale gas revolution. Rather than cast communities as powerless to respond to oil and gas companies and their landmen, it shows that communities have adapted their local rules and regulations to meet the novel challenges accompanying unconventional gas extraction through fracking. The multidisciplinary perspectives of this volume's essays tie together insights from planners, legal scholars, political scientists, and economists. What emerges is a more nuanced perspective of shale gas development and its impacts on municipalities and residents. Unlike many political debates that cast fracking in black-and-white terms, this book's contributors embrace the complexity of local responses to fracking. States adapted legal institutions to meet the new challenges posed by this energy extraction process while under-resourced municipal officials and local planning offices found creative ways to alleviate pressure on local infrastructure and reduce harmful effects of fracking on the environment. The essays in When Fracking Comes to Town tell a story of community resilience with the rise and decline of shale gas production. Contributors: Ennio Piano, Ann M. Eisenberg, Pamela A. Mischen, Joseph T. Palka, Jr., Adelyn Hall, Carla Chifos, Teresa Córdova, Rebecca Matsco, Anna C. Osland, Carolyn G. Loh, Gavin Roberts, Sandeep Kumar Rangaraju, Frederick Tannery, Larry McCarthy, Erik R. Pages, Mark C. White, Martin Romitti, Nicholas G. McClure, Ion Simonides, Jeremy G. Weber, Max Harleman, Heidi Gorovitz Robertson

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While Russian computer scientists are notorious for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, they are ubiquitous on Wall Street and coveted by international IT firms and often perceive themselves as the present manifestation of the past glory of Soviet scientific prowess. Drawing on over three hundred in-depth interviews, the contributors to From Russia with Code trace the practices, education, careers, networks, migrations, and lives of Russian IT professionals at home and abroad, showing how they function as key figures in the tense political and ideological environment of technological innovation in post-Soviet Russia. Among other topics, they analyze coders' creation of both transnational communities and local networks of political activists; Moscow's use of IT funding to control peripheral regions; brain drain and the experiences of coders living abroad in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Finland; and the possible meanings of Russian computing systems in a heterogeneous nation and industry. Highlighting the centrality of computer scientists to post-Soviet economic mobilization in Russia, the contributors offer new insights into the difficulties through which a new entrepreneurial culture emerges in a rapidly changing world. Contributors. Irina Antoschyuk, Mario Biagioli, Ksenia Ermoshina, Marina Fedorova, Andrey Indukaev, Alina Kontareva, Diana Kurkovsky, Vincent Lépinay, Alexandra Masalskaya, Daria Savchenko, Liubava Shatokhina, Alexandra Simonova, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Dimitrii Zhikharevich

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The European Social Model has been an integral part of the construction of the European Community and has been effective in stimulating its economic growth. This social dimension represents the soul of the European Union, and has been envied and adopted by other regions and countries in the world.Under the pressure of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent introduction of austerity measures across Europe, many countries have reformed basic elements of the model including social protection, pensions, public services, workers' rights, quality of jobs, working conditions and social dialogue, often undermining social cohesion. These trends have raised questions: is Europe currently losing its legacy? If so, what are the social and economic implications, both in the short and longer term? The European Social Model in Crisis assesses social policy developments in each EU individual member state on the basis of detailed empirical evidence and concrete case studies.The volume is a timely warning about the weakening of the European Social Model and its possibly devastating future effects. The alternative options proposed here make the book essential reading for policy-makers, while scholars and researchers of European studies and social policy will find it an invaluable reference.Contributors include: J.I. Antón, D. Anxo, G. Bosch, R. Muñoz de Bustillo Llorente, K. Espenberg, A. Figueiredo, J. Gautié, P. González, D. Grimshaw, M. Karamessini, J. Masso, I. Mierina, Á. Scharle, A. Simonazzi, D. Szikra, D. Vaughan-Whitehead

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Three-quarters of a century after the Second World War, almost all the participants are gone. This book contains interviews with and about the Canadian who led the troops during that war. Edited and introduced by one of the foremost military historians of our time, this carefully curated collection brings to life the generals and their wartime experiences.The interviews are based on lengthy conversations that J.L. Granatstein had with the surviving generals, their key staff officers, fighters under their command, and their families. Generals McNaughton, Crerar, Simonds, Foulkes, and Burns are among those discussed. The content is revealing and conversations frank. Peers and subordinates alike scrutinize key commanders of the war, sometimes offering praise but often passing harsh judgment. We learn of their failings and successes – and of the heavy weight of command borne by all.

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From the early adaptation of Star Wars: A New Hope in the 1970s through comics of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, to the thrilling new adventures and characters of today, this box set of 100 collectible postcards showcases the best comic book covers to celebrate a galaxy far, far away . . .  The Star Wars comic series has been one of the most popular comics since its first issue debuted in 1977. Beloved by fans for its supplemental storytelling and galaxy-building, the series has introduced numerous characters that were later featured in films or series or just loved as new comics inventions.   This history-spanning postcard collection features unique and iconic cover art of Jedi, Sith, bounty hunters, cosmic dogfights, and fantastic creatures by amazing artists Carmine Infantino, Walt Simonson, Al Williamson, Alex Ross, Jen Bartel, Leinil Francis Yu, Peach Momoko, Francesco Francavilla, and mor

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An inclusive history of the professionalization of American scenic design The figure of the American theatrical scenic designer first emerged in the early twentieth century. As productions moved away from standardized, painted scenery and toward individualized scenic design, the demand for talented new designers grew. Within decades, scenic designers reinvented themselves as professional artists. They ran their own studios, proudly displayed their names on Broadway playbills, and even appeared in magazine and television profiles.American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism tells the history of the field through the figures, institutions, and movements that helped create and shape the profession. Taking a unique sociological approach, theatre scholar David Bisaha examines the work that designers performed outside of theatrical productions. He shows how figures such as Lee Simonson, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, and Donald Oenslager constructed a freelance, professional identity for scenic designers by working within their labor union (United Scenic Artists Local 829), generating self-promotional press, building university curricula, and volunteering in wartime service. However, while new institutions provided autonomy and intellectual property rights for many, women, queer, and Black designers were not always welcome to join the organizations that protected freelance designers’ interests. Among others, Aline Bernstein, Emeline Roche, Perry Watkins, Peggy Clark, and James Reynolds were excluded from professional groups because of their identities. They nonetheless established themselves among the most successful designers of their time. Their stories expand the history of American scenic design by showing how professionalism won designers substantial benefits, yet also created legacies of exclusion with which American theatre is still reckoning.

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'Frances Brody has made it to the top rank of crime writers' Daily Mail'Brody's writing is like her central character Kate Shackleton: witty, acerbic and very, very perceptive' Ann CleevesA murder most foulWhen the landlord of a Yorkshire tavern is killed in plain sight, Freda Simonson, the only witness to the crime, becomes plagued with guilt, believing the wrong man has been convicted. Following her death, it seems that the truth will never be uncovered in the peaceful village of Langcliffe . . .A village of secretsBut it just so happens that Freda's nephew is courting the renowned amateur sleuth Kate Shackleton, who decides to holiday in Langcliffe with her indomitable teenage niece, Harriet. When Harriet strikes up a friendship with a local girl whose young brother is missing, the search leads Kate to uncover another suspicious death, not to mention an illicit affair.The case of a lifetimeIt soon becomes clear to her that nothing in Langcliffe is quite as it appears, and with a murderer on the loose and an ever-growing roster of suspects, this isn't the holiday Kate was expecting . . .Whether you've read the whole series, or are discovering the Kate Shackleton mysteries for the first time, this is the perfect page-turner for fans of Agatha Christie, Ann Granger and Jacqueline Winspear.Praise for the Kate Shackleton mysteries:'Kate Shackleton is a splendid heroine' Ann Granger'Delightful' People's Friend'Kate Shackleton joins Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs in a subgroup of young, female amateur detectives matured by their wartime experiences. They make excellent heroines' Literary Review'I really adore this series and Kate is such a strong, level-headed character' Woman's Way'Brody's excellent mystery splendidly captures the conflicts and attitudes of the time with well-developed characters' RT Book Reviews

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What happens when you have a loose tooth, but it's the Tooth Fairy's first day on the job? How will she find you and where will she leave her gifts? In this installation of Sue Fliess and Simona Sanfilippo's Magical Creatures and Crafts series, a group of children wonder what happens if the Tooth Fairy assigned to collect their most recent lost tooth is brand new to her job. How will she know where to find the tooth? What if she goes to the wrong room? To help the Tooth Fairy remember her training, the children devise a plan that will guarantee her success! With the right supplies—colored paper, crayons or pens, scissors, stickers and glitter, and ribbon—young readers who have a wiggly tooth or have recently lost a baby tooth can also help train their Tooth Fairy by making a sign for their bedroom doors similar to the ones the children make in the book. Fliess’s bouncy read-aloud rhyming text and Sanfilippo’s

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The story of the improbable campaign that created America’s most enduring monument.The Statue of Liberty is an icon of freedom, a monument to America’s multiethnic democracy, and a memorial to Franco-American friendship. That much we know. But the lofty ideals we associate with the statue today can obscure its turbulent origins and layers of meaning. Francesca Lidia Viano reveals that history in the fullest account yet of the people and ideas that brought the lady of the harbor to life.Our protagonists are the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and his collaborator, the politician and intellectual Édouard de Laboulaye. Viano draws on an unprecedented range of sources to follow the pair as they chase their artistic and political ambitions across a global stage dominated by imperial rivalry and ideological ferment. The tale stretches from the cobblestones of northeastern France, through the hallways of international exhibitions in London and Paris, to the copper mines of Norway and Chile, the battlegrounds of the Franco-Prussian War, the deserts of Egypt, and the streets of New York. It features profound technical challenges, hot air balloon rides, secret “magnetic” séances, and grand visions of a Franco-American partnership in the coming world order. The irrepressible collaborators bring to their project the high ideals of liberalism and republicanism, but also crude calculations of national advantage and eccentric notions adopted from orientalism, freemasonry, and Saint-Simonianism.As entertaining as it is illuminating, Sentinel gives new flesh and spirit to a landmark we all recognize but only dimly understand.

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An interdisciplinary exploration of how writers have conveyed sound through text.Edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, The Sound of Writing explores the devices and techniques that writers have used to represent sound and how they have changed over time. Contributors consider how writing has channeled sounds as varied as the human voice and the buzzing of bees using not only alphabets but also the resources of the visual and musical arts. Cannon and Justice have assembled a constellation of classicists, medievalists, modernists, literary historians, and musicologists to trace the sound of writing from the beginning of the Western record to poetry written in the last century. This rich series of essays considers the writings of Sappho, Simonides, Aldhem, Marcabru, Dante Alighieri, William Langland, Charles Butler, Tennyson, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot as well as poems and songs in Ancient Greek, Old and Middle English, Italian, Old French, Occitan, and modern English. The book will interest anyone curious about the way sound has been preserved in the past and the kinds of ingenuity that can recover the process of that preservation.Essays focus on questions of language and expression, and each contributor sets out a distinct method for understanding the relationship between sound and writing. Cannon and Justice open the volume with a survey of the various ways sound has been understood as the object of our senses. Each ensuing chapter presents a case study for a sonic phenomenology at a specific time in history. With approaches from a wide variety of disciplines, The Sound of Writing analyzes writing systems and the aural dimensions of literary cultures to reconstruct historical soundscapes in vivid ways.

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The transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) after 1989 is often clothed in terms of historical and geographical categories, either as a 'return of history' or as a 'return to Europe', or both. Either way, the radical right in CEE claims a prominent place in this politics of return. Studies of the radical right echo the more general concern, in analyses of the region, with historical analogies and the role of legacies. Sometimes parallels are discovered between the post-1989 radical right and inter-war fascism. They imply a 'Weimarisation' of the transformation countries and the return of the pre-socialist, ultranationalist, or even fascist past - the 'return of history'. Another interpretation argues that since some CEE party systems increasingly resemble their West European counterparts, so does the radical right, at least where it is electorally successful - the 'return to Europe'. A third line of thought states that the radical right in the region is a phenomenon sui generis, inherently shaped by the historical forces of state socialism and the transformation process. As a result and in contrast to Western Europe, it is ideologically more extreme and anti-democratic while organisationally more a movement than a party phenomenon. This book provides insight into the role of historical forces in the shaping and performance of the current radical right in CEE. It conceptualises 'legacies' both as a contextual factor, (ie: as part of structural and cultural opportunities for new movements and parties in the region, and as textual factors; ie: as part of the ideological baggage of the past which is revived -- and reinterpreted -- by the radical right). An introductory essay by Michael Minkenberg puts the topic and the concept of legacies into a larger research perspective. Articles by Lenka Bustikova and Herbert Kitschelt as well as John Ishiyama employ the role of legacies as context, whereas the contributions by Timm Beichelt, Sarah de Lange and Simona Guerra as well as James Frusetta and Anca Glont treat legacies as text.

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States of Memory illuminates the construction of national memory from a comparative perspective. The essays collected here emphasize that memory itself has a history: not only do particular meanings change, but the very faculty of memory—its place in social relations and the forms it takes—varies over time. Integrating theories of memory and nationalism with case studies, these essays stake a vital middle ground between particular and universal approaches to social memory studies.The contributors—including historians and social scientists—describe societies’ struggles to produce and then use ideas of what a “normal” past should look like. They examine claims about the genuineness of revolution (in fascist Italy and communist Russia), of inclusiveness (in the United States and Australia), of innocence (in Germany), and of inevitability (in Israel). Essayists explore the reputation of Confucius among Maoist leaders during China’s Cultural Revolution; commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States Congress; the “end” of the postwar era in Japan; and how national calendars—in signifying what to remember, celebrate, and mourn—structure national identification. Above all, these essays reveal that memory is never unitary, no matter how hard various powers strive to make it so.States of Memory will appeal to those scholars-in sociology, history, political science, cultural studies, anthropology, and art history-who are interested in collective memory, commemoration, nationalism, and state formation.Contributors. Paloma Aguilar, Frederick C. Corney, Carol Gluck, Matt K. Matsuda, Jeffrey K. Olick, Francesca Polletta, Uri Ram, Barry Schwartz, Lyn Spillman, Charles Tilly, Simonetta Falasca Zamponi, Eviatar Zerubavel, Tong Zhang

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This collection of artwork from European comics master Sergio Toppi focuses on illustrations of biblical characters he drew during his lengthy collaboration with the journal Il Giornalino. Hundreds of character portraits and key scene illustrations from both the Old and New Testament are presented in Toppi’s inimitable pen-and-ink style.Master artist Sergio Toppi depicts iconic scenes from the most widely read scripture in the world.Sergio Toppi’s work has been hailed as an influence by such artistic masters as Sean Gordon Murphy and Walter Simonson. See his amazing vision for The Bible across many beautiful illustrations of biblical characters drawn during Toppi’s lengthy collaboration with the journal Il Giornalino. Hundreds of character portraits and key scene illustrations from both the Old and New Testament are presented in Toppi’s inimitable pen-and-ink style.From the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis through the many moving character tales throughout the Old Testament to the gospels and tales of the apostles in the New Testament, this stunningly illustrated volume will give new life and visual reference for some of the most familiar passages in the Bible.

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Precious snippets of ancient song.Towards the end of the fifth century BC, Aristophanes and the other writers of comedy used contemporary poets and musicians as targets for their jokes, making fun of their innovations in language and music. The dithyrambs of Melanippides, Cinesias, Phrynis, Timotheus, and Philoxenus are remarkable examples of this new style. The poets of the new school, active from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth century, are presented in this final volume of David Campbell’s widely praised edition of Greek lyric poetry. The longest piece extant is a nome by Timotheus—the foremost of these poets—called The Persians; it is a florid account of the battle of Salamis, to be sung solo to cithara accompaniment.This volume also collects folk songs, drinking songs, and other anonymous pieces. The folk songs come from many parts of Greece and include children’s ditties, marching songs, love songs, and snatches of cult poetry. The drinking songs are derived mainly from Athenaeus’ collection of Attic scolia, short pieces performed at drinking parties in Athens. The anonymous pieces come from papyrus, vases, and stone as well as from literary texts, and include hymns, narrative poetry, and satirical writing.This is the fifth in a five-volume edition of Greek lyric poets. Sappho and Alcaeus—the illustrious singers of sixth-century Lesbos—are in the first. Volume II contains the work of Anacreon, composer of solo song; the Anacreontea; and the earliest writers of choral poetry, notably the seventh-century Spartans Alcman and Terpander. Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and other sixth-century poets are in Volume III. Bacchylides and other fifth-century poets are in Volume IV along with Corinna (although some argue that she belongs to the third century).

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Guy Pratt's life as bass player to the stars. The book behind the successful comedy show.Guy Pratt came of age just as playing bass became cool, with the likes of Paul Simonon and Bruce Foxton. Having dallied with Funkapolitan, Pratt suddenly found himself on Top of the Pops and supporting David Bowie with smooth Australian outfit Icehouse. At a ludicrously young age Guy Pratt became a sought after bass player to the stars, finding himself crawling from studio to bar, from hotel to stadium portacabin with Robert Palmer, Womack & Womack, Bernard Edwards, Bryan Ferry and David Crosby, etc. The eighties were in their prime, and with a number of Crolla-suited appearances in windswept videos behind him, he was invited to join Pink Floyd for a series of stadium of extravaganzas to make Bono & co look fairly modest. Pratt has recorded with Madonna, and spent time in the studio with Michael Jackson. He was in The Smiths for a week, has travelled through customs in a wheelchair after a flight with Jimmy Page, and has lived to tell all. MY BASS AND OTHER ANIMALS emerges from the successful stand-up tour of the same name. It charts his journey from a Mod band in Southend to playing with Roxy Music at Live 8.

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The main original aim of the European Union was to promote convergence towards higher economic growth and social standards. However, EU countries have sometimes experienced different trajectories, due in part to their different starting points and the fact that their convergence on particular socio-economic indicators has varied. At the same time, little evidence has so far been presented on cross-country convergence within the EU. This book aims to answer a number of important questions. To what extent have European countries converged or diverged with EU-wide economic and social indicators over the past 20 years? What have been the drivers of convergence? Why do some countries lag behind, while others experience continuous upward convergence? Why are these trajectories not always linear? Particular attention is paid to the role of institutions, actors and industrial relations - focusing on the resources and strategies of governments, employers and trade unions - in nudging EU countries onto an upward convergence path.This book provides a unique analysis of socio-economic indicators to identify convergence trends in the EU. It defines a number of clusters that help to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of national socio-economic models and the European Social Model. Cross-country case studies help to identify the possible impact of global movements (migration, foreign investment) and policies (social protection, social dialogue, employment) on cross-country convergence. This book offers a timely assessment of convergence within the EU, identifying its drivers in the world of work and in institutions and industrial relations. It presents examples of where institutions and industrial relations can change convergence outcomes and proposes a range of useful policy options. Scholars and researchers will find it an invaluable reference for studies of European affairs and social policies.Contributors include: D. Anxo, B. Bembic, G. Bosch, V. Ciampa, P. Courtioux, C. Erhel, K. Espenberg, A. Figueiredo, P. González, D. Grimshaw, I. Marx, J. Masso, I. Mierina, R. Muñoz de Bustillo Llorente, P.J. O'Connell, W. Salverda, A. Simonazzi, V. Soloviov, D. Vaughan-Whitehead, R. Vazquez-Alvarez, L. Villamaina

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In 1860, Milton Bradley invented The Checkered Game of Life. Having journeyed from Springfield, Massachusetts, to New York City to determine interest in this combination of bright red ink, brass dials, and character-driven decision-making, Bradley exhausted his entire supply of merchandise just two days after his arrival in the city; within a few months, he had sold forty thousand copies. That same year, Walt Whitman left Brooklyn to oversee the printing of the third edition of his Leaves of Grass in Massachusetts. In Slantwise Moves, Douglas A. Guerra sees more than mere coincidence in the contemporary popularity of these superficially different cultural productions. Instead, he argues, both the book and the game were materially resonant sites of social experimentation—places where modes of collectivity and selfhood could be enacted and performed. Then as now, Guerra observes, "game" was a malleable category, mediating play in various and inventive ways: through the material forms of pasteboard, paper, and india rubber; via settings like the parlor, lawn, or public hall; and by mutually agreed-upon measurements of success, ranging from point accumulation to the creation of humorous narratives. Recovering the lives of important game designers, anthologists, and codifiers—including Anne Abbot, William Simonds, Michael Phelan, and the aforementioned Bradley—Guerra brings his study of commercially produced games into dialogue with a reconsideration of iconic literary works. Through contrapuntal close readings of texts and gameplay, he finds multiple possibilities for self-fashioning reflected in Bradley's Life and Whitman's "Song of Myself," as well as utopian social spaces on billiard tables and the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance alike. Highlighting meaningful overlap in the production and reception of books and games, Slantwise Moves identifies what the two have in common as material texts and as critical models of the mundane pleasures and intimacies that defined agency and social belonging in nineteenth-century America.

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In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld that is driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates.

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Bioart -- art that uses either living materials (such as bacteria or transgenic organisms) or more traditional materials to comment on, or even transform, biotechnological practice -- now receives enormous media attention. Yet despite this attention, bioart is frequently misunderstood. Bioart and the Vitality of Media is the first comprehensive theoretical account of the art form, situating it in the contexts of art history, laboratory practice, and media theory. Mitchell begins by sketching a brief history of bioart in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, describing the artistic, scientific, and social preconditions that made it conceptually and technologically possible. He illustrates how bioartists employ technologies and practices from the medical and life sciences in an effort to transform relationships among science, medicine, corporate interests, and the public. By illustrating the ways in which bioart links a biological understanding of media -- that is, “media” understood as the elements of an environment that facilitate the growth and development of living entities -- with communicational media, Bioart and the Vitality of Media demonstrates how art and biotechnology together change our conceptions and practices of mediation. Reading bioart through a range of resources, from Immanuel Kant’s discussion of disgust to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of affect to Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “individuation,” provides readers with a new theoretical approach for understanding bioart and its relationships to both new media and scientific institutions.

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In this account, Alexandra Richardson reveals (as she says in her introduction) her quest to get to know a ‘remarkable man who wholly dedicated his later life and finances to restoring and excavating what is surely one of the finest classical Greek sites in the Western Mediterranean. I rapidly began to be drawn in to the sketchy, sometimes speculative, details surrounding the remarkable Captain Hardcastle…I thought back to his unlit villa beside the theatrically shining temples, and the more I got to know the man, the more it seemed entirely in keeping with his personality that his former home should still be not be sharing the spotlight with the great monuments he was so intimately involved with. He remained a mysterious and private person who kept his own counsel throughout life. I was to discover that he wrote very few letters home to his family from the Far East, South Africa, Italy. And when he did write to the chosen few, I had to learn to read between the lines. Luckily his own family wrote to one another making mention of him…With so little to go on, it was just the sort of challenge that a researcher relishes. The Anglo-Italian theme was yet another appeal, my instinctive habitat. No full-scale biography had ever been written about him and thus I was not stepping on any toes. I had the field all to myself, piecing together a profile from many sources, set largely in a period of modern Sicilian history, the 1920s and early ‘30s rarely “popularised” by foreign writers. That was all how the four-year journey began...’ 'This book is the labour of years of research and scholarship. In Alexandra Richardson's book, the personality of Alexander Hardcastle comes to life in all its many facets. Her detailed account of the history of Agrigento is historically correct and written in a fluid style. Her descriptions of Sicily are accurate and lyrical, her cameos of Sicilians witty and a pleasure to read. Richardson's rigorous research describes his painful and determined iter from London to Girgenti, his stubborness and his resilience.' - Simonetta Agnello Hornby, 'The Almond Picker'

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International debate has recently focused on increased inequalities and the adverse effects that they may have on both social and economic developments. Income inequality, which is at its highest level for the past half-century, may not only undermine the sustainability of European social policy but also put at risk Europe?s sustainable recovery. A common feature of recent reports on inequality (ILO, OECD, IMF, 2015?2017) is their recognition that the causes emerge from mechanisms in the world of work. The purpose of this book is to investigate the possible role of industrial relations, and social policies more generally, in reducing these inequalities.The volume pays particular attention to the contribution of social partners and social dialogue to achieving concrete outcomes, notably in terms of flexibility and security for both employers and workers. The key aim is to identify elements of a response to a number of important questions: which countries have succeeded in carrying out the necessary reforms without generating further inequalities? What industrial relations systems seem to perform better in this respect? What policy measures, institutions and actors play a determinant role in achieving more balanced outcomes? How can social dialogue address future transformations of the world of work, while limiting inequalities?The scope of this volume goes beyond pay to address other types of inequality ? in the distribution of working time, access or re-access to jobs, training and career opportunities, and social protection and pensions. It also looks at inequalities that may affect particular groups of workers, including women or young people, as well as people in certain types of work arrangements, such as part-time or temporary work or the self-employed.This book is vital reading for anyone concerned with labour policy, industrial relations and social welfare but, above all, with how advances in these areas can contribute to the global fight against growing inequalities.Contributors include: D. Anxo, B. Bembic, G. Bosch, P. Courtioux, C. Erhel, K. Espenberg, G. Fiorani, G. Giakoumatos, D. Grimshaw, M. Johnson, M. Karamessini, I. Marx, J. Masso, I. Mierina, R. Muñoz de Bustillo, B. Nolan, F. Pinto Hernández, W. Salverda, A. Simonazzi, M. Tverdostup, L. Van Cant, D. Vaughan-Whitehead, R. Vazquez-Alvarez

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Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century, producing clear theories and innovative research that continue to shape multiple disciplines. Merton's reach can be felt in the study of social structure, social psychology, deviance, professions, organizations, culture, and science. Yet for all his fame, Merton is only partially understood. He is treated by scholars as a functional analyst, when in truth his contributions transcend paradigm. Gathering together twelve major sociologists, Craig Calhoun launches a thorough reconsideration of Merton's achievements and inspires a renewed engagement with sociological theory. Merton's work addressed the challenges of integrating research and theory. It connected different fields of empirical research and spoke to the importance of overcoming divisions between allegedly pure and applied sociology. Merton also sought to integrate sociology with the institutional analysis of science, each informing the other. By bringing together different aspects of his work in one volume, Calhoun illuminates the interdisciplinary--and unifying--dimensions of Merton's approach, while also advancing the intellectual agenda of an increasingly vital area of study. Contributors: Aaron L. Panofsky, University of California; Alan Sica, Pennsylvania State University; Alejandro Portes, Princeton University; Charles Camic, Northwestern University; Charles Tilly, Columbia University; Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council and New York University; Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, City University of New York; Harriet Zuckerman, Mellon Foundation; Peter Simonson, University of Colorado; Ragnvald Kalleberg, University of Oslo; Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University; Thomas F. Gieryn, Indiana University; Viviana A. Zelizer, Princeton University

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Why is it important to consider the human today? Exploring this question John Lechte takes inspiration from the interplay of two of Giorgio Agamben’s concepts: ‘ways of life’ and ‘bare life’. Stateless people, those who do not have a political community, such as asylum seekers and refugees, are no less human. However the European tradition, represented most clearly in Hannah Arendt’s thinking of the opposition between the oikos, as the satisfaction of basic needs, and the polis, as the realm of freedom and glory, proposes the opposite of this. Arendt’s famous phrase, ‘the right to have rights’, means that freedom and full human potential can only be realised in the context of civil society; in short, that only citizens can be fully human. Because Arendt’s view is so influential, yet often not acknowledged, it is necessary to undertake a full investigation of the nature and meaning of the human to establish that it is not reducible to the citizen, but is always characterised by a ‘way of life’ – life mediated by language. The human is never reducible to ‘bare life’ – a life with no other significance than physical survival. The implications of ‘bare life’ are investigated through important themes in relation to the human, such as: freedom and necessity, the animal, animality as nature, inclusion and exclusion in politics, the sacred, death and dying, technics and nature, the Same and the Other, the everyday as extraordinary. Journeying through Agamben, Arendt, Bataille, Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, Schelling, Simondon, and Stiegler, this is a profound search to reveal the truly human.

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While recent studies have highlighted the phenomenon and risks of increased inequalities between the top and the bottom of society, little research has so far been carried out on trends relating to the median income range that generally represents the middle class. This volume examines the following questions: what are the main transformations in the world of work over the last 20 years in terms of the labour market, social dialogue and conditions of work, wages and incomes that may have affected the middle class? How has the middle class been shaped by the financial and economic crisis? What are the long-term trends for the middle class in Europe?This volume also investigates the potential risks and effects of the reshuffling, or even weakening, of the middle class. On the social side, it explores the ramifications of further retrenchment of the European Social Model, which to a great extent has traditionally been funded by the middle class. On the economic side, the book investigates whether this process - especially from the perspective of consumption and human capital - is endangering the long-term sustainability of the current economic model. While presenting evidence of a definite erosion of the middle class, this book assesses the specific situation in each individual EU Member State on the basis of detailed statistics and case studies of professional categories that traditionally represent the middle class.This book issues a timely warning about the latest trends and future of the middle class in Europe. On this basis, it presents policy considerations and options that will be useful to policy-makers for ensuring the future of the middle class in Europe. Scholars and researchers of European studies and social policy, especially from its sustainability perspective, will find the volume an invaluable reference.Contributors include: J.I. Antón, D. Anxo, T. Barbieri, G. Bosch, P. Courtioux, C. Erhel, K. Espenberg, A. Figueiredo, H. Figueiredo, S. Giakoumatos, P. González, D. Grimshaw, T. Kalina, M. Karamessini, S. Kuypers, B. Maître, N. Maitre, I. Marx, J. Masso, I. Mierina, R. Muñoz-de-Bustillo Llorente, B. Nolan, A. Rafferty, W. Salverda, L.D. Santos, A. Simonazzi, I.G. Tóth, D. Vaughan-Whitehead, R. Vazquez-Alvarez

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This guidebook describes the St Oswald's Way and Northumberland Coast Paths, both long-distance trails through Northumberland. St Oswald's Way (156km, 97 miles) begins in Heavenfield and traverses parts of Northumberland National Park and visits Hadrian’s Wall, the Simonside Hills and the beautiful Coquet Valley, before continuing up the coast to Lindisfarne (Holy Island). The Northumberland Coast Path (100km, 62 miles) takes in the whole of the Northumberland Coast AONB with its breathtaking coastal scenery and birdlife. Both trails converge on Holy Island, with the Coast Path continuing up to Berwick-upon-Tweed. Each trail can be walked in a week. The guide includes practical advice on when to go and what to take, and information on the region, its weather, wildlife, history and heritage. Detailed route descriptions and clear, step-by-step instructions are accompanied by 1:50K OS mapping. Public transport options and accommodation listings are also given. Described as the cradle of Christianity in England, Northumberland's history is long and varied and the trails reflect this with visits to some magnificent architecture – rambling castles, Norman churches, medieval abbeys – as well as sites of enormous archaeological and geological interest, quiet villages and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. From rugged hills to coastal dunes this is one of Britain's most beautiful landscapes for walking and backpacking far away from it all.

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Old English scholars of the mid-seventeenth century lived through some of the most turbulent times in English history but, this book argues, the upheaval inspired them to produce some of the most famous landmark texts in early Old English studies. England in the 1640s and 1650s experienced civil wars, regicide, and unprecedented debate over religious and social structures, but it also saw several milestones in the field of early medieval English studies. This book argues that the scholars of Old English who produced these works did so not in spite but because of the intense political upheaval surrounding them. The opening chapters examine the book collecting and lexicographic endeavors of the Parliamentarian Simonds D'Ewes, sponsor of the professorship of "Saxon" at Cambridge University, and Abraham Wheelock's pro-Stuart "Old English" poetry and the puritan overtones of his edition of the Old English Historia Ecclesiastica. It then moves on to consider the constitutionalist Roger Twysden's depiction of early English laws as the cornerstone for English identity in his edition of Archaionomia and the Leges Henrici Primi; and the royalist and Laudian bent of both William Somner's chorographic work and his Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, the first printed dictionary of Old English. It concludes by an exploration of the way in which William Dugdale deployed early medieval events to comment on his present day in his monumental county history, Antiquities of Warwickshire. The volume as a whole suggests that the crises through which these scholars lived and worked spurred their research to engage with both the past and present, using Old English texts as a lens through which to view understand and contribute to contemporary debates about the English church and state.

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