Browse Books
Decolonizing Islamic Art in Africa
This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon.
The contributors to this volume explore the dynamic place of Islamic art architecture and creative expression in processes of decolonization across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together new work by leading specialists in the fields of African Islamic and modern arts and visual cultures the book directs unprecedented attention to the agency and contributions of African and Muslim artists in articulating modernities in local and international arenas. Interdisciplinary and transregional in scope it enriches the under-told story of Muslim experiences and expression on the African continent home to nearly half a million Muslims or a third of the global Muslim population.
Furthermore it elucidates the role of Islam and its expressive cultures in post-colonial articulations of modern identities and heritage as expressed by a diverse range of actors and communities based in Africa and its diaspora; as such the book counters notions of Islam as a retrograde or static societal phenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributors propose new methodologies for accentuating human agency and experience over superficial disciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell about art-making and visual expression thus contributing to widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship on histories of modern expression.
Dissens and Sensibility
The book is motivated by the author's long-lasting interest in the role of art in society in general and education in particular and is a contribution to arts-based approaches to education. An introduction to pedagogy of dissensus: a pedagogy informed by the dissensual characteristics of art. The book includes both theoretical foundations and examples of how the theory is unfolded in different contexts ranging from educational practice to own arts-based research. This publication is a unique opportunity to launch the relevance of the pedagogy of dissensus in an international context.
The author invites readers to encounter dissensus as an educational strategy through examples from her own research and teaching. Referencing philosophers and theorists such as Rancière Gert Biesta and Dennis Atkinson she demonstrates art’s ability to create necessary disturbance and resistance in art education. Putting art at the centre of education and democracy the author shows what an art education focusing on concepts and issue-based art rather than form colours and composition can contribute as a contrast to the dominating practice in art.
Digital Embodiment and the Arts
A timely examination of the use of emerging technologies in the arts in recent decades from the first wave of Virtual Reality through to the current use of Mixed Augmented and Extended Realities. It highlights the necessity of understanding technological experiences through the assumption that all experience is embodied. An explosion of digital culture and experience has most certainly given artists and creative practitioners new ways of exploring a hybridisation of creative practices with access to technological tools only previously dreamt of. Further there are a number of threads around digital embodiment and its centrality to the digital experience.
The book is divided into 3: Section 1 explores the whole notion of embodied experience through a study of space and virtuality imagination and technology. Section 2 lays the ground for a more explicit understanding of the role the body has in our engagement with the digital technologies focussing on three distinct bodies: the gravitational body the virtual body and finally the hybrid body. Section 3 is split into three chronological chapters in terms of technological developments that of VR Virtual Worlds and Augmented Mixed and Extended Realities.
While individual aspects and themes covered here can be found in some recent books there is little that places digital embodiment within the arts in the way this book does. A unique synthesis.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects
This is a textbook aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts and includes practical guidance examples exercises and further resources.
The book offers definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame a step-by-step approach to designing practice-based research projects chapter summaries examples of practice-related research exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach and lists for further reading. This textbook can serve as the foundation for a wider online “living” textbook for practice-related research in the arts.
The Drama Therapy Decision Tree, 2nd Edition
This substantially revised and expanded edition of the The Drama Therapy Decision Tree provides an integrated model for therapeutic decision-making by uniting drama therapy interventions with diagnostic information individual and group processes psychological distance the drama therapy pie and global outcomes.
This book is a practical guide in four sections not a checklist. Rather than using a standardized protocol that makes the decisions for the therapist drama therapy is based on dynamic embodied creative action with participants in the here and now. Conscious planning on the part of the drama therapist before the session supports spontaneity and creativity preparing them to make good therapeutic decisions in the moment during the session.
The opening section guides readers through the foundational principles leading readers into Section Two The Decision Tree which is a series of questions for early career drama therapists to ask themselves as they prepare treatment plans for clients. Diversity Equity and Ethics are covered in Section Three from the point of view of creative arts therapy practitioners. Section Four looks at Integrating the Five Phases of Treatment with the Drama Therapy Pie following different populations (diagnosis) of clients through the five phases of group therapy in order to illustrate how the Decision Tree supports intervention choice in the different phases of treatment.
The authors strive to provide a common language for communicating what drama therapists do and how they do it in order to demystify drama therapy for other mental health and medical professionals. Using the decision tree as a guide early career drama therapists can move forward confidently and ground their work with participants in an integrated system.
An online searchable database of drama therapy interventions provides descriptions therapeutic outcomes addressed and other useful information provides a wealth of additional supporting material. There is also a separate online resource of deroling activities.
The online resources can also be an asset for non-drama therapists who are wanting to incorporate a more active and embodied component safely into their work particularly in terms of warm-ups closure and deroling.
Data Dating
What does it mean to love with technology? Does data improve our emotional interactions? The collection approaches the query with critical essays and works of new media art to look into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships. With expertise coming from recognized researchers critics and artists in the field of media and cultural studies it analyses relationship trends and affect cultures that have emerged from technological acceleration.
Data Dating: Love Technology and Desire is a comprehensive study of love and intimacy under digitalism that reflects on the structure of feeling(s) and libido environments in the high-tech and media-bound landscapes of contemporary technocracies. Organized around ten chapters and ten works of new media art the collection offers an extensive critical analysis of technologized romance (and other emotional relations) as well as provides an insight into the codification execution deployment and evolution of the patterns of togetherness in the so-called Tamagotchi era.
The chapters engage in the problems of new material planes that have emerged from the abstraction of networked communication and dispersion of traditional notions of physicality. They close-read the templates of contemporary fantasy fetish and eroticism as shaped by platform capitalism datafication and new commodity cultures in which self-promotion for bonding relies on the new possibilities that are coming in with new media self-mediation formats. Central to the analysis is the carbon-silicon dynamics of love’s contemporary DNA and libidinal techne – practiced in the environment where screens interfaces algorithms data protocols and non-organic objects of affection and affect delineate organize and program the trajectories of encounter limerence and erotic pleasure. All the chapters are authored by recognized researchers in the field of love emotion media technology and cultural studies and they critically explore various aspects of love/intimacy under technocracy approaching them with expertise the goes beyond the typical high-modernist and post-structural reading of the media-ridden life practices and environments.
More importantly the collection includes landmark works of new media art coming from prominent new media artist gathered around 'Data Dating' – new media art exhibition curated by Valentina Peri (co-editor of the collection) and presented in Paris Tel Aviv and London. As such the collection proffers a unique and original critical approach – one that combines artistic practice and cultural criticism – to comment upon the transformation of human relationships and emotional standards under technological development with reference to the social change and cultural condition.
The collection of essays each accompanied by a work of media art that provides a comprehensive insight into the construction of love and its practices in the time of digitally mediated relationships.
Primary readership will be among educators researcher and students in disciplines including cultural studies media and communications philosophy sociology psychology and gender LGBTQ+ and sexual studies. It will be an extremely valuable resource for those in these fields.
It will be of interest to other groups including art curators online platform designers social media content managers and designers and data specialists.
Drawing, Well-being and the Exploration of Everyday Place
Over 200 observational drawings created every day from the same window reveal life in an ordinary English street in extraordinary times.
This visual record and accompanying prose is a unique meditation on place nature community time and mental well-being. Through this qualitative work we gain insight into the individual and collective experience and place-specific impacts of the pandemic as opposed to the quantitative statistics of mortality and infection rates that characterise daily media soundbites and scientific discourse surrounding lockdown.
Five themes are central to the drawings highlighting the environmental and social factors influencing daily life and how these can be perceived and recorded via observational drawing: ‘framing space’ foregrounds the importance of widows as an interface between interior and exterior worlds; ‘observing nature and the built environment’ celebrates the street and garden as sites of human-nature relations that support well-being; ‘watching people’ focusses on the activities typify living under lockdown including isolation socially distanced interactions and working from home; ‘drawing’ reflects on the multiple professional and personal benefits of drawing; and mindful awareness is discussed throughout affirming the value of appreciating everyday life through drawing practice.
Drawing Processes of Life
Drawing Processes of Life is the product of biologists philosophers and artists working together to formulate new ways of representing our new approach to life. It is a mutualistic symbiosis where identities are transformed information and nutritive substances shared and where new organisms emerge.
Originating from an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project it derives from Gemma Andersons’ work on the methodological and epistemological value of drawing as a technique in biological research and from her collaborative work on visualising living – biological – processes through artistic processes. It also draws on John Dupré’s recent work on biology as process and the need to develop representations of biological systems that more adequately capture their processual nature. Hence the book has intertwined aims: to show how better to represent biological process through drawing and to demonstrate the scientific value of drawing as a method.
The book presents this work and locates it in a broader historical and contemporary perspective on the relations between art and science. The project outcomes are interwoven with the work of leading scholars in the field. Many of these contributions also stress the problems presented by the processual nature of biological phenomena a central focus of Anderson and Dupré’s own work.
Contributors include Chiara Ambrosio Heather Barnett Alessio Corti Katharina Lee Chichester Johannes Jaeger Wahida Khandker Jonathan Phillips Berta Verd James Wakefield and Janina Wellmann. Foreword from Scott F. Gilbert and Afterword from Sarah Gilbert and Scott F. Gilbert.
The perspectives presented here constitute a powerfully integrated and vital set of themes of interest to artists scientists philosophers students and post-doctoral researchers.
Digital Platforms and the Press
James Meese argues that there is a growing risk of a platform-dependent press a development that threatens liberal democracies across the world. The book provides the first comprehensive account of how platform dependence manifests in the news media sector.
Platform dependence is a concept used to describe what happens when businesses or an entire sector become reliant on one or more digital platforms for its survival. The situation is occurring across the news industry to the extent that it is difficult to imagine the production distribution and long-term survival of news in liberal democracies without the involvement of platforms.
With governments regulators and citizens increasingly concerned about platform power Digital Platforms and the Press is the first book to highlight the long-term economic and social consequences of platform dependence for the news sector.
Featuring a rich selection of case-studies and written in an accessible style Digital Platforms and the Press provides a strong grounding in relevant debates for the interested student reader and important takeaways for subject matter experts in journalism studies and media policy.
Digital Platforms and the Press will be of interest to journalism and media policy scholars other scholars in communication as well as industry practitioners and policymakers.
Dances with Sheep
Dances with Sheep presents the methodology of Felt Thinking in Movement as an eco-somatic practice inspired by re-thinking nature of being human as well as contextualises it within wider frameworks of cultural philosophical and therapeutic viewpoints on wellbeing.
Felt Thinking is a self-inquiry practice grounded in somatic movement experience that originates in site-specific and embodied dialoguing between what is felt and what shapes as a responsive thought as creative movement itself and which paths ways for ecologically inclusive care for being well with self and other.
The book elaborates on creative processes in and with the natural environment in relation to the movers’ overall wellbeing and covers creative journeys of opening up to the living agency of Nature itself through the emergent three phases of experiential relatedness in embodied experience of the self. The book presents its original contribution to eco-phenomenology with its ontological principle of embodied relationality in towards and away from movement as a primal gateway to wellbeing and its creative inter-constitution.
An intriguing and inspiring resource for students practitioners educators self-learners therapists and researchers. Foreword by Sondra Fraleigh.
Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making
Contemporary art has a complex relationship to crisis. On the one hand art can draw us toward apocalypse: it charts unfolding chaos reflects and amplifies the effects of crisis shows us the dystopian in both our daily life and in our imagined futures. On the other hand art’s complexity helps fathom the uncertainty of the world question and challenge the order of things and allows us to imagine new ways of living and being – to make new worlds.
This collection of written and visual essays includes artistic responses to various crises – including the climate emergency global and local inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic – and suggests new forms of collectivity and collaboration within artistic practice. It surveys a wide variety of practices oriented from the perspective of Australia New Zealand and Asia. Art making has always responded to the world; the essays in this collection explore how artists are adapting to a world in crisis.
The contributions to this book are arranged in four sections: artistic responses; critical reflections new curatorial approaches and the art school reimagined. Alongside the written chapters three photographic essays provide specific examples of new visual forms in artistic practice under crisis conditions.
The primary market for the book will be scholars and upper-level students of art and curating at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Specifically the book will appeal to the burgeoning field of study around socially engaged art.
Beyond the academic and student market it will appeal to practicing artists and curators especially those engaged in social practice and community-based art.
Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America
The long-lasting effects of colonialism are still present throughout Latin America. Racism political persecution ethnic extermination and extreme capitalism are some salient examples. This new book explores how heavy metal music in the region has been used to critically challenge the historical legacy of colonialism and its present-day manifestations.
Through extensive ethnographic research in Puerto Rico Cuba Dominican Republic Mexico Guatemala Colombia Peru Chile and Argentina Varas-Díaz documents how metal music listeners and musicians engage in ‘extreme decolonial dialogues’ as a strategy to challenge past and ongoing forms of oppression. This allows readers to see metal music in a different light and as a call for justice in Latin America.
Heavy metal related scholarship has made strides in the past decade. Many books have aimed to explain its origins uses and the social meanings ascribed to the music in a variety of contexts. For the most part these have neglected to address the region of Latin America as an area of study.
It represents a historical and sociological journey in Latin American heavy metal music through rich ethnographic engagements with performers fans and scholars of music. Its central premise is the dialogic relationship amongst deep histories of coloniality systematic oppression entrenched inequalities and the expressive forms generated by ‘decolonial metal music’. The book also provides an exemplary and potentially iconic model of ethnomusicology and the anthropology of music.
Most previous work on metal music in Latin America has relied on theoretical frameworks developed in the Global North and is therefore limited in understanding the region through its particular history and experiences. There is no scholarship of heavy metal scholarship in the Latin American region that achieves the depth or breadth of analysis represented by this book. It provides a roadmap and a model for this emerging mode of musical analysis by demonstrating how decolonial metal scholarship can be achieved.
Academic readership for the book will come from multiple disciplines including cultural studies musicology ethnomusicology sociology anthropology cultural geography history and Latin American studies. It will be of interest to music studies programmes as well as for methods courses on structurally informed social research. The book will also be of interest to those outside academic settings – accessibly written with its concise reviews of historical and political-economic contexts and its vivid storytelling it will be of interest to consumers of the metal musical genre.
Design for the New World
Design for the New World aims to introduce a new paradigm in design and design thinking by shifting our approach from a human perspective that is primarily focused on human scales needs and desires to a planet perspective in which design is guided by the ambition to create a balanced coexistence between humans and the other species that make up the global ecosystem.
The book intervenes in current discussions within design research about what role design can play in the sustainable transition by offering new methods and mindset to handle the giant-scale complexity of the climate and environmental crisis as well as specific tools to turn these theoretical reflections into a transformative practice.
Essential reading for researchers students and practitioners in the fields of design innovation development entrepreneurship leadership art and creativity. The book is structured so that it can be easily used in an educational context both at under- and postgraduate level and in courses of business innovation or management training. The practical suggestions and process-management tools can be used to facilitate sustainable transformations in in commercial businesses organizations and political networks.
Written in an accessible and clear style where all technical terms are fully introduced and unpacked. The chapters can be read in order or independently and the practical tools for facilitating processes of change are supplemented with additional questions for reflection and further development.
Design for the New World
Design for the New World aims to introduce a new paradigm in design and design thinking by shifting our approach from a human perspective that is primarily focused on human scales needs and desires to a planet perspective in which design is guided by the ambition to create a balanced coexistence between humans and the other species that make up the global ecosystem.
The book intervenes in current discussions within design research about what role design can play in the sustainable transition by offering new methods and mindset to handle the giant-scale complexity of the climate and environmental crisis as well as specific tools to turn these theoretical reflections into a transformative practice.
Essential reading for researchers students and practitioners in the fields of design innovation development entrepreneurship leadership art and creativity. The book is structured so that it can be easily used in an educational context both at under- and postgraduate level and in courses of business innovation or management training. The practical suggestions and process-management tools can be used to facilitate sustainable transformations in in commercial businesses organizations and political networks.
Written in an accessible and clear style where all technical terms are fully introduced and unpacked. The chapters can be read in order or independently and the practical tools for facilitating processes of change are supplemented with additional questions for reflection and further development.
Dance and Ethics
Dance and Ethics: Moving Towards a More Humane Culture is an introductory study of ethical issues as applied to the history and field of Western theatrical dance. It is the first sustained work of its kind inspired by the belief that there are serious issues to be illuminated by examining dance in relation to ethics and to the changing values in the dance world itself especially as faced by young dancers entering the profession.
Since the 1960s and gathering momentum with the #metoo movement scholars and practitioners especially from the fields of dance education somatics and the realms of postmodern dance and ballet have increasingly believed that attitudes and practices involving psychological physical and sexual mistreatment of students and dancers must be challenged. Dance and Ethics examines key ethical issues related to the dance field primarily within the United States and how those directly impact different aspects of the lives of dance artists over the span of their careers. The issues discussed include the basic ethical choices facing a dance artist in terms of whether to care about ethics or separate art from morality; ethical issues involved in student–teacher and dancer–choreographer relationships; how ethical concerns relate to the creation and reception of choreographic work; ethical aspects of the critical assessment of dance and dancers; and ethical issues related to presenting systems and institutional infrastructures within the dance field.
While there is a clear bias towards greater humanism within the dance field Naomi Jackson is sensitive to the variety of moral stances available in any given situation. Readers are invited to consider that ethical options exist other than those that are usually promoted that while sometimes there are no clear right and wrong answers there are better and worse positions to be explored and defended and that it is important for the dance field and broader culture to consciously address ethical issues in relation to dance in a sustained thoughtful and creative manner.
The book focuses on theatrical dance forms of ballet modern/postmodern dance and theatrical jazz but also extends to commercial dance dance for the camera/internet and social/vernacular/folk dance when relevant to the main argument.
Dance and Ethics will appeal primarily to educators and students as well as young professional dancers. It is designed for undergraduate and graduate students in dance studies American studies performance studies and cultural studies. It will be useful for undergraduate and graduate dance courses focused on pedagogy choreography criticism community engagement politics and aesthetics.
Design and the Digital Humanities
This is an essential practical guide for academics researchers and professionals involved in the digital humanities as well as designers working with them. It prepares readers from both fields for working together outlining disciplinary perspectives and lessons learned from more than twenty years of experience with over two dozen practical exercises.
The central premise of the book is a timely one – that the twin disciplines of visual communication design and digital humanities (DH) are natural allies with much to be gained for researchers students and practitioners from both areas who are able to form alliances with those from the other side. The disciplines share a common fundamental belief in the extraordinary value of interdisciplinarity which in this case means that the training experience and inclinations from both fields naturally tend to coincide. The fields also share an interest in research that focuses on humanities questions and approaches where the goal is to improve understanding through repeated observation and discussion. Both disciplines tend to be generative in nature with the ultimate end in many cases of designing and creating the next generation of systems and tools whether those be intended for dealing with information or communication.
The interdisciplinary nature of this book is both a strength and a challenge. For those academics and practitioners who have worked with the other discipline this will be a much-welcomed handbook of terminology methods and activities. It will also be of interest to those who have read about seen presented and used the outcomes of successful design and DH collaborations and who might be interested in forming similar partnerships.
However for all they have in common design and digital humanities also have significant differences. This book discusses these issues in the context of a variety of research projects as well as classroom activities that have been tried and tested. This book will provide both design and the digital humanities with a better mutual understanding with the practical intention of working effectively together in ways that are productive and satisfying for everyone involved.
Design education has a long history a presence in many post-secondary institutions and a robust market for educational and practice-based literature. The Digital Humanities community in contrast is much younger but rising rapidly both academically and within industry. Both design and DH are collaborative disciplines with much in common in terms of vision but with confusing overlap in terminology and ways-to-practice.
The book describes and demonstrates foundational concepts from both fields with numerous examples as well as projects activities and further readings at the end of each chapter. It provides complete coverage of core design and DH principles complete with illustrated case studies from cutting-edge interdisciplinary research projects. Design and the Digital Humanities offers a unique approach to mastering the fundamental processes concepts and techniques critical to both disciplines.
It will be of interest to those who have been following previous work by bestselling authors in the fields of visual communication design and the digital humanities such as Ellen Lupton Steven Heller Julianne Nyhan Claire Warwick and Melissa Terras.
This guide is suitable for use as an undergraduate or masters-level text or as an in-the-field reference guide. Throughout the book terms or concepts that may not be familiar to all readers are carefully spelled out with examples so that the text is as accessible as possible to non-technical readers from a range of disciplines.
Dance Studies in China
Dance Studies in China is a collection of articles selected from issues of the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy translated for an English-speaking audience. Beijing Dance Academy is a full-time institution of higher learning with commitment to developing excellent professional dancers choreographers and dance researchers. This collection includes an interview with Shen Wei the Chinese-American choreographer painter and director living in New York City USA.
Founded in 1954 the former Beijing Dance School was the first professional dance school ever established since the founding of People’s Republic of China. Beijing Dance Academy (BDA) officially established in 1978 it provides BA and MA degrees and has become the only institution of higher learning for professional dance education in China as well as the largest prestigious dance school with comprehensive concentrations in the world.
In recent years BDA has committed to develop its research profile specialising in dance the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy is one of such outcomes. The Academy is also actively engaging with international collaboration.
The Intellect China Library is a series of new English translations of the latest scholarship in Chinese that have not previously been available. Subjects covered include visual arts performing arts popular culture media and the broader creative industries. The series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural knowledge exchange by introducing unique Chinese scholarship and ideas to our readers.
Distillation of Sound
Distillation of Sound focuses on the original music of Jamaica and how through dub reggae Jamaican culture was expanded and shifted. It will further the discussion on dub music its importance to Jamaican culture and its influence on the rest of the world.
Dub music in Jamaica started in the early 1970s and by the end of the decade had influenced an entire population. The music began to use the rhythm track of a song as a song itself and spread quickly throughout the sound systems of the island. The importance of dub music and its influence on the music world frames the discussions in this new book. How dub travelled and distilled to three places in the world is covered in chapters focussing on the rise and spread of dub in New York City in England and in Japan.
Abbey discusses the separation between dub as a product and dub as an act of the engineer. Codifying these two elements and tracing them will allow for a more definitive approach to the culture and music of dub. To define it and its surrounding elements five of the first albums produced in the genre are discussed in three parameters that help to define and set up the culture of dub music.
The albums discussed are Java Java Java Java (Impact All Stars) Aquarius Dub (Herman Chin Loy) Blackboard Jungle Dub (Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry) The Message Dubwise (Prince Buster) King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (Augustus Pablo).
From the Preface:
‘Jamaican music has always been about creating with what is at hand. Taking what is around you and making it into something great is the key to dub and Jamaican culture. This attitude is what this project is about. There is not enough written on the music that has inspired and influenced so many people around the world and this is an addition to the conversation. Dub music fixates on the engineer as a musician and in doing so allows for the creator to interact with echnology. Through this the mixing board and other electronic elements become musical instruments. Now these technologies are dominant in contemporary music and allow for people to easily create in their own homes. Without the engineers and musicians in the following work these changes and shifts in technology and music would not have occurred.
Dub is also a refiguring of already existing music. What this demonstrates is that music is ever evolving and can be shifted through technology. It also suggests that recorded music can always be modified and expanded upon. In our contemporary world this modification is seen every day online and in people’s daily lives. Dub created a way to view these changes through music. The influence of technology in the development of culture is the key to this work and to our development in society. How technology can be modified changed and evolved through the interaction of the engineer is the focus of this project.
This work will further the importance of dub music and culture in our society. The definition and distinction between version and dub is also an important element in the following work. Jamaican music needs to be discussed more for its influence and creative force in the entirety of the music world.
The author is a professional musician with the groups J. Navarro & the Traitors Detroit Riddim Crew and 1592 and a producer of dub reggae and ska and a professor of English and literature at Oakland Community College in Michigan USA.
Genuine popular and academic appeal. Will appeal to students and scholars of music and Jamaican culture – and to academic libraries. Has genuine popular appeal to those with an interest in Jamaican culture and music.
Design in the Age of Change
Change is inevitable. This is the only constant in our lives. Yet change is also something that we fear. We seek comfort in the familiar in routines and in conventions. We are afraid of things that we don't know or we don’t understand. We fear change because we don’t know how change will affect us. Change however is necessary for progress. Sometimes change happens naturally due to circumstances beyond our control and sometimes we initiate change because we can or because we must.
In 2020 we experienced the biggest change of our lifetimes. For a brief moment in history the world came to a halt. Then everything changed. Many things that we used to take for granted no longer applied. We experienced major disruptions to our daily lives. As if in some kind of perfect storm so many things happened all at once – global pandemic social inequalities climate change racial injustices riots and unrests gender struggles and rapid advances of new technologies. This book started to take shape in the midst of it all and in a way it is a time capsule of how we experienced the birth of what became known as the 'new normal'.
Designers are the kind of people who thrive in times of change. In fact it is their job to create change. The nature of their job is such that they have to take an existing situation and change it into a better or a more preferred situation. Some do this by relying on their imagination and personal experiences and some use evidence-based research to inform their work. Regardless of this many share the belief that they can somehow make the world a better place – on a micro or a macro level.
During this period of massive change Gjoko Muratovski invited ten highly influential design figures – including iconic design leaders such as Carole Bilson Karim Rashid Bruce Mau Steven Heller and Don Norman – to reflect on the state of things today. In return each one of them shares a highly personal account on why change is good. The book also features a foreword written by the president of the World Design Organisation (WDO) Srini Srinisavan and a conclusion by one of the greatest design philosophers of our time Ken Friedman.
By looking to the past and reflecting on the present these designers project very personal images of the future that they would like to see. The conversations are very broad and they cover highly diverse topics. From the effects of the pandemic to issues of race and gender notions of beauty technology and industry to global and local economies politics power privilege and the importance of community.
A 'must-read' for anyone interested in how designers and design can change the world.
Gjoko Muratovski is a university executive award-winning designer and innovation consultant working with leading organisations Fortune 500 companies and governments from around the world and a fellow of the Design Research Society.