The concept of this book is ‘dance and ageing’ and is driven by the possibility that everybody in the Western dance community in particular young dance students but also readers beyond the parameters of dance will profit if the voices of senior professional practitioners are heard.



It features dancers from USA Canada UK Europe and Australia all interviewees are practitioners of stature and prominence who continue to contribute despite ageism to the dance industry. They are inspiring role models for younger dancers but also for an ageing demographic in society; it is a celebration of the body and the indomitable urge to create and express.

Conversations with twenty senior professional dancers explore how they sustain performing despite the inground ageism that exists through society and is mirrored within the dance world. This cohort of older dancers aged between 41 and 107 illuminate inspiring life stories that convey their passion to continue performing while overcoming the prejudices in an artform that champions youth.



Dance practitioners remaining active and relevant throughout the life stages is an area of growing interest particularly in community dance health and wellbeing. This would inspire all dancers to follow in their footsteps to believe that diversity and inclusion would widen the boundaries within Western dance culture and eradicate bias. Further interest from an older demographic who enjoy watching dance or dance themselves who would appreciate their representation in a book that reveals the positive attributes ageing can bring. It also has the potential to reach an anti-ageing reader as well as a dance reader. The book has a broad appeal not just within Western dance culture but also where ageing/ageism is a prominent concern within Western society.

Industrial music appeared in the mid-1970s and far from being a simple sound experimentation phenomenon it quickly spawned a coherent visual culture operating at the intersection of a multitude of media (collage mail art installation film performance sound video) and initiated a close inspection of the legacy of modernity and the growing pervasive influence of technology.



Originally British the movement soon outgrew Europe extending into the United States and Japan during the 1980s. The sound experiments conducted by industrial bands – designing synthesizers manipulating and transforming recorded sounds from audio tapes either recycled or laid down by the artists – were backed up by a rich array of radical visual productions deriving their sources from the modernist utopias of the first part of the 20th century. Such saturated sounds were translated into abrasive images manipulated through the détournement of reprographic techniques (Xerox art) that investigated polemical themes: mind control criminality occultism pornography psychiatry and totalitarianism among others.



This book aims to introduce the visual and aesthetic elements of 1970a and 1980s industrial culture to a general history of contemporary art by analysing the different approaches taken and topics addressed by the primary protagonists of the movement who perceptively anticipated the current discourse concerning the media and their collective coercive power.

The Social Object uses the methods of design history material culture studies and the social construction of technology to analyse the domestic spaces and objects in the homes of the middle class in India. The book describes how people make meaning of the objects they buy own and gift.

This is a book about the biography of projects and objects. The projects in the book serve as book ends to a detailed and affectionate account of the biographies of objects within the homes of the not so rich.



The aim of the author has been to silence the voice of the designer to allow the accounts of objects to emerge as periodic irruptions that reveal a hidden maelstrom of passion ideas and failed projects. The book opens with the biography of a project dealing with waste leading the reader to a very particular kind of object the bads. This object is illicit handled by criminals and in the writing by the author serves to invert the dominant discourse of objects as commodities. This book makes the case that the program of design is better seen as a democratic community where the householders the zietgiest technology and all manner of hidden agents collide to allow unforseen periodic objects to emerge.

Varadarajan argues against a simplistic universal account off the way we think about how objects are designed. As an enterprise the book was a journey to assemble the evidence - of places and objects - and observe the enactment of practices with the objects. It was also a project of speculation upon the possible ways in which objects come to be as local collaborations of action.

The short lived Tulip Era breathed a new life into Ottoman social life and novel elements of art architecture and new spaces of leisure and entertainment that both men and women could participate and enjoy emerged during the early 18th century. Later during the 19th century triggered by the state policies to establish closer relationship with European states as well as by the royal urge to be seen and felt by their subjects more intensively and more interactively these novelties in social life were predominantly adopted and instrumentalized by the ruling elite and found their reflection in major urban centers of the empire. With the emulation of the ruling elite by various classes and due to an increasing social mobility among classes the new forms of entertainment and recreation gradually permeated into the rest of the society and ended up having a long-term impact on the Ottoman society.



Hence during the 19th century a modern urban life in Ottoman cities has emerged shaped by these new forms of recreation and entertainment and by new regimes of visibility. Ripping open of their traditional nuclei in the second half of the 19th century these urban centers accommodated –along with new trade financial industrial and residential facilities– different types of entertainment and recreation ranging from opera to cinema and from concerts to sports. Thus the late-Ottoman cities witnessed the emergence of new architectural and urban facilities such as theatres opera houses clubs performance halls sports fields and public parks. These spaces of entertainment and spectacle represented the modernizing face of the empire and also embraced by the Republican elite after the foundation of the young Turkish Republic. These public/social spaces were utilized for the making of the modern Turkish nation.



This edited volume offers an analysis of the forms and spaces of spectacle entertainment and recreation during the late Ottoman and early Republican eras. Each article focuses on different forms on spectacle entertainment or recreation in varied cities of Ottoman Empire or Republican Turkey. The edited volume aims not only to shed light on how such urban or architectural spaces were developed and shaped but also to scrutinize their impact on social cultural urban life in the modernizing Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey.

Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.

This book of highly original essays addresses the field of movement-based and dance somatics through lenses of ethics and ecology. It is based in methods of phenomenology.

A new collection of essays previously published with Intellect as journal articles with the addition of new essays and editorial material. The text considers body-based somatic education relative to values virtues gender fluidity lived experience environmental awareness fairness and collective well-being. In delineating interdependent values of soma ecology and human movement that are newly in progress the collection conceives links between personal development of subjective knowledge and cultural critical and environmental positionality.

The text raises questions about defining somatics and self gender dynamics movement preferences normative body conceptions attention to feelings inclusiveness ethics of touch and emotional intelligence in somatics contexts. I include these crucial concerns of somatics and ethics as relational globally complex and ongoing.

Like much of Sondra Fraleigh’s writing these essays utilize phenomenology as a method to investigate embodied relationships—often through lenses of ethics and aesthetics. In providing some examples the text explores specific values of gratitude listening and emotional intelligence in somatic bodywork and learning environments.

This book focuses on Somatic Movement Dance Therapy and the importance of self-regulation and co-regulation.  The chapters attend to self-regulating different tissues through movement breath sound and the imagination.

Throughout the book the author shares processes and practices that support participants to balance their living tissues moving from sympathetic arousal into parasympathetic ease and release. The study of the autonomic nervous system and how to innervate the parasympathetic through breath awareness heart-sensing and intero-ception is the central through-line in the book.

Uniquely Williamson attends to the anatomical and physiological complexity underlying the apparent simplicity of somatic movement dance practice. How to sense-perceive and move with attuned awareness of specific body tissues such the skeletal-muscular and craniosacral system invites the reader into a deep anatomical and physiological excavation of self-regulation. The interconnectivity of fascia and the importance of cardio-ception breath awareness and gravity lie at the heart of this book. Sensory-perceptual awareness of the heart is foregrounded as the most important ingredient in the efficacy of practice as well as gravi-ception soft-tissue-rolling and fascial unwinding.

Includes a collective foreword from Sarah Whatley Daniel Deslauriers Celeste Snowber and Karin Rugman 

This is a must-read practice-as-research book for under- and postgraduate students researchers and educators and especially important for practitioners who feel the weight and condescension of the mechanistic paradigm.

Scream for Me Africa! examines the hard rock and metal scenes in five African countries: Botswana Togo South Africa Kenya and Ghana. Banchs spent significant time in each country interviewing musicians producers and fans to create vivid pictures of each of these rarely discussed scenes. These scenes are 'a disruption of the norm a disruption of what we have come to expect from Africa and rock and metal music'. He has chosen to shed light on these particular scenes now because of their difference and because they are reflections of their countries.

This exciting new book considers how heavy metal's subculture is viewed in Africa and how musicians in the continent have stepped forward to make this genre their own. It looks at the continent's blossoming scenes through various themes including hybridity othering and how scenes have collided with their difficult political systems.

Scream For Me Africa! Is the first book of its kind and an engaging look at the various metal scenes across the African continent and how they are constructing an identity as metal fans in their modern nation states under the shadow of post-colonialism. Written in a clear approachable manner it is accessible to academic and non-academic readers.

Edward Banchs is a freelance writer and independent scholar – and a metal fan – based in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania USA whose writing has appeared in The Guardian Afropop Metal Hammer Metal Music Studies and The Pittsburgh City Paper. He is also author of Heavy Metal Africa (2016).

This new book fills a gap in the market for an academic text on metal in Africa expanding published scholarship on metal in the global south. It book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology cultural studies musicology ethnomusicology sociology and Africa studies.  It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.

Will appeal to anyone who is interested in metal African culture anthropology and sociology and history.  Particularly musicologists and ethnomusicologists and those with an interest in metal in the global south. 

Jazz photography has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Photographs of musicians are popular with enthusiasts while historians and critics are keen to incorporate photographs as illustrations. Yet there has been little interrogation of these photographs and it is noticeable that what has become known as the jazz photography 'tradition' is dominated by a small number of well-known photographers and 'iconic' images.

Many photographers including African American photojournalists studio photographers early twentieth-century émigrés the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory supported by extensive original archival research Sight Readings is a thorough exploration of twentieth century jazz photography and it includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did.

One of the remarkable things about this book is its movement back and forth between detailed archive research the empirical documentation of photographers their techniques working practices equipment etc. and cultural theory the sophisticated discussion of aesthetics cultural sociology the politics of identity etc.  The result is both a fine scholarly achievement and an engaging labour of love.

This original collection fills a gap in the literature on Lav Diaz and more broadly on slow and durational cinema. The importance of the director in contemporary world cinema is beyond doubt. 

This collection considers Lav Diaz and his works holistically without being confined to a specific approach or research method. On the contrary it involves almost all the major contemporary academic approaches to cinema. It focuses on an auteur who has been celebrated immensely in recent times and yet has remained largely unexplored in cinema studies. The book will address this research gap.

As such this book aims to situate Diaz at the crucial juncture of ‘new’ auteurism Filipino New Wave and transnational cinema but it does not neglect the industrial–exhibitional coordinates of his cinema. The rationale behind this project is to raise questions on the oeuvre of a significant auteur to situate him in and outside of his immediate national context(s) to present a repository of critical approaches on him to reconsider the existing critical positions on him to find newer avenues to enter (and exit) his canon that will consciously avoid the time-worn rhetoric of long take and slowness of the proverbial ‘slow cinema’ camp and to find corridors in him that will lead to informed ways of reaching other movements/auteurs in other times other places.

It explores various other aspects of Diaz and his cinema whose notoriety the editors believe should not rely solely on its incredible running time. The collection looks at Diaz from the perspectives of a national and a transnational critic – one of the two editors is from the Philippines the other from another Asian location. It concentrates both on the spatial and the temporal to place him within the intricacies of the culture and creative industries and the distribution practices and politics in his native place to allow space for his ‘detractors’ who (perhaps rightly) focus on and object to his ‘artlessness’ and also to read him in the context of his fascination for the epic novel and novelistic cinema his engagement with Dostoevsky and Jose Rizal among others.

This is the first book-length study on the Filipino auteur Lav Diaz. It looks critically at his career and corpus from various perspectives with contributions from cinema studies researchers film critics festival programmers and artists. It offers a nuanced overview of the filmmaker and the cinematic traditions he belongs to for film enthusiasts researchers and general readers alike.

Primary readership will be researchers scholars educators and students in film studies. Also academics and researchers interested and working in cultural studies and Philippine studies.

Shiny Things combines an interest in visual art with a broad attention to popular culture – the wideness of its range is striking. It is more than just an expansion of subject matter which many of today’s innovative books also have – it considers how a specific physical property manifests itself in both art and culture at large and contributes to an analysis of and polemics about the world. It is accessibly written but with a careful application of contemporary theory.

Interesting informative and entertaining this will appeal to progressive thinkers looking for new ways of presenting ideas. This is scholarship that challenges stale thought and interacts with philosophical ideas in real time with a versatility that can often be lacking in traditional academic scholarship.

Using art especially contemporary art as its recurrent point of reference the authors argue that shininess has moved from a time when rarity gave shiny things a direct meaning of power and transcendence. Shininess today is pervasive; its attraction is a foundation of consumer culture with its attendant effects on our architecture our conceptions of the body and our production of spectacle. Power and the sacred as readings of the shiny have given way to readings of superficiality irony and anxiety while somehow shininess has maintained its qualities of fascination newness and cleanliness.

Examines the meanings and functions of shininess in art and in culture more generally: its contradictions of both preciousness and superficiality and its complexities of representation; the way shininess itself is physically and metaphorically present in the construction of major conceptual categories such as hygiene utopias the sublime and camp; and the way the affects of shininess rooted in its inherent disorienting excess produce irony anxiety pleasure kitsch and fetishism. All of these large ideas are embodied in the instantly noticeable sometimes precious and sometimes cheap physical presence of shiny things those things that catch our eye and divert our attention. Shininess then is a compelling subject that instantly attracts and fascinates people.

The book engages primarily with visual art although it makes frequent use of material culture as well as advertising film literature and other areas of popular and political culture. The art world however is a place where many of the affects of shininess come into clearest focus where the polemical semiotics of shine are most evident and consciously explored. 

Artists as diverse as Anish Kapoor (whose popular Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago is a repeating example in the book) Olafur Eliasson Jeff Koons Carolee Schneemann Audrey Flack Fra Angelico and Gerard ter Borch centre the book in an art discourse that opens up to automobiles Richard Nixon and Liberace.

Will be relevant to academics scholars and students with an interest in contemporary theory and material and popular cultures. Potential interest across the humanities: philosophy gender studies perhaps public relations advertising and marketing.

It will also appeal to more general readers with an interest in popular and material cultures art and aesthetics.  It is written in a genuinely accessible style and its ideas and theory are embodied through examples and narratives.  Will be of interest to readers of Oliver Sacks James Gleick George Lakoff James Elkins or Rebecca Solnit.