Browse Books
Media Materialities
Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats materiality and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured transformed and redefined through changing social cultural and technological values.
Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film board games maps videogames cassette tapes transistor radios and Twitter amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context.
We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media culture and society.
Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life
This collection explores critical and visual practices through the lens of interactions and intersections between pattern and chaos. The dynamic of the inter-relationship between pattern and chaos is such as to challenge disciplinary boundaries critical frameworks and modes of understanding perception and communication often referencing the in-between territory of art and science through experimentation and visual scrutiny. A territory of 'pattern-chaos' or 'chaos-pattern' begins to unfold.
Drawing upon fields such as visual culture sociology physics neurobiology linguistics or critical theory for example contributors have experimented with pattern and/or chaos-related forms processes materials sounds and language or have reflected on the work of other artists scientists and scholars. Diagrams tessellations dust knots mazes folds creases flux virus fire and flow are indicative of processes through which pattern and chaos are addressed.
The contributions are organized into clusters of subjects which reflect the interdisciplinary terrain through a robust yet also experimental arrangement. These are 'Pattern Dynamics' 'Morph Flux Mutate' 'Decompose Recompose' 'Virus; Social Imaginary' and 'Nothings in Particular'.
Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life
This collection explores critical and visual practices through the lens of interactions and intersections between pattern and chaos. The dynamic of the inter-relationship between pattern and chaos is such as to challenge disciplinary boundaries critical frameworks and modes of understanding perception and communication often referencing the in-between territory of art and science through experimentation and visual scrutiny. A territory of 'pattern-chaos' or 'chaos-pattern' begins to unfold.
Drawing upon fields such as visual culture sociology physics neurobiology linguistics or critical theory for example contributors have experimented with pattern and/or chaos-related forms processes materials sounds and language or have reflected on the work of other artists scientists and scholars. Diagrams tessellations dust knots mazes folds creases flux virus fire and flow are indicative of processes through which pattern and chaos are addressed.
The contributions are organized into clusters of subjects which reflect the interdisciplinary terrain through a robust yet also experimental arrangement. These are 'Pattern Dynamics' 'Morph Flux Mutate' 'Decompose Recompose' 'Virus; Social Imaginary' and 'Nothings in Particular'.
Women's Work in Post-war Italy
Italy’s 1948 constitution states that Italy is a ‘republic founded upon work’. This book explores women’s labour following World War Two and Italy’s new republic. It focuses its enquiry on three sectors: agriculture (rice weeders) fashion (seamstresses) and religious work (nuns). It studies original oral history interviews and compares women’s own words with their representation in film.
In Italy both war and national reconstruction have typically been framed as masculine undertakings. This book shifts that frame to investigate the labour that Italian women were doing at this critical time of political social and ideological change. By examining (filmed) oral history interviews and postwar fiction films the book brings a vivid engaging and cross-disciplinary account of women’s work.
Historical studies of Italian women’s work in this period are scarce short and almost never in English; this work addresses that critical gap. Film histories almost invariably study women for their beauty and on-screen sexuality; this work critiques and moves beyond this bias. Oral history studies aim to give voice to the under-represented; this book shares that goal.
The book is interested in how women’s work was viewed by society and by women workers themselves. Critical analysis of films produced between 1945 and 1965 reveals tensions around women workers’ financial sexual intellectual and spatial independence. Oral histories reveal little-discussed professions and women’s experiences in the workplace. These interviews expose the profound difference work made to women’s lives and the joys and dilemmas of this difference.
A Cultural History of The Punisher
If the Punisher became a valuable piece of intellectual property during the closing decades of the twentieth century he has become a global icon in the twenty-first. In this pathbreaking study Kent Worcester explores the sometimes ridiculous and often socially resonate storyverse of the most famous rageaholic in popular culture: Frank Castle aka the Punisher.
Worcester pays particular attention to nearly five decades' worth of punishment-themed comics and graphic novels published between the 1970s and the present day. These texts provide the material resources for a close reading of the Punisher's distinctive and extreme form of justice discourse. Punishment after all is a political and social construct. Violence does not imply or claim legitimacy. Punishment does. To talk about punishment is to ask who deserves to be punished who decides who deserves to be punished and what form the punishment should take. All costumed heroes have their political moments; the Punisher is political.
Frank Castle inhabits the most politically engaged corner of the entire Marvel Universe. His adventures should attract our interest for precisely this reason.
Popular Music in Leeds
This first academic collection dedicated to popular music in Leeds - developed from the work of interdisciplinary scholars drawn from a major public museum exhibition “Sounds of Our City” and built upon contemporary research. Leeds has rich musical histories and heritage a long tradition of vibrant music venues nightclubs dance halls pubs and other sites of musical entertainment.
The city has spawned crooners folk singers punks post- punks Goths DJs popstars rappers and indie rockers yet – with a few exceptions - Leeds has not been studied for its scenes in ways that other UK cities have. In ways that the chapters explore Leeds’ popular music exemplifies and informs understandings of broader cultural and urban changes – both in Britain and across wider global contexts – of the social and historical significance of music as mass media; music and migration; music racialisation and social equity; industrial decline de-industrialisation neoliberalism and the rise of the 24-hour city. Charting moments of stark musical politicisation and de-politicisation while concomitantly tracing arguments about “heritagising” popular music within discussions about music’s “place” in museums and in the urban economy this book contributes to debates about why music matters has mattered and continues to matter in Leeds and beyond.
Contemporary Design Education in Australia
This book offers a range of approaches to teaching higher education design students to learn to design collaboratively and creatively through transdisciplinary multidisciplinary cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning experiences.
It highlights that the premise of traditional disciplinary silos does little to advance the competencies needed for contemporary design and non-linear career paths. It makes the point that higher education should respond to the impacts of a changing society including fluctuating market demands economic variations uncertainties and globalization.
Chapters highlight approaches that address this changing landscape to meet student industry and societal needs and reflect a range of design education contexts in which the authors have taught with a focus on experiences at the Queensland University of Technology Australia but also including collaborations and comparative discussions elsewhere in Australia and globally spanning Europe Asia the Middle East and the United States.
The book is positioned not as a definitive theoretical model for transdisciplinary design education but instead as a collective of chapters in which many forms of learning are explored through overarching themes of curriculum design and experiential and authentic learning and collaboration transforming professional identities and design cultures.
Architecture, Film, and the In-between
The long-established dialogue between architecture and film offers an interdisciplinary platform for a critical examination of spaces of in-between.
Apart from architecture informing scenography and cities serving as backdrops to the moving image films have actively participated in shaping the public opinion about architecture and its allied disciplines. While architecture and design may not necessarily be central themes in a film their spatial contextualization of the narrative informs cinematic productions. Screen Space and the In-Between looks at both the filmic imagination/representation of architectural in-betweenness as well as the in-between spaces within the inherent architectural structure of filmic expression.
On the one hand cinematic production serves as a site to project utopian fantasies of the built environment and on the other hand the processes tools and methods involved in both architecture and film function as mediators between abstract ideation and its materialized manifestation.
The book interrogates the filmic creation of spatial imaginaries through the anthropological lens especially as the disciplines in the built environment react to the liminal spaces of the cinematic. It adopts cinematic experiences of the built environment as a vantage point to reframe ongoing theoretical debates about liminal spaces.
Foreword by Mark Foster Gage
Contributors: Giuliana Bruno Beatriz Colomina James F. Kerestes Graham Harman Ferda Kolatan Juhani Pallasmaa Eva Perez De Vega Mehmet Sahinler Patrik Schumacher Maria Sieira Alican Taylan Vahid Vahdat Jason Vigneri-Beane Jon Yoder Michael Young
Hip-Hop Archives
This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects including methods of accumulation curation preservation and digitization and critically analyzes institutional power community engagement urban economics public access and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values.
The collection of essays are divided into four sections; Doing the Knowledge Challenging Archival Forms Beyond the Nation and Institutional Alignments: Interviews and Reflections. The book covers a range of official unofficial DIY and community archives and collections and features chapters by scholar practitioners educators and curators.
A wide swath of hip-hop culture is featured in the book including a focus on dance graffiti clothing and battle rap. The range of authors and their topics span countries in Asia Europe the Caribbean and North America.
Spectacle, Entertainment, and Recreation in Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republican Cities
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.
A Holocaust Cabaret
Two scripts were created in 2017 from the same source materials: preserved song lyrics from a performance created in 1943 in the Terezin Ghetto called Prince Bettliegend (the Bedridden Prince) the popular 1930s jazz melodies to which those lyrics were set and fragments of testimony by survivors who performed in or witnessed that production.
The development processes took place under the auspices of the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive. PtJA co-investigator Lisa Peschel has spent the past two decades researching theatrical performance in Terezin and the project’s planned performance festivals in Australia and South African in the summer of 2017 afforded a unique opportunity to allow Prince Bettliegend to speak to our present. Peschel synthesized the existing materials into a rough plot outline then collaborated with local production teams at the University of Sydney (produced by Joseph Toltz directed by Ian Maxwell) and Stellenbosch University (directed by Amelda Brand) to reconstruct/recreate/re-imagine the play.
Both teams were extraordinarily sensitive to questions of trauma and pleasure in the original performance and those questions manifested themselves in different underlying themes that emerged with each production. During the first month-long development process at the University of Sydney (July 2017) Peschel Maxwell and Toltz worked together to refine the plot outline Toltz and musical director Kevin Hunt explored the 1930s music with the entire production team then the actors recruited from Sydney’s alternative theatre scene developed the performance through improvisation. Due to fortuitous accidents of casting a theme soon emerged that dovetailed with the historical reality of the ghetto: the desire of the older prisoners to protect the youth.
While the Australian production was still in development the South African team at Stellenbosch University led by Amelda Brand began creating their own version. Their performance was based on the same plot outline and to some extent the same text developed by the Sydney performers but their production diverged radically due to their interest in addressing issues of more immediate interest to the multi-racial student case: race and power. Their musical approach also diverged: music director Leonore Bredekamp created a hybrid of 1930s jazz and klezmer music.
Part I of the book is composed of a series of essays about the original material and about each production. The essays written by Peschel and key collaborators on each development team explore the Terezin production and both reconstructions. Part II comprises the scripts. Although the texts themselves are similar detailed stage directions and illustrations make clear how each manifested its own themes.
Part of Intellect's Playtext series.
Music Making and Civic Imagination
In a world facing multiple existential crises music might be seen as little more than a distraction. However in this synthesis of ideas developed over a decade a timely re-appraisal of the potential of musicing for human flourishing is presented emphasising its role in the history of human evolution alongside its potential as a resource for sustainable development.
A holistic philosophy of music is outlined which recognises the complex web of meaning which spreads across complementary musical dimensions of performance and participation whilst emphasising the ‘paramusical’ benefits which arise from both. Highlighting the notion that the social bonds which arise from musicing share much of the neurobiological underpinnings of attachment and love musicing is presented as a resource with the potential for facilitating ethical human connection.
The humanistic values which are thereby materialised during musicing – love reciprocity and justice – form the experiential grounds for inhabiting alternative social realities. The book addresses how such a holistic philosophy of music might be implemented in practice drawing on the author’s professional praxis as a performer educator community musician composer and researcher in particular their experience of musician education at Sage Gateshead Royal College of Music and Trinity-Laban Conservatoire in the UK.
Community Arts Education
This edited collection offers global perspectives on the transverse boundary-blurring possibilities of community arts education.
Invoking ‘transversality’ as an overarching theoretical framework and a methodological structure 55 contributors – community professionals scholars artists educators and activists from sixteen countries – offer studies and practical cases exploring the complexities of community arts education at all levels.
Such complexities include challenges created by globalizing phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic; ongoing efforts to achieve justice for Indigenous peoples; continuing movement of immigrants and refugees; growing recognition of issues related to equity diversity and inclusion in the workplace; and the increasing impact of grassroot movements and organizations.
Chapters are grouped into four thematic clusters – Connections Practices Spaces and Relations – that map these and other intersecting assemblages of transversality. Thinking transversally about community art education not only shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life but redefines art education as a distinctive practice emerging from the complex relationships that form community.
Interpreting and Experiencing Disney
Ever since the premiere for the first Mickey Mouse cartoon in 1928 Disney has played a central role in American popular culture which has progressively expanded to include a global market. The company positioned itself to be a central role in family entertainment and many of its offerings – from films to consumable products – have deeply embedded themselves into not only the imaginations of children and adults but also into the threads of one’s life experience. It is difficult to go through life without encountering one Disney product. Because of this fans of Disney build connections with their favourite characters and franchises some of which are fuelled further by Disney’s own marketing practices.
Similarly Disney responds to the cultural values of the era through its films and other media offerings. In this volume scholars from varying backgrounds take a close look at facets of the Disney canon as more than agents of entertainment or consumption and into underlying messages at the very heart of the Disney phenomenon: the cultural response that drives the corporation’s massive production and marketing machine. The relationship between Disney and its fans is one of loyalty and love shaping cultural behaviours and values through the brand and its products. Disney responds in kind with a synergistic approach that makes it possible to experience Disney in any format at any given time.
Primary readership will be academics researchers educators scholars and students working in the fields of media and cultural studies especially those interested in marketing and branding and in the Disney Company in general. The accessible writing style and the range of topics covered make it suitable for postgraduate students and academics working in these fields as well as third-year undergraduate students.
The book will also appeal to academics working in the related fields of tourism studies film and television studies and given the focus of some of the chapters in gender studies.
Although academic in focus the accessible writing style does mean that it may also have appeal to the non-academic reader and fans of Disney.
The Architect's Dream
Sean Pickersgill demonstrates that the goal of creating meaningful architecture can take a variety of critical and philosophical paths. The importance of architecture as an expression of broad complex social drivers is complemented by the equally popular idea that architecture as an intellectual pursuit retains its own autonomy as a self-referential culture. This book uniquely places the emphasis for innovation in architecture within the domain of critical thinking generally and a specific understanding of the semantics of built form.
The book draws on a broad range of subject areas from film to philosophy to anthropology to mathematics and economics to show that the path to meaningful creative practice is always based in an understanding of the principal drivers for change and meaning in society.
It is not a simple recipe book or workshop manual for others to reproduce. It requires the engaged reader to employ their own creative abilities to find what potential lies in each of the propositions and it will encourage the scholastic architect to continue to mine the rich veins of intellectual culture to demonstrate the latent purposiveness inherent in all meaningful architecture.
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.
Media Pluralism and Online News
The book arises from an international research project that explores the future of media pluralism policies for online news. It investigates the latest European policies and techniques for regulatory intervention and examines the consequences of innovative news practices asking ‘How will automation of news affect public opinion in the age of social media platforms and what are the consequences?’
In Media Pluralism and Online News the authors make the argument that there is an urgent need for revitalised thinking for a media policy agenda to deal with the trends to platform power and concentrated media power which is an ongoing global risk to public interest journalism.
In the transition to a media landscape increasingly dominated by broadband internet distribution and the dominance of US-centric new media behemoths Google Facebook Apple Amazon and Netflix the book investigates measures that can be taken to reduce this ongoing march of concentration and the attenuation of media voices.
Securing the public interest in a vibrant and sustainable news media sector will require that merger decisions assess whether there is a ‘reduction in diversity’ -- calling for a new public interest test and a more expansive policy focus than in the past. This would include consideration of the sustainability of local businesses; the encouragement of original and local news content; quality of content in terms of the promotion of news standards; and new modes of delivery and consumption including the ‘automated curation’ of news content by digital platforms.
Media Pluralism and Online News
The book arises from an international research project that explores the future of media pluralism policies for online news. It investigates the latest European policies and techniques for regulatory intervention and examines the consequences of innovative news practices asking ‘How will automation of news affect public opinion in the age of social media platforms and what are the consequences?’
In Media Pluralism and Online News the authors make the argument that there is an urgent need for revitalised thinking for a media policy agenda to deal with the trends to platform power and concentrated media power which is an ongoing global risk to public interest journalism.
In the transition to a media landscape increasingly dominated by broadband internet distribution and the dominance of US-centric new media behemoths Google Facebook Apple Amazon and Netflix the book investigates measures that can be taken to reduce this ongoing march of concentration and the attenuation of media voices.
Securing the public interest in a vibrant and sustainable news media sector will require that merger decisions assess whether there is a ‘reduction in diversity’ -- calling for a new public interest test and a more expansive policy focus than in the past. This would include consideration of the sustainability of local businesses; the encouragement of original and local news content; quality of content in terms of the promotion of news standards; and new modes of delivery and consumption including the ‘automated curation’ of news content by digital platforms.
Studio Seeing
Opens with several first-person anecdotes about the author’s life as a practicing artist and a discussion of the intellectual lineage of his vision-based pedagogy. Many more anecdotes from the author’s teaching appear in most chapters.
The author discusses perception as it benefits the artist in the studio. Perceptual laws govern both our experience of seeing and the artist’s process of creating. The book presents a proven process developed by the author over many decades of teaching and studio practice that the artist can apply to their own painting/drawing and/or teaching. The painting and drawing principles in the book are essential and yet not generally taught or understood. They will benefit anyone learning how to draw/paint or advance their practice. The book will also help practitioners to make rapid progress and to avoid clichéd overused solutions. It also offers insights and discussions of interest to art lovers and “Sunday painters.” It is for everyone who enjoys viewing and thinking about art.
Integrated into the text are more than one hundred images—works of art by well-known historical and contemporary artists and students photographs and diagrams—to reinforce the concepts presented. A recap section ends each chapter followed by an exercise or group of related exercises to encourage and guide the practitioner in immediate application of the concepts.
Studio Seeing
Opens with several first-person anecdotes about the author’s life as a practicing artist and a discussion of the intellectual lineage of his vision-based pedagogy. Many more anecdotes from the author’s teaching appear in most chapters.
The author discusses perception as it benefits the artist in the studio. Perceptual laws govern both our experience of seeing and the artist’s process of creating. The book presents a proven process developed by the author over many decades of teaching and studio practice that the artist can apply to their own painting/drawing and/or teaching. The painting and drawing principles in the book are essential and yet not generally taught or understood. They will benefit anyone learning how to draw/paint or advance their practice. The book will also help practitioners to make rapid progress and to avoid clichéd overused solutions. It also offers insights and discussions of interest to art lovers and “Sunday painters.” It is for everyone who enjoys viewing and thinking about art.
Integrated into the text are more than one hundred images—works of art by well-known historical and contemporary artists and students photographs and diagrams—to reinforce the concepts presented. A recap section ends each chapter followed by an exercise or group of related exercises to encourage and guide the practitioner in immediate application of the concepts.