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Beyond Text
This original new book represents a variety of art forms across different professional contexts. Its focus is on the ways that educational practitioners and leaders from a range of cultures disciplines professions and organizations practice arts-based research and it explores how these can enable innovative means of learning and enhance professional and organizational development.
This vibrant project allowed for long term systematic conversations between a large and unusually diverse group of twenty-nine people from eight organisations in six countries. It was unusually diverse in many senses: for some the word ‘data’ meant little for others it was central to their daily work; for some artistic practice was core while for others the arts were a means to an end; while some were social entrepreneurs running their own companies others were researching in universities and a number were doing both; some were working within the STEM disciplines of business management engineering science technology sustainability and the built environment others were in the social sciences of social and health care education and youth work while others were engaged in rapid or long term social and cultural action as a means of resisting state violence and military occupation; some worked in one of the safest countries on the planet others in one of the most tear-gassed refugee camps in the world.
Within these professional groups there were also ranges of experience for example senior researchers early career researchers PhD students seasoned professional artists and newcomers to arts forms. Whilst the main communication of this group was English six other major languages were spoken Estonian Finish Catalan Spanish Arabic and key stakeholders bought Swedish and Japanese into the space. This meant that while the conversations in and about arts-based practice were transnational interdisciplinary and systematic they had all the messy troubled-ness that the intercultural on all of the above levels brings with it.
This unique and exciting collection discusses how creative arts practices can have a significant impact on research across a range of international contexts drawing on their own field of research and educational experience. For instance drama music dance and visual arts can be used to understand how learners internalise concepts reflect on how decisions are made in the midst of action in leadership education or investigate the use of the intuitive alongside the rational and analytical in their educational experience. Non-textual arts-based forms of research can also provide modes of investigation into pedagogical and professional practices when applied to fields that normally lie outside of the arts.
Its greatest strengths are its focus on arts-based research as a way of learning in a variety of contexts and often in collaboration. Its consistent theoretical artistic and professional engagements make it a very readable and engaging read.
The representation of a variety of art forms across different professional contexts means that this book will have appeal to several readerships in higher education including the following groups.
Academics and practitioners using arts-based methods in organisation and business settings. Researchers in the arts and researchers generically in the social sciences humanities and arts. University students of the arts education and professional studies especially those interested in the wider international and intercultural diversity of research methodologies.
Those working in international research teams using any form of qualitative research will also find this collection very interesting. It also has potential interest for groups outside higher education with an interest in arts-based research – for example community groups looking to explore collaborative projects.
Phenomenology for Actors
This book gives new insight into acting and theatre-making through phenomenology (the study of how the world shows itself to conscious experience). It examines Being-in-the-world in everyday life with exercises for workshops and rehearsal. Each chapter explores themes to guide the creative process through objects bodies spaces being with others time history freedom and authenticity. Key examples in the work are drawn from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Practical tasks in each section explore how the theatrical event can offer unique insight into Being and existence. In this way the book makes a bold leap to understand acting as an embodied form of philosophy and to explain how phenomenology can be a rich source of inspiration for actors directors designers and the creative process of theatre-making.
This original new book will provide new insight into the practice and theory of acting stimulate new approaches to rehearsal and advance the notion of theatre making a genuine contribution to philosophical discourse.
The fundamental task of the actor is to be on stage with purposeful action in the given circumstances. But this simple act of ‘Being’ is not easy. Phenomenology can provide valuable insight into the challenge. For some time scholars have looked to phenomenology to describe and analyse the theatrical event. But more than simply drawing attention to embodiment and the subjective experience of the world a philosophical perspective can also shed light on broader existential issues of being.
No specialist knowledge of philosophy is required for the reader to find this text engaging and it will be relevant for second-year students and above at tertiary level.
For postgraduates and researchers the book will provide a valuable touchstone for phenomenology and performance as research. The book will appeal to theatre and performance studies and some applied philosophy courses. The material is also relevant to studies in literary and critical theory cultural studies and comparative literature.
The work is relevant to The International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT) (Performance and Consciousness) Performance Studies International (psi) and the Performance Philosophy Research Network — an influential and growing research field.
Primary markets for this book will be students (both at university and conservatoires) and academics in theatre studies as well as practitioners and actors in training. The text will be useful to students in units or modules relating to acting theory and theatre-making processes and which combine critical theory with practical performance. It will also be useful for practitioners of theatre looking to expand or inflect their own methods of approaching performance.
Radioactive Documentary
How have nuclear issues been covered in documentary since the end of the Cold War? This original new book explores how the sometimes elusive sometimes dramatic effects of uranium products on the landscape on architecture and on social organisation continue to show up on-screen maintaining a record of moving images that goes back to the early twentieth century.
It is the first book to analyse independent documentary films about nuclear energy - it suggests an approach to documentary films as agents of change.
Each chapter of this book focuses on one of ten different documentary films made in Europe and North America since 1989. Each of these films works the material and the ideological heritage of the nuclear power industry into visions of the future. Dealing with the legacy of how ignorance and neglect led to accidents and failures the films offer different ways of understanding and moving on from the past. The documentary form itself can be understood as a collective means for the discovery of creative solutions and the communication of new narratives. In the case of these films the concepts of radioactivity and deep time in particular are used to bring together narrative and formal aesthetics in the process of reimagining the relationships between people and their environments.
Focusing on the representation of radioactive spaces in documentary and experimental art films the study shows how moving images do more than communicate the risks and opportunities and the tumultuous history associated with atomic energy. They embody the effects of Cold War technologies as they persist into the present acting as a reminder that the story is not over yet.
Primary readership will be academics and students working in environmental communication and in environmental humanities more broadly. For students of independent film or documentary it will also provide a clear picture of contemporary themes and creative practice.
Invisible Presence
This book looks at the representation of female characters in French comics from their first appearance in 1905. Organised into three sections the book looks at the representation of women as main characters created by men as secondary characters created by men and as characters created by women.
It focuses on female characters both primary and secondary in the francophone comic or bande dessinée as well as the work of female bande dessinée creators more generally. Until now these characters and creators have received relatively little scholarly attention; this new book is set to change this status quo.
Using feminist scholarship especially from well-known film and literary theorists the book asks what it means to draw women from within a phallocentric male-dominated paradigm as well as how the particular medium of bande dessinée its form as well as its history has shaped dominant representations of women.
This is the first book to study the representation of women in the French-language drawn strip. There are no other works with this specific focus either on women in Franco-Belgian comics or on the drawn representation of women by men.
This is a very useful addition to both general discussions of French-language comics and to discussions of women’s comics which are focused on comics by women only.
As it is written in English and due to the popularity of comic art in Britain and the United States this book will primarily appeal to an Anglo-American market. However the cultural and gender studies approach this text employs (theoretical frameworks still not widely seen in non-Anglophone studies of the bande dessinée) will ensure that the text is also of interest to a Franco-Belgian audience.
With a focus on an art-form which also inspires a lot of public (non-academic) enthusiasm it will also appeal to fans of the bande dessinée (or wider comic art medium) who are interested in the representation of women in comic art and to comics scholars on a broad scale.
Actional Poetics – ASH SHE HE
A retrospective monograph of Alistair MacLennan’s performance art practice its influence on the Belfast art scene and its relationships with wider art histories. This new book is the most comprehensive and complete legacy monograph about Alastair MacLennan’s extensive performance practice
Alastair MacLennan is emeritus professor of fine art School of Art and Design Ulster University in Belfast. He is one of Britain’s major practitioners in live art and travels extensively in Eastern and Western Europe also America and Canada presenting ‘Actuations’ (his term for performance/installations). MacLennan is a founding member of Belfast's Art and Research Exchange of Belfast's Bbeyond performance collective and is a member of the performance art entity Black Market International. He has represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale (1997) and is an honorary associate of the National Review of Live Art Glasgow Scotland.
There is a wide variety of approach in the essays ranging from descriptive to interpretive. Some set the work in historical context and others provide pertinent biography. This variety is appropriate – and perhaps even necessary – in looking at the work of a living artist whose work is particularly complex. The selection of essays presents a complex body of work in an understandable way with each writer allowed to address the art in their own terms. Placing the work in historical context is important but presenting MacLennan as an influential teacher is also important.
Includes a significant contribution from Adrian Heathfield (professor of performance and visual culture at Roehampton UK) who has written an extended essay on MacLennan’s oeuvre focusing on its use of materials and its creation of sculptural environments. Discussing the artist’s deployment of slow-time action and contemplative space Heathfield sees MacLennan’s work as activating sustained contact with the elemental and locates MacLennan’s work as a significant intervention in performance art history globally and discusses the politics of its engagement with local history violence social conflict and memory.
The primary readership will be academics researchers and scholars working in performance art and contemporary art in general. Also valuable to students in performance art visual arts and related practices.
Of relevance to academics and artists in the interrelated fields of performance art art and philosophy critical theory conflict studies and Zen philosophy.
Devising Theatre and Performance
Devising Theatre and Performance is a hands-on guide for artists students and teachers of performance at any stage of their practice. It offers a wide range of creative prompts and pathways enriched with critical thinking tools and questions a hybrid approach Hill and Paris call ‘Curious Methods’.
This is a welcome addition to the field created and curated by two experienced artists who have operated at the international interface of academia and professional practice for over three decades.
The collection is packed with fun creative thoughtful exercises distilled from over twenty years of running interdisciplinary artist workshops and teaching both devising and performance making. As well providing numerous exercises and suggestions for devising composing and editing original works this book offers tools for giving and receiving feedback critical reflection and framing artistic work within academic research contexts.
Readers can choose to dip in and out to follow the book as a course or to work section by section focusing on organizing principles such as working from the body working with site working with objects or performance activism. The book includes a detailed production workbook and a practice-based research workbook you can tailor to your own projects. The 'Curious Methods' approach encourages users to take the time and space their practice deserves while offering tools nourishment and encouragement and inviting them to take risks beyond their comfort zones. The exercises are carefully described so that they can easily be tested out by readers and are well contextualized in relation to vivid examples from contemporary performance practice and relevant political contexts. This compelling approach goes beyond many other books on theatre devising which merely provide performance recipes; they do so by repeatedly highlighting the vital cultural relevance and potential personal impact of the experiments that they invite us to undertake.
The primary audience for this important new book will be academics instructors and students in courses on devised theatre improvisation performance art experimental performance and practice-based research. It will be essential for classroom use for students of theatre and performance and live art – undergraduate postgraduate and Ph.D. teachers and all those needing strategies for getting started.
It will also appeal to readers from the broader arts humanities and social sciences who are seeking resources for integrating creative methods into their research.
Visual Research Methods in Architecture
This book offers a distinctive approach to the use of visual methodologies for qualitative architectural research. It presents a diverse selection of ways for the architect or architectural researcher to use their gaze as part of their research practice for the purpose of visual literacy. Its contributors explore and use ‘critical visualizations’ which employ observation and sociocultural critique through visual creations – texts drawings diagrams paintings visual texts photography film and their hybrid forms – in order to research architecture landscape design and interior architecture. The visual methods intersect with those used in ethnography anthropology visual culture and media studies. In presenting a range of interdisciplinary approaches Visual Methodologies in Architectural Research opens up territory for new forms of visual architectural scholarship.
Slow TV
Slow TV has become a familiar feature of broadcasting in Norway. It refers to a set of programmes produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) since 2009 starting out with a seven-hour broadcasting of the train ride between Bergen and Oslo.
The concept of slow TV and ‘minute-by-minute’ broadcasting was developed so that the event on television lasts as long as in real time. Several broadcasters outside Norway including BBC Four YLE SRF and Netflix have now taken up the concept of slow TV.
The first study of this genre this highly original book explores three different aspects of the phenomenon of slow TV: the perspective of the broadcaster the perspective of the producers and other actors involved in the production of the programme and that of the audience.
It goes beyond the question of genre and considers how slow TV fits into television scheduling and how the audience appeal can be understood within broader concepts such as media events media tourism reception and national identity. Public service broadcasters can be seen as having more opportunity to experiment and slow TV can be seen as a good example of public service programming. What attracts viewers to the programmes is that they invite a contemplative mode of watching: there is a chance to see something unexpected or to be introduced to interesting new things.
Illustrated throughout in full colour using stills from broadcast programmes.
This book will appeal primarily to an academic readership both researchers and students. Most readers are likely to be involved with media and communication studies cultural studies and film studies. It will also be of interest more generally to the humanities and social sciences fields as it touches on topics such as national and local identity popular culture Nordic lifestyle well-being tradition community and popular culture.
Columbo
This book presents an analysis of Lieutenant Columbo's investigative method of rhetorical inquiry as seen in the television police procedural Columbo (1968-2003). With a barrage of questions about minute details and feigned ignorance the iconic detective enacts a persona of ‘antipotency’ (counter authoritativeness) to affect the villains' underestimation of his attention to inconsistencies abductive reasoning and rhetorical efficacy. In a predominantly dialogue-based investigation Columbo exhausts his suspects by asking a battery of questions concerning all minor details of the case which evolves into an aggravating tedious provocation for the killer trying to maintain innocence. Based on the Ancient Greek ideal of Sophrosyne (temperance restraint) and the Socratic method of questioning to discover truths the Lieutenant models effective rhetorical inquiry with resistant responders: shy secretive anxious emotionally-disconnected angry arrogant jealous and in this case murderous conversants. While designed to be critical and theoretical this text strives to be accessible to interdisciplinary readers practical in application and amusing for Columbo buffs.
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.
Shiny Things
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.
The Performances of Sacred Places
This is the first book to explore the notion of sacred places from the perspective of performance studies and presents both practice-as-research accounts alongside theoretical analysis. It is multidisciplinary bringing together religious studies philosophy and anthropological approaches under the umbrella of performance studies. By focusing on practice and performance rather than theology it also expands the notion of sacred places to non-religious contexts.
This new collection offers a multi-layered and contemporary approach to the question of sacred sites their practices politics and ecologies. The overarching critical framework of inquiry is performance studies a multidisciplinary methodological perspective that stresses the importance of investigating the practices and actions through which things are conducted and processes activated. This is an innovative perspective that recognizes the value function and role that practices and their materialities have in the constitution of special places their developments in culture and the politics in place for the conservation of their sense of specialness.
The questions investigated are: what is a sacred place? Is a place inherently sacred or does it become sacred? Is it a paradigm a real location an imaginary place a projected condition a charged setting an enhanced perception? What kind of practices and processes allow the emergence of a sacred place in human perception? And what is its function in contemporary societies?
The book is divided into three sections that evidence the three approaches that are generally engaged with and through which sacred places are defined actualized and activated: Crossing Breathing and Resisting. There is a strong field of international contributors including practitioners and academics working in the United Kingdom the United States Poland and Australia.
Primary interest will be students academics and practitioners studying or working in theatre and performance studies; fine art; architecture; cultural and visual studies; geography; religious studies; and psychology.
Potential for classroom use and very strong potential for inclusion on reading lists as a secondary text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in fine art live art performance art performance and theatre studies.
Material Media-Making in the Digital Age
There is now no shortage of media for us to consume from streaming services and video-on-demand to social media and everything else besides. This has changed the way media scholars think about the production and reception of media. Missing from these conversations though is the maker: in particular the maker who has the power to produce media in their pocket.
How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one's disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging as well as thinking through time editing sound and the stream Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice.
The result is a personal journey through media theory history and technology furnished with practical exercises for teachers students professionals and enthusiasts: a unique combination of theory and practice written in a highly personal and personable style that is engaging and refreshing.
This book will enable readers to understand how a personal creative practice might unlock deeper thinking about media and its place in the world.
The primary readership will be among academics researchers and students in the creative arts as well as practitioners of creative arts including sound designers cinematographers and social media content producers.
Designed for classroom use this will be of particular importance for undergraduate students of film production and may also be of interest to students at MA level particularly on the growing number of courses that specifically offer a blend of theory and practice. The highly accessible writing style may also mean that it can be taken up for high school courses on film and production.
It will also be of interest to academics delivering these courses and to researchers and scholars of new media and digital cinema.
Arnold Wesker
This new collection will add significantly to the body of scholarship on this important dramatist. This is the first study of the whole body of Wesker’s work and will create new interest in this partly forgotten key figure in post-war British theatre.
A new study of Wesker’s work is overdue. The editors are recognized scholars in the field with a track record of publication on British theatre. An impressive list of contributors comprises important scholars of post-war theatre – including John Bull and Chris Megson – alongside practitioners such as Edward Bond and Pamela Howard who bring professional insights to bear.
Arnold Wesker was hailed in the press as ‘one of the great overlooked’ of British drama when he died in April 2016. Despite his pivotal engagement with the cultural politics of 1960s Britain and his international career only a fraction of Wesker’s dramatic output tends to be studied. He is still remembered and discussed as the author of The Trilogy three plays staged between 1958–60 that fail to reflect the daring aesthetics of his later work thereby perpetuating an incorrect image of a naturalist playwright.
This important new book aims to remedy the recent critical neglect of the dramatist building on existing scholarship and introducing new insights and perspectives. It examines the whole body of Wesker’s work for the first time including some of his non-dramatic work and considers it from a variety of perspectives. These include Wesker’s reception in Europe his Jewishness and his attitude to politics and to community. Significant use is made of material from the Arnold Wesker archive held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin USA.
It includes chapters on Wesker’s representation of and attitude towards women his relationship with his Jewish origins and identity and his role in establishing Centre 42 following his imprisonment for participation in the Aldermaston March in 1959. Centre 42 was initially a touring festival aimed at devolving art and culture from London to the other working class towns of Britain and arose from Resolution 42 of the 1960 Trades Union Congress which concerned the importance of arts in the community.
It will be of most interest to academics and scholars of post-war British theatre and to those teaching theatre and drama. It is accessible for a student readership at all undergraduate levels as well as postgraduates. It has potential for textbook and reading list use.
Wesker’s significance in British theatre history of the 1950s and 1960s means that the book may find readers amongst the informed general public.
The Lure of the Social
This new and original book is a creative practice ethnography which navigates a spectrum where at one end the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research and at the other she tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work such as art schools and conferences.
Artists increasingly find themselves working in participatory settings where skills in social engagement are as essential as their creative skills. The author was involved in the field of social practices from its early stages and stayed engaged with the primary movers in the field for nearly two decades as a witness participant and critical observer. Her writing evokes the people and places she discusses and her writing style is personal and accessible.
Over the course of the book readers are introduced to artists and their work and to the key debates and issues facing this fast-growing and emergent field. The author navigates the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice through description and analysis and importantly gives voice to the artists who are working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.
The problems addressed by social practices as well as their contradictions very much reflect our troubled political global moment. This book is a significant contribution to the field – few people have followed the development of social practices for as long as Coombs and her dual perspective as an art critic and anthropologist make her ideally placed to describe and evaluate the institutions and practices. While there are many books already in this growing field the experimental and intensely personal nature of this book sets it apart. It could be a useful teaching tool to generate debate around the tensions and paradoxes inherent in the field of social practices and politically engaged art. Students will appreciate the author’s attempt to convey what it was really like to be there at certain key events and insights gained from direct conversations with the artists curators and writers shaping the field.
Relevant to academics working in and students studying art and social practice community arts programmes contemporary anthropology cultural historians and those with an interest in the sociology of art protest or activism.
Will appeal to artists writers and students interested in the history of how social practices developed as a field through its practitioners discourse and lived experience.
Fat Activism (Second Edition)
In this new edition of her accessible autoethnography of fat feminist activism in the West Charlotte Cooper revisits and discusses her activism in the context of recent shifts in the movement. The new preface explores the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on fat people and fat activism and how Black Lives Matter is inspiring new forms of activism. Cooper issues a call to action in Fat Studies and offers alternatives to current public health approaches to Diabetes.
What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question Charlotte Cooper presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts. She details fat activist methods analyses existing literature in the field challenges long-held assumptions that uphold systemic fatphobia and makes clear how crucial feminism queer theory and anti-racism are to the lifeblood of the movement. She also considers fat activism’s proxy concerns including body image body positivity the obesity epidemic and fat stigma.
Combining rigorous scholarship with personal accessible writing Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is a rare insider’s view of fat people speaking about their lives and politics on their own terms. This is the book you have been waiting for.
Dancing to Transform
Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinema and Television
The Naples-born director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino has to date written and directed nine films winning an Oscar a Bafta and a Golden Globe for The Great Beauty in 2013. In 2016 he created and directed his first TV series The Young Pope which starred Jude Law. John Malkovich joined the cast in 2020 for the follow-up series. He has established himself as a world-leading auteur with a list of critically acclaimed and award-winning films.
This is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature on Sorrentino and is the first English language collection dedicated to this prolific director who has emerged as one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first-century European film.
International contributors from the UK Italy France The Netherlands Australia Israel Canada and the United States Italy Israel France UK Australia Canada offer original interpretations of Sorrentino’s work. They examine his recurrent grand themes of memory nostalgia ageing love thirst for fulfilment search for the self identity crisis human estrangement marginality irony and power. In so doing they offer new perspectives and unique cues for discussion challenging established assumptions and interpretations. Important and current themes such as eco-cinema and post-secularism are addressed as well as the links between Sorrentino’s highly visual cinema and artistic practice such as painting and architecture.
While there are several books on Sorrentino available in Italian none
of these provide an authoritative account of his work; and language has restricted the readership. This is the first English-language collection focussed on Sorrentino arguably the most successful and significant contemporary Italian filmmaker.
The majority of the chapters included in this new book are original and it also includes a Foreword by Giancarlo Lombardi Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at CUNY and an interview with renowned costume designer Carlo Poggioli who has worked with Sorrentino on many productions.
Some of the chapters were previously published in a special issue of the journal JICMS – The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies in 2019. The new collection makes a significant coherent contribution to the field.
Primary readership will be academics researchers and scholars of Italian film and media studies. Also post-graduate students and upper level under-graduates.
Potential to be used as textbook or as supplementary reading for undergraduate and graduate courses
Given the subject there is a possibility for some crossover appeal to a broader readership but this is primarily a scholarly text.
The Poetics of Poetry Film
Set to generate and influence discussions in the field for years to come this is an encyclopaedic work on the ever-evolving genre of poetry film. It will set the benchmark for all subsequent works on the subject being the first book of its kind.
Poetry films are a genre of short film usually combining the three main elements: the poem as verbal message; the moving film image and diegetic sounds; and additional non-diegetic sounds or music which create a soundscape. This book examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film film poetry and video poetry particularly in relation to lyric voice and time.
Provides an introduction to the emergence and history of poetry film in a global context defining and debating terms both philosophically and materially. Examines the formal characteristics of the poetic in poetry film particularly in relation to lyric voice and time. Includes interviews analysis and a rigorous and thorough investigation of the poetry film from its origins to the present. This is a very important groundbreaking work on film poetry. The ideas discussed here are of great importance and the diversity and breadth of the volume is especially impressive and very useful. This book brings together in one place crucial ideas and information for practitioners students and academics and is clearly and accessibly written.
Including over 40 contributors and showcasing the work of an international array of practitioners this will be an industry bible for anyone interested in poetry digital media filmmaking art and creative writing as well as poetry filmmakers. It explores working practices processes of collaboration and the mechanisms which make these possible. It also reveals the network of festivals disseminating and theorizing poetry film and presents a compelling bibliography.
This is the most incisive and complete analysis of filmic poetry to date. It is poised to become a major text in the field.
Essential reading for academics teaching poetry filmmaking moving image film media and media poetry writing and art. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in those fields. Great potential for textbook adoption.
Also relevant to poets filmmakers visual artists graphic artists and theorists filmmakers screenwriters art historians philosophers cultural commentators arts journalists.
The Politics of Migration and Mobility in the Art World
While Eastern European migration is predominantly seen as one-way permanent for economic reasons and as going bilaterally from East to West Europe this book investigates alternative patterns of migration and mobility across Europe.
This original new book explores how visual artists take part in regular cross-border mobilities onward migrations and transnational communications across Europe for work and the effects of this on their feelings of home and belonging. It assesses how far there is a culture of mobility amongst visual artists from the Baltic States of Lithuania Latvia and Estonia for whom a combination of onward migration and regular cross-border mobilities is a necessity for career progression. This is due to the ‘glass ceiling’ in the Baltic States with regard to a lack of local art markets few dealers buying art and governments not providing enough funding.
How then do artists from the Baltic States get onto the global art market in the face of such barriers? This is a particularly important question as these artists come from a region where migration mobilities and cross-cultural exchanges were not freely available during the Soviet Union. This transdisciplinary investigation into visual artists’ working practices ways of moving and placing dwellings addresses this issue.
Mobile working practices have an impact on artists’ feelings of home and belonging which can be seen in their artworks that compare different cultures. This is a result of their particular combination of onward migration and regular mobilities the multiple flows in and out of the home cities and the workings of the global art market within which these artists are operating. Nevertheless these movements are determined by the forces of the global art world whereby a particular politics of migration and mobility is experienced by artists from the Baltic States wanting to ‘make it’ in the global art world.
With its focus on Baltic artists and their mobilities the scope and space explored is the whole of Europe and the mobilities explored in this text are crucially enabled by the freedom of movement in the European Union.
The book is multidisciplinary and at the intersection of art geographic mobility and creative practice. It combines visual cultures and social sciences in order to answer questions more thoroughly as well as to contextualise an analysis of artworks in a conversation with the artists themselves.
This topic is current with the situation of the ‘refugee crisis’ and Brexit that has created a culture of anti-immigration and resurgence in anti-Eastern European sentiment in government mainstream media and society.
The book discusses the implications of these complex itineraries on the conventional sociological notions of home mobility and diaspora. The author argues that artists form a ‘diaspora of practice’ rather than of ethnicity their homes are multiple as are the directions of their settlement.
Primary appeal will be to artists and art professionals; scholars working and researching on mobilities and migration issues; those working on the concepts of belonging and home; sociologists; anthropologists; those in the fields of cultural studies and European Union studies.