Browse Books

Dedicated to the stories of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles, this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art, art practices, activism, reception, and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration, flight, and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts - the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

These entanglements take centre stage when migration shapes forms and aesthetics (and vice versa), when actors employ image politics and visualisation strategies in and about migration at different times and places, or when materialities, sites, and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes.

Giving space to these stories of art and migration and its power of pluriverse knowledge production, the book takes an art and cultural studies perspective and questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration and elaborates on new or different theory formation. Bringing together its case studies and theoretical approaches, the argumentation unfolds over the five sections of the book Visibilities | Invisibilities, Sites | Spaces, Materiality | Materialisation, Racism | Resistance and Practices | Performativity.

A timely examination of the use of emerging technologies in the arts in recent decades, from the first wave of Virtual Reality through to the current use of Mixed, Augmented and Extended Realities. It highlights the necessity of understanding technological experiences through the assumption that all experience is embodied. An explosion of digital culture and experience has most certainly given artists and creative practitioners new ways of exploring a hybridisation of creative practices with access to technological tools only previously dreamt of. Further, there are a number of threads around digital embodiment and its centrality to the digital experience.



The book is divided into 3: Section 1 explores the whole notion of embodied experience through a study of space and virtuality, imagination, and technology. Section 2 lays the ground for a more explicit understanding of the role the body has in our engagement with the digital technologies focussing on three distinct bodies: the  gravitational body, the virtual body, and finally the hybrid body. Section 3 is split into three chronological chapters in terms of technological developments, that of VR, Virtual Worlds, and Augmented, Mixed, and Extended Realities.

While individual aspects and themes covered here can be found in some recent books, there is little that places digital embodiment within the arts in the way this book does. A unique synthesis.

Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images and scripts which emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Collectively, the contributors challenge, celebrate and share the normative, the queer, the transgressive, the joy and the pain of performing maternity. The book asks key questions about the construction of maternal identities and mythologies in the contemporary world, the ways these impact on individuals in different social, economic and sexual identities, and the ways in which - as mothers, writers, artists, parents and grandparents -we can challenge and address those identities.

The depiction of New York City in song across a variety of different genres, focusing on jazz genres, as well as the work of both New York born artists like Billy Joel or Lin-Manuel Miranda and artists living most of their life in New York City like Shinehead or Debbie Harry, that are intimately connected with the city.



The book analyzes songs written about New York City, and engage with the depiction of the city within them, but mainly use it as a way to deal with several musical genres that the city has been home to, and instrumental in developing. These include the musical theatre scene on Broadway and beyond, but also early 20th century sheet music, hip hop, disco, punk, dancehall, jazz, swing, rock or pop music. The collection includes essays from authors with a cultural studies, media studies, cultural history or musicology background, making possible a far-ranging treatment of the interconnection of the city space and its musical history.

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.

This is the second book in the Performance and Communities series.  An edited collection from academics and artists engages with both these notions of performance – that of identities in and through time and space - and of more formal instances of specific time-limited performances; textual, embodied, visual and communal.

Each chapter focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines and media – from community opera to online queer performance, from anti-racist class-room pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs, from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges, the performers, writers and creators represented here all engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problematic.

The personal perspective of each performer – directors, librettists, producers, writers, performers – is explicitly located in a community and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.

This collection considers how Canadian art educators are engaging with a new range of approaches to museum education, and why educators are responding to 21st century challenges in ways that are unique to Canada.



Organized into three sections, this collection reconceptualizes museums to consider accessibility, differences in lived experiences, and how practices create impactful change.



With the overarching concept of relationality between art museums and interdisciplinary perspectives, authors consider methodological, philosophical, experiential and aesthetic forms of inquiry in regional museum contexts from coast-to-coast-to-coast that bring forward innovative theoretical standpoints with practice-based projects in museums, articulating how museums are shifting, and why museums are evolving as sites that mediate different and multiple knowledges for the future. Informed by social justice perspectives, and as catalysts for public scholarship, each chapter is passionate in addressing the mobilization of equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) in relation to practices in the field.



By weaving the learning potential of interacting with artworks more fully within situated and localized social and cultural communities, the authors present a distinct socio-political discourse at the heart of teaching and learning. Rupturing preconceived ideas and sedimentary models, they suggest a discourse of living futures is already upon us in museums and in art education.

From the perspective of art educators, museum education is shifting to a new paradigm, which this collection showcases and marks as threshold moments of change underway internationally. The goal in drawing together international perspectives is to facilitate deeper thinking, making and doing practices central to museum engagement across global, local and glocal contexts.

Museums as cultural brokers facilitate public pedagogies, and the dispositions and practices offered in 33 chapters from 19 countries articulate how and why collections enact responsibility in public exchange,

leading cultural discourses of empowerment in new ways. Organized into five sections, a wide range of topics and arts-based modes of inquiry imagine new possibilities concerning theory-practice, sustainability of educational partnerships and communities of practice with, in and through artwork scholarship.

Chapters diverse in issues, art forms and museum orientations are well-situated within museum studies, enlarging discussions with trans-topographies (transdisciplinary, transnational, translocal and more) as critical directions for art educators.



Authors impart collective diversity through richly textured exposés, first-person accounts, essays and visual essays that enfold cultural activism, sustainable practices and experimental teaching and learning alongside transformative exhibitions, all while questioning – Who is a learner? What is a museum? Whose art is missing?

Proposes a methodology for incorporating concepts drawn from ancestor trance in Afrolatinx ritual for actors trained in Western methods. Danowski created four new works of theatrical performance, writing the play texts, and incorporating acting exercises from Afrolatinx rituals adapted for non–practitioners. Working toward a phenomenological understanding of what is happening when a performer incorporates a character, drawing on the ritual knowledge of trance possession in Lukumí and Palo Monte to examine how ontologies might speak to each other.

Constructing a methodology called kanga (from the Bantu for tying and untying), using three methods based on aspects of Afrolatinx ritual, and modified for performance contexts: spell, charm, and trance. This methodology enacts and complicates distinctions between performance and ritual, serving as a contribution to respectful and responsible intercultural performance practices.

The methodology is bricoleur, drawing from ethnography, psychoanalytic theory, and phenomenology. Kanga in practice leads to a state of consciousness that Danowski calls hauntological. This borrows from Derrida but is redefined to refer to the study of haunted states of consciousness, where reality is co–constituted by the living and the dead, where ancestral spirits are invoked to do the work once reserved for characters.

Comics have always embraced a diversity of formats, existing in complex relationships to other media, and been dynamic in their response to new technologies and means of distribution. This collection explores interactions between comics, other media and technologies, employing a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives.

By focusing on key critical concepts within multimodality (transmediality, adaptation, intertextuality) and addressing multiple platforms and media (digital, analogue, music, prose, linguistics, graphics), it expands and develops existing comics theory and also addresses multiple other media and disciplines.

Over the last decade Studies in Comics has been at the forefront of international research in comics. This volume showcases some of the best research to appear in the journal. In so doing it demonstrates the evolution of Comics Studies over the last decade and shows how this research field has engaged with various media and technologies in a continuously evolving artistic and production environment. The theme of multimodality is particularly apt since media and technologies have changed significantly during this period. The collection will thus give a view of the ways in which comics scholars have engaged with multimodality during a time when “modes” were continually changing.

This book is for artists, teachers, and those who prepare teachers. In the field of art and design education there are many theoretical strands that contribute to the practices of teaching and learning in the visual arts. The problem for artist teachers and those who prepare teaching artists is how to frame the diverse methodologies of art and art education in a way that affords divergent practices as well as deep understanding of issues and trends in the field. Teachers need a field guide that provides a contextual background of theory in order to make their own teaching practice relevant to contemporary art practices and important ideas within the field of education. The book, in its content and presentation of content is pedagogical; it provides a catalyst and prompt for meaningful and personal artistic inquiry and exploration.



The book describes connections between teaching and artistic practices including the pedagogical turn in contemporary art. As a book for artists and designers, it is graphically compelling and visually inspiring. It is designed to be engaging for the practitioner and theoretically robust. A problem with many current texts is that they are written by academics who are often a step removed from the issues of classroom instruction and tend use the language of the scholar, which is appropriate for a scholarly journal, but can be difficult for other audiences. This book will bridge this divide through its use of design, narrative, and descriptions of innovative artistic practices. Rather than being a book about “best practice” it is a book about “diverse practices” within art making and teaching.



This field guide to artistic approaches, including methods for teaching art, frames its arguments around critical questions that artists and art teachers must address such as: What is the role of art and design in secondary education? What will I teach? How do we go about teaching art? How do I know if my teaching is working? What is the role of traditional mediums and methods within contemporary art practices? How can art teachers contribute to the reinvention of schools? How might fluency within a medium be connected to important issues within culture, including the culture of adolescents? This book includes examples of approaches that might provoke or inspire artist and pedagogical inquiry. These are approaches that actively engage students in work that disrupts taken for granted conventions about schooling and its purposes. It considers how art and design might transform the school experience for adolescents.

This substantially revised and expanded edition of the The Drama Therapy Decision Tree provides an integrated model for therapeutic decision-making by uniting drama therapy interventions with diagnostic information, individual and group processes, psychological distance, the drama therapy pie, and global outcomes.

This book is a practical guide in four sections, not a checklist. Rather than using a standardized protocol that makes the decisions for the therapist, drama therapy is based on dynamic, embodied, creative action with participants in the here and now. Conscious planning on the part of the drama therapist before the session supports spontaneity and creativity, preparing them to make good therapeutic decisions in the moment during the session.

The opening section guides readers through the foundational principles leading readers into Section Two, The Decision Tree, which is a series of questions for early career drama therapists to ask themselves as they prepare treatment plans for clients. Diversity, Equity, and Ethics are covered in Section Three from the point of view of creative arts therapy practitioners. Section Four looks at Integrating the Five Phases of Treatment with the Drama Therapy Pie, following different populations (diagnosis) of clients through the five phases of group therapy in order to illustrate how the Decision Tree supports intervention choice in the different phases of treatment.

The authors strive to provide a common language for communicating what drama therapists do and how they do it in order to demystify drama therapy for other mental health and medical professionals. Using the decision tree as a guide, early career drama therapists can move forward confidently and ground their work with participants in an integrated system. 



An online searchable database of drama therapy interventions provides descriptions, therapeutic outcomes addressed, and other useful information provides a wealth of additional supporting material. There is also a separate online resource of deroling activities.



The online resources, here, can also be an asset for non-drama therapists who are wanting to incorporate a more active and embodied component safely into their work, particularly in terms of warm-ups, closure, and deroling.

This edited collection highlights ways that arts-educators have taken up important questions around learning with the land through walking practices across spatial, temporal and cultural differences. These walking practices serve as ecopedagogical moments that attune us to human-land and more-than-human relationships, while also moving past Western-centric understandings of land and place. Yet it is also more than this as the book situates this work in a/r/tographic practices taking up walking as one method for engagement.

Authors explore walking and a/r/tography in their local contexts. As a result, the book finds that kinship and relationality are significant themes that permeate across a/r/tographic practices focused on ecopedagogy and learning with the land.

Unique to this collection is the weaving of groundings that both guide each chapter and emphasize the philosophical commitment of the book. Each grounding is written by scholars or artists with Indigenous backgrounds to Turtle Island (North America) or are scholars who are Indigenous to other countries and places who are now working in Canadian university settings. Many are Elders, cultural stewards, knowledge keepers, and stewards of the land who find themselves immersed in practices that are artful, ecological, and in many instances, involve the practice of walking. Each grounding offers an important lesson or prompt for readers to consider as they engage with the chapters, as well as offering a conceptual re-centring and grounding to the land and the traditional knowledges from the territories on which this collection is being produced and edited.



Anishnaabe kwe scholar and artist Anna-Leah King reflects on the teachings of Alfred Manitopeyes, a Saulteaux Elder from Muskcowekwun, Pimosatamowin, who shares that good walking and good talking is more than just a metaphor.



Ojibwa scholar and artist Natalie Owl troubles the dictionary definition of anecdotal in relation to walking in the world as an Indigenous woman.



Mukwa Musayett, Shelly Johnson, reflects on her relationship to the natural elements, revealing how the winds have helped her learn emotional intimacy- from feelings of grief, frustration, anger, respect, power, love and gratitude.



Metis scholar and artist Shannon Leddy invites the reader to a time-travelling walk, tracing the colonial legacies of the land where she now lives in Vancouver, Musqueam Territory, going back to ancient Greece and engaging with Greek mythology, and bringing us to creation itself, as we gestate in our mother’s womb.



Cathy Rocke invites readers to her favourite walking path where she focuses her attention to the reciprocal relationships found in nature and considers how they can help us better understand healthy human relationships.

Gloria Ramirez reflects on her homeland in the Andean Mountains and how her body is intimately tied to the places she has walked.



In a poetic grounding story, Shauneen Pete reflects on the traditional teachings shared by her grandfather from Little Pine First Nation about living and learning with the land.



Sheila Blackstock, member of the Gitxsan First Nation, invites readers to join her on a walk along the lakeshore in early springtime, as she reflects on her walking practices that have taught her how to learn from nature. She describes her movements and senses as “a heart catalogue of understanding how to be in nature”.



In this grounding lesson from Peter Cole and Pat O’Riley, the characters of Coyote and Raven invite readers to the Kichwa-Lamista of the High Amazon and the Quechua Andeans in the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru. Through story they talk about returning to the land in an era of climate change and learning about traditional lifeways of Indigenous relations that emphasize preserving, maintain, repairing, caring and sharing.



In her grounding poem, Yasmin Dean attunes to and shows gratitude to the Earth, as she thoughtfully considers how to open and walk through the gate that leads to the sacred.

Fashion Projects: 15 Years of Fashion in Dialogue anthologizes the New York–based journal Fashion Projects. The book is an index of a particular time within the fashion studies landscape and the attendant fields of fashion writing, fashion curation, and critical fashion practice during which the field witnessed a meteoric rise.

The long-running non-profit journal Fashion Projects was described by The Paris Review as “a journal devoted to critical discourse in fashion,” Fashion Projects was founded in New York in 2005 as a zine. It gradually morphed into a larger journal straddling the academic and general interest worlds, with international distribution and an ardent readership. It served as a platform to highlight the importance of fashion within current critical discourses through longform interviews with a range of curators, critics, artists and designers. This book collects together the best articles from the journal, most issues of which are now unavailable.

From exploring the rise of digital fashion media with Penny Martin (the founding editor-in-chief of SHOWstudio) to the continued importance of connoisseurship with Harold Koda (former Curator in Chief of the Met’s Costume Institute), the anthology records the increasing centrality of fashion to contemporary critical discourse.

This book guides artists through the discovery and development of the art that they alone were born to create. Through real-life examples and exercises, we tear down the cultural, educational, and psychological obstacles to finding authentic visual voice, stripping away years of assumptions, external and self-imposed limiting parameters.



We learn how to listen to the Universe and get out of the way when work wants to come through us. We construct a core foundation, unique to each artist, one that will grow along with them in their artistic

practice. Artists will discover their own singular visual vocabulary by mining their personal history, psyche, and world view to reveal new creative directions, and learn how to intensify and develop their core ideas to make them more resonant and complex. We explore methodologies to tap into the subconscious, cultivate breakthroughs, create environments to maximize the gestation of ideas, instill bravery, and do meaningful research to produce deeply layered works of art.



While designed for college students, professional artists will also find it allows them to get to that illusive

“next level” in their work; the one that calls to them, haunts them in their dreams, yet remains unarticulated in their practice.



In addition to helping undergraduate and graduate students who are looking to identify, articulate, and hone their vocabulary, it can serve as a tool for more established artists to step up or refresh their practice. It is the kind of book that artists will keep on the studio shelf, to pick up time and time again, as their responses to the exercises will change throughout the course of their career.

There are extensive lists, exercises, and questionnaires, anecdotes of art-historically significant artists and detailed descriptions of the methodologies they employ to tap into the subconscious, various types of research on creative breakthroughs (and how to apply it to your own process), helpful suggestions to create an environment / lifestyle to maximize the gestation of ideas, and how to do meaningful research to produce deeply layered works of art. While the tone of the book is often earnest and spiritual (in an “art is religion” kind of way), Kretz is aiming for a straightforward, accessible, kind-but-no-nonsense tenor, with some humor, and nurturing “tough love” when needed, to say some of the things that artists need to hear, but few people have the guts to tell them.

This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self, which, far from being a stable marker of urban, liberal, millennial Indian identity, has a schizophrenic quality, one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions, unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion, optimism, and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book, however, belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.

The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies, popular culture analyses, and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star, the urban space, web series, YouTube videos, and social media content.

LIFE: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry examines nature, cognition and society as an interwoven tapestry across disciplinary boundaries. This volume explores how information and communication are instrumental in and for living systems, acknowledging an integrative account of media as environments and technologies.

The aim of the collection is a fuller and richer account of everyday life through a spectrum of insights from internationally known scholars of the natural sciences (physical and life sciences), social sciences and the arts.

How or should life be defined? If life is a medium, how is it mediated? Viewed as interactions, transactions and contexts of ecosystems, life can be recognized through patterns across the sciences, including metabolisms, habitats and lifeworlds. The book also integrates discussions of embodiment, ecological values, literacies and critiques, with bioinspired, synthetic and historical design approaches to envision what could constitute artful living in an ever-evolving, interdependent world.

The volume foregrounds systemic approaches to life, drawing on a wide range of disciplines and fields, including architecture, art, biology, bioengineering, chemistry, cinema studies, communication, computer science, conservation, cultural studies, design, ecology, environmental studies, information science, landscape architecture, geography, journalism, materials science, media archaeology, media studies, philosophy, physics, plant signalling and development, political economy, sociology and system dynamics.

This is the second volume in the MEDIA • LIFE • UNIVERSE Trilogy. It follows and builds upon the 2021 collection MEDIA: A Transdisciplinary Inquiry ISBN 9781789382655

Performance Art in practice – pedagogical approaches opens up a variety of philosophies that explore, explain and challenge Performance art and introduces a range of practices used in higher level education.



The book is a collection of nine independent essays. All the writers have several years of practice as artists, curators, teachers, professors, researchers and in establishing performance art education in Finland. The essays explain, challenge and deconstruct performance art from various angles: the body as a tool and a base of identity, self as material, pedagogic acts of dissidence, challenging societal questions without politicing art, building sustainable artwork based on emotions, intuition and research, using Fluxus scores in contemporary practices etc. are all topics dealt by the writers of Performance Art in practice – pedagogical approaches.



The essays are written from a practical point of view: how do we concretely teach performance art, why have we chosen these ways and what are the outcomes. Teaching the experimental art form, that doesn’t wear a uniform and relies on ever changing time and space isn’t all evident. Deconstructing performance art and reconstructing pedagogy springs out ideas that are relevant also elsewhere in the contemporary society. 



The book challenges art school institutions: Individuality bound to collegiality, fruitful dialogue that bases on trust and sharing with a sociologically and politically challenging curricula come out in texts written by Aapo Korkeaoja, Eero Yli-Vakkuri, Jussi Matilainen, Pia Lindy and Tuomas Laitinen that refer to the remote countryside campus of SAMK Kankaanpää school of art. More urban perspective with philosophies, research interests and pedagogic practices at The University of Arts Helsinki are opened up by Tero Nauha, Annette Arlander, Pilvi Porkola and Leena Kela in their essays.

This collection seeks to explore alternative definitions of bounded identities, facilitating new approaches to spatial and architectural forms. Taking as its starting point the emergence of a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-19th century dissolution of large, heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of boundaries has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship, but also redefines relationships between the nation, citizenship, cities and architecture.

It brings critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies and within the global Muslim diaspora. Essays in this book seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define, enable, obstruct, accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities.

More generally, the book explores how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implication of defining modern self. The essays in this volume collectively address how the construction of self is primarily a spatial event and operated within the crucial nexus of power-knowledge-space.



Contributors investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness, how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implications for how we define the modern self.

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

Over 200 observational drawings created every day from the same window reveal life in an ordinary English street in extraordinary times.



This visual record and accompanying prose is a unique meditation on place, nature, community, time and mental well-being. Through this qualitative work we gain insight into the individual and collective experience and place-specific impacts of the pandemic, as opposed to the quantitative statistics of mortality and infection rates that characterise daily media soundbites and scientific discourse surrounding lockdown.



Five themes are central to the drawings, highlighting the environmental and social factors influencing daily life, and how these can be perceived and recorded via observational drawing: ‘framing space’ foregrounds the importance of widows as an interface between interior and exterior worlds; ‘observing nature and the built environment’ celebrates the street and garden as sites of human-nature relations that support well-being; ‘watching people’ focusses on the activities typify living under lockdown including isolation, socially distanced interactions and working from home; ‘drawing’ reflects on the multiple professional and personal benefits of drawing; and mindful awareness is discussed throughout, affirming the value of appreciating everyday life through drawing practice.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.