Browse Books
Music Making and Civic Imagination
A Holistic Philosophy
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
Transversal Global Perspectives
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.
The Architect's Dream
Form and Philosophy in Architectural Imagination
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
Molecules, Cells, Organisms
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.
Prison Cultures
Performance, Resistance, Desire
Prison Cultures offers the first systematic examination of women in prison and performances in and of the institution. Using a feminist approach to reach beyond tropes of 'bad girls' and simplistic inside vs. outside dynamics, it examines how cultural products can perpetuate or disrupt hegemonic understandings of the world of prisons. The book identifies how and why prison functions as a fixed field and postulates new ways of viewing performances in and of prison that trouble the institution, with a primary focus on the United Kingdom and examples from popular culture. A new contribution to the fields of feminist cultural criticism and prison studies, Aylwyn Walsh explores how the development of a theory of resistance and desire is central to the understanding of women’s incarceration. It problematizes the prevalence of purely literary analysis or case studies that proffer particular models of arts practice as transformative of offending behaviour.
Media Pluralism and Online News
The Consequences of Automated Curation for Society
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.
Hip-Hop Archives
The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production
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.
Studio Seeing
A Practical Guide to Drawing, Painting, and Perception
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.
Digital Platforms and the Press
James Meese argues that there is a growing risk of a platform-dependent press, a development that threatens liberal democracies across the world. The book provides the first comprehensive account of how platform dependence manifests in the news media sector.
Platform dependence is a concept used to describe what happens when businesses or an entire sector, become reliant on one or more digital platforms for its survival. The situation is occurring across the news industry, to the extent that it is difficult to imagine the production, distribution, and long-term survival of news in liberal democracies without the involvement of platforms.
With governments, regulators and citizens increasingly concerned about platform power, Digital Platforms and the Press is the first book to highlight the long-term economic and social consequences of platform dependence for the news sector.
Featuring a rich selection of case-studies and written in an accessible style, Digital Platforms and the Press provides a strong grounding in relevant debates for the interested student reader, and important takeaways for subject matter experts in journalism studies and media policy.
Digital Platforms and the Press will be of interest to journalism and media policy scholars, other scholars in communication, as well as industry practitioners and policymakers.
Let's Talk about Critique
Reimagining Art and Design Education
This book explores the tradition of critique in art and design education. It examines how critique, as a signature pedagogy in the field, has evolved, how it falls short, and what else it can be. Current practices are contextualized and suggestions are made for ways to have more open, inclusive and dynamic classroom conversations about art and design. Included is a discussion of the history of critique, grounding current practice in the discipline’s history, the field of education, and characteristics of contemporary students.
The book is designed to be useful, with an array of critique methods, written by experienced arts educators. Each one guides the reader through a method, describing “why you might do it this way” and “for what group, purpose, or type of assignment”. The text explores what the art critique is, and what it can be, offering practical, updated approaches for faculty and students seeking more educationally beneficial and nuanced critique
Inclusive Dance
The Story of Touchdown Dance
Inclusive Dance is an ethnography of disability arts, and historiographic overview of the 1980s when many new disability arts groups came to fruition. Touchdown Dance was the research 'ambition' of dancer Steve Paxton and theatre maker and psychotherapist Anne Kilcoyne, involving visually impaired and sighted adults in Contact Improvisation - a dyadic movement form requiring physical contact. Katy Dymoke took over Touchdown Dance in 1994 and refers here to archives, accounts and personal experience to share the learning that has been shared over the years to today.
Touch and movement are vital for accessibility and inclusion and modality specific approaches were devised to ensure a democratic process towards the inclusion of visually impaired people in a pro-touch activity. The continuum of movement based methods fills the gaps in polarities of visual and nonvisual and a two-way membrane interlinks all the participants in a body focused learning experience. The mutable membrane becomes a heuristic device for the relational realm, a locus for debate, for change. Touch deprivation, exclusion and inequality are the consequence of an inaccessible visually dominant society.
Three point of view chapters - from two visually impaired and one sighted company dancer - further describe the performance work, revealing how lives are changed and why sociocultural inclusion is imperative.
Copenhagen Chic
A Locational History of Copenhagen Fashion
Copenhagen has long been celebrated for its unique fashion, design, innovation, and sustainability practices, and yet there has never been a comprehensive history of Copenhagen fashion and its current innovation and sustainability drive.
This book fills that gap, assembling a multidisciplinary roster of contributors to examine all aspects of Copenhagen fashion and culture. Grounded in a broad context of Danish culture, industry, media, technology, sustainability, and innovation practices within the wider cultural and economic fields of fashion, the book helps us understand what makes Copenhagen unique.
Building Community Choirs in the Twenty-First Century
Re-imagining Identity through Singing in Northern Ireland
This book explores how five community choirs construct and imagine collective identity formations in Northern Ireland. Original insight is provided through ethnographic research conducted between 2013-2018. Working with five choirs in disparate locations, with different repertoires and demographics resulted in the creation of an integrated comparison that drew out both diversity and commonalities of approach revealing the malleability of choral practice.
The research is framed through communities of practice, a theory of learning through engaging with other people in a common endeavour. Research findings demonstrate how choirs re-imagine identity through the manner in which they organise, rehearse, and perform. Choirs develop a distinct choral identity and ethos highlighting both the musical and social importance of the community of practice. Research suggests that choirs re-imagine multiple conceptions of identities within their groups, including gender, later age, religious faith, inclusivity and ethnic diversity, that can both influence broader structures of community in the region, and be influenced by them.
Community choral practice in Northern Ireland is under-researched. As such this book provides unique insight into how members of community choirs are attempting to transcend sectarian boundaries through their practice, developing academic understandings of identity formation, community music-making and choral practice.
Constructions of the Real
Intersections of Documentary-Based Film Practice and Theory
Constructions of the Real features a wide range of writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who undertake theoretically informed practice and think through making. These global filmmakers and writers straddle the divide between the academy and industry and they reflect on, interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relationship to questions of form, content, and process.
The book is in four sections. The first is on intimate, first-person works where memory and identity are explored. The second features responses to and interventions in historical and dominant relationships to place. The third explores multivarious forms of essay films. In the final section, filmmakers discuss the precarity of non-fiction filmmaking in its form and financial rewards. This book is anti-colonial, in that it offers diverse new voices and new practices promoting hybridity and experimentation and makes claims for knowledges that fall outside of traditional scholarship. This book presents the silenced and the marginalized.
It engages with current debates about the role of creative scholarship and makes a claim for non-fiction filmmaking as a knowledge-making practice for revealing, critiquing, and interpreting the world.
Contributors include Kaveh Abbasian, Judith Aston, Nicholas Andueza, Elisabeth Brun, Joanna Callaghan, Gerda Cammaer, Philip Cartelli, Lorena Cervera, Jill Daniels, Kath Dooley, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Andréa França, Catherine Gough-Brady, Robert Hardcastle, Alex Johnston, Elizabeth Miller, Ros Mortimer, Kim Munro, Minou Norouzi, Stefano Odorico, Rebecca Ora, Sheersha Perera, Christine Rogers, Isabel Seguí, Jeni Thornley and Masha Vlasova.
Crafted With Pride
Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain
Explores queer craft and the material cultures of LGBTQ+ activism in Britain since the 1980s. From handmade clothing and protest banners to radical self-published zines and manifestos, there is a long history of using craft and DIY processes to explore identities, bring communities together, and encourage social and political change. Yet, many of these histories remain undocumented and are insufficiently researched.
This collection sheds light on these important histories and includes a range of contributions from academics, artists, activists, curators, and heritage professionals. Case studies discussed include Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, the Museum of Transology, Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners (LGSM), the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, Islington’s Pride, Queer Zine Library, Glasgow Women’s Library, Queer Journeys, and more. These critical essays and oral histories are complemented by short reflections from contemporary creative practitioners including Matt Smith, Tanoa Sasraku, Sarah-Joy Ford, Rachael House and Raisa Kabir.
Taken together, this collection weaves together an important web between craft, queerness, and activism in Britain. As the first book of its kind, it will likely be of interest to a range of students and academics, as well as cultural producers and creatives more broadly.
Dances with Sheep
On RePairing the Human–Nature Condition in Felt Thinking and Moving towards Wellbeing
Dances with Sheep presents the methodology of Felt Thinking in Movement as an eco-somatic practice inspired by re-thinking nature of being human, as well as contextualises it within wider frameworks of cultural, philosophical and therapeutic viewpoints on wellbeing.
Felt Thinking is a self-inquiry practice grounded in somatic movement experience that originates in site-specific and embodied dialoguing between what is felt and what shapes as a responsive thought, as creative movement itself, and which paths ways for ecologically inclusive care for being well with self and other.
The book elaborates on creative processes in and with the natural environment in relation to the movers’ overall wellbeing and covers creative journeys of opening up to the living agency of Nature itself through the emergent three phases of experiential relatedness in embodied experience of the self. The book presents its original contribution to eco-phenomenology with its ontological principle of embodied relationality in towards and away from movement as a primal gateway to wellbeing and its creative inter-constitution.
An intriguing and inspiring resource for students, practitioners, educators, self-learners, therapists and researchers. Foreword by Sondra Fraleigh.
Fashion Education
The Systemic Revolution
Fashion Education explores how the classroom can transform the fashion industry towards body inclusion and social justice.
The book is a collection of 17 essays by fashion educators from Australia, Canada, the US and the UK who recount their experiences, struggles and strategies of reimagining the exclusive foundation of fashion pedagogy and redesigning fashion curricula to centre Indigenous, Black, brown, fat, disabled, trans and queer worldviews, histories and bodies.
This is the first book to explore the relationships between fashion pedagogy and social justice, and to map out new pedagogical frameworks and tools to redistribute power through fashion education. It shares the teaching practices of fashion educators implementing radical pedagogies and offers practical case studies that engage with a number of intersectional positions.
Fashion Education engages with current pressing concerns for educators and is a valuable teaching resource for fashion educators – both theory and practice – working in art and design schools in Europe, the US and the UK.
With chapters covering fashion theory, history, business, communication and design curricula to centre Indigenous, Black, brown, fat, disabled, trans, queer worldviews, histories and peoples it will appeal directly to the many disciplines within fashion. The discussions are also relevant to educators in other art, design and creative fields also looking to centre inclusion in their courses and the strategies presented will apply to them.
Contributions from Tanveer Ahmed, Kevin Almond, Avalon Acaso, Ben Barry, Mal Burkinshaw, Johnathan Clancy, Robin J. Chantree, Deborah A. Christel, Brittany Dickinson, Greg Climer, Bianca Garcia, Denise Nicole Green, Alicia Johnson, Lucy Jones, Grace Jun, Carmen Keist, Riley Kucheran, Michael Mamp, Krys Osei, Lauren Downing Peters, Alexis Quinney, Kelly L. Reddy-Best, Austin Reeves, Joshua Simon, Colleen Schindler-Lynch, Brandon Spencer and Sang Thai
Somatics in Dance, Ecology, and Ethics
The Flowing Live Present
This book of highly original essays addresses the field of movement-based and dance somatics through lenses of ethics and ecology. It is based in methods of phenomenology.
A new collection of essays previously published with Intellect as journal articles, with the addition of new essays and editorial material. The text considers body-based somatic education relative to values, virtues, gender fluidity, lived experience, environmental awareness, fairness, and collective well-being. In delineating interdependent values of soma, ecology, and human movement that are newly in progress, the collection conceives links between personal development of subjective knowledge and cultural, critical, and environmental positionality.
The text raises questions about defining somatics and self, gender dynamics, movement preferences, normative body conceptions, attention to feelings, inclusiveness, ethics of touch, and emotional intelligence in somatics contexts. I include these crucial concerns of somatics and ethics as relational, globally complex, and ongoing.
Like much of Sondra Fraleigh’s writing, these essays utilize phenomenology as a method to investigate embodied relationships—often through lenses of ethics and aesthetics. In providing some examples, the text explores specific values of gratitude, listening, and emotional intelligence in somatic bodywork and learning environments.
In Search of Tito’s Punks
On the Road in a Country That No Longer Exists
The book traces the story of how a song recorded in 1981 by a young punk rock band from a cultural backwater on the English-Welsh border, and released on a tiny independent record label, became famous in a Yugoslavia formed in the image of Marshall Tito? Why was it 30 years before the members of the band found out? How did this ‘socialist’ country have one of the most vibrant punk scenes in the world?
Gloucester, England, 1981; multi-racial, teenage street-punk band, Demob, recorded and released what would become their best known and most enduring song, No Room For You. A rasping vocal told the story of the 1979 closure of a short-lived, punk rock venue at a disused motel on the edge of the provincial city. Depending on your mind-set, the lyrics were either a howl of rage at the injustice, a wail at the loss, or a love-song to an era.
More than three decades later, the author – and Demob’s bass player in 1981 – set out to follow the song across a country that no longer exists. On the road he heard the life stories of the heroes of Yugoslavian punk and the punks themselves; from the Tito era, through the disintegration and wars, forced displacements and permanent exiles, to today’s turbulent ‘reconstruction. Who were ’Tito’s punks’ and who are they now?
An unvarnished but also affectionate portrait of Yugoslavia in the years before its demise through to the present, seen through the unlikely lens of punk and punk rockers. Part travelogue, part history the book is both, and neither, of those things. Rather, it is a mural and soundtrack of a journey through a time and place which no longer exists.
The latest addition to the Global Punk series from Intellect.
Contemporary British and Italian Sound Docudrama
Traditions and Innovations
The book focuses on radio and sound docufiction and docudrama through comparative analysis of the British and the Italian output from post war years to the 2010s, from both a historical and formal point of view. It sheds light on a rather neglected area of study providing a systematic survey of the development of the form and of its current status and perspectives, and at the same time constructing viable analytical tools that can be used to investigate individual productions.
Considering the different docudramatic output in formats and quantity in the two countries, the book explores case studies from BBC Radio, which continue to air a high number of programmes with a great variety of formats and subgenres, and Italian case studies from both independent bodies and the Radio RAI, whose docudramatic production has declined since the late 1980s.
Specifically, the study seeks to explain how radio language in its purely acoustic dimension allows access to unpredictable layers of truth often complementary, when not overtly alternative, to the documental truth of declaredly journalistic or scientific programmes.
A well-researched resource for university students, scholars, researchers and educators in media, sociology of media and history. In-depth analysis of an original topic.
3-D Experimental VR and Art Practices
Untangling Another Dimension
The book addresses themes such as visual perception, perception of 3-D and stereo. With the event of the stereoscope and the theatre, dioramas and panoramas before it, vision and perception in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is seen to be marketed to a mass audience. As such the spectacle of the stereoscope and other optical devices can be seen as a precursor to mass media dissemination today.
Yet artists use the stereoscope and VR to signify the spectacle, clairvoyance, vision and the mechanism of vision as well as a symbol for the act of looking, being looked at while looking and the gaze within an art new media practice.
Other artists have used 3-D and virtual reality to address themes such as theories of consciousness or embodied consciousness, the human – machine relationship and the idea of mapping reality, alternative networked realities.
The book includes an introduction and summary of chapters, 86 anaglyphic 3-D images and presents a survey of artists working in 3-D and virtual reality, VR art. The convergence of other fields such as new media art, video art and early virtual reality art is described through many examples within the scope of the book.
Artists discussed include Mert Akbal, Zoe Beloff , Geoffrey Berliner, Lygia Clark, Dan Graham, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Scott S. Fisher, Rebecca Hackemann, Perry Hoberman, Daniel Iglesia, Ken Jacobs, William Kentridge, Susan MacWilliam, Patrick Meagher, Rosa Menkman, Jim Naughten, Tony Ousler, Alfons Schilling, Joel Schlemowitz, Christopher Schneberger, Judith Sönniken, Ethan Turpin, Aga Ousseinov, Colleen Woolpert.
3-D glasses included with hardback book.
Sonic Signatures
Music, Migration and the City at Night
Sonic Signatures is an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars and music-makers who come together to explore how music makes cities. More specifically, they argue that the musical encounter, composed of an array of production and consumption practices, takes on particular and essential meaning at night. Thinking about music as an encounter allows one to appreciate the value and power of migration within the act of music-making.
The majority of voices amplified in the book come from so-called “migrants,” understood as someone who was born in one country and currently lives and works in another. Yet, these words, migration, migrant and migrancy, are more expansive than that as they indicate a range of movement, politics and place-making.
Contributions from Emilie Amrein, André de Quadros, Nick Dunn, Pol Esteve, Jillian Fulton-Melanson, Jacqueline Georgis, Masimba Hwati, Ailbhe Kenny, Seger Kersbergen, Brendan Kibbee, Áine Mangaoang, Derek Pardue, Nick Prior, Austin T. Richie, Willians Santos, Sipho Sithole, Gibran Teixeira Braga, Katie Young.
A great, engaging transdisciplinary contribution to nightlife studies, music and the city.
Women and the Media in Capitalism and Socialism
An Ecofeminist Inquiry
This book looks at the position of women in the media in capitalism and socialism using ecofeminist lenses. It argues that when the position of women in the media in capitalism is at stake, women suffer from discrimination, structural barriers, lack of recognition and a masculine way of thinking across countries whereas in socialism women did not suffer from the lack of recognition but they did suffer from dual expectations, which placed a burden on them and enabled the return of patriarchal discrimination with the change of regimes and this leads to the notion of masculine thinking that underpinned socialist regimes too.
Whilst it is obvious from existing research, as well as chapters in this book, that socialist regimes had more respect for women, it is clear that they were also underpinned by a masculine thought to an extent, which resulted in a double burden on women in society and this was mirrored by the media.
Therefore, the book argues that the new socialism is needed, the one which will take into consideration patriarchy in all of its elements and include not just policies on equal pay and equal opportunities in the organisation but also has active women’s voices in designing policies that last and that makes an impact on equality in all of its social segments.
Contributions from Nikolina Borčić, Ovidiana Bulumac, Joseph Nwanja Chukwu, Carla Cruz, Maria Cunha, Ivana Čuljak, Ivona Čulo, Béatrice Damian-Gaillard, Elena Díaz, Sanita Nwakpu Ekwutosi, Barbara Henderson, Bethany Fenner, Mirela Holy, Lisa Makarchuk, Anka Mihajlov Prokopović, Chinedu Jude Nwasum, Jude Nwakpoke Ogbodo, Eugénie Saitta, Paloma Sanz-Marcos, Nataša Simeunović Bajić, Salomé Sola-Morales, Martina Topić, Hanne Vandenberghe, Lea Vene, Marija Vujović, Belén Zurbano-Berenguer, Batya Weinbaum.
Sonic Signatures
Music, Migration and the City at Night
Sonic Signatures is an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars and music-makers who come together to explore how music makes cities. More specifically, they argue that the musical encounter, composed of an array of production and consumption practices, takes on particular and essential meaning at night. Thinking about music as an encounter allows one to appreciate the value and power of migration within the act of music-making.
The majority of voices amplified in the book come from so-called “migrants,” understood as someone who was born in one country and currently lives and works in another. Yet, these words, migration, migrant and migrancy, are more expansive than that as they indicate a range of movement, politics and place-making.
Contributions from Emilie Amrein, André de Quadros, Nick Dunn, Pol Esteve, Jillian Fulton-Melanson, Jacqueline Georgis, Masimba Hwati, Ailbhe Kenny, Seger Kersbergen, Brendan Kibbee, Áine Mangaoang, Derek Pardue, Nick Prior, Austin T. Richie, Willians Santos, Sipho Sithole, Gibran Teixeira Braga, Katie Young.
A great, engaging transdisciplinary contribution to nightlife studies, music and the city.
Sonic Signatures
Music, Migration and the City at Night
Sonic Signatures is an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars and music-makers who come together to explore how music makes cities. More specifically, they argue that the musical encounter, composed of an array of production and consumption practices, takes on particular and essential meaning at night. Thinking about music as an encounter allows one to appreciate the value and power of migration within the act of music-making.
The majority of voices amplified in the book come from so-called “migrants,” understood as someone who was born in one country and currently lives and works in another. Yet, these words, migration, migrant and migrancy, are more expansive than that as they indicate a range of movement, politics and place-making.
Contributions from Emilie Amrein, André de Quadros, Nick Dunn, Pol Esteve, Jillian Fulton-Melanson, Jacqueline Georgis, Masimba Hwati, Ailbhe Kenny, Seger Kersbergen, Brendan Kibbee, Áine Mangaoang, Derek Pardue, Nick Prior, Austin T. Richie, Willians Santos, Sipho Sithole, Gibran Teixeira Braga, Katie Young.
A great, engaging transdisciplinary contribution to nightlife studies, music and the city.
Punk Art History
Artworks from the European No Future Generation
The punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s is examined as an art movement through archive research, interviews, and art historical analysis. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld avant-garde, instead choosing to be the ‘rear-guard’.
Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art protagonists from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, among others the members Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), members of Værkstedet Værst (The Workshop Called Worst), Nina Sten-Knudsen, Marc Miller, Diana Ozon, Hugo Kaagman, as well as email correspondence with Jon Savage, Anna Banana, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.
A large portion of the discussed materials stem from the protagonists' private archives, while some very public—scandalous and spectacular—events are discussed, too, such as the Prostitution exhibition at the ICA in London in 1976 and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West-Berlin in 1981. The examined materials cover almost all media: paintings, drawings, bricolages, collages, booklets, posters, zines, installations, sculptures, Super 8 films, documentation of performances and happenings, body art, street art.
What emerges is how crucial the concept of history was in punk at that point in time. The punk movement's rejection of the tale of progress and prosperity, as it was being propagated on both sides of the iron curtain, evidently manifested itself in punk visual art too. Central to the book is the thesis that punks placed themselves as the rear-guards, not the avant-gardes, a statement which was in made by Danish punks in 1981, when they called themselves “bagtropperne". Behind the rear-guard watchword was the rejection of the inherent notion of progress that the avant-garde name brings with it; how could a "no future" movement want to lead the way?
Although aimed at students and scholars of art, design, music and performance history, the subject as well as the author’s accessible, occasionally playful style will no doubt draw readers with an interest in punk, music, and urban histories.
Anarchitectural Experiments
When Unbuilt Designs Turn to Film
The book investigates speculative filmic architectural projects and animations that go beyond representing buildings, touching upon issues concerning medium, act of representation, or conducting criticism on history, culture, society, or urban politics, along with the mediated character of contemporary spatial experience – interpreting it primarily through protocols of architectural imaging.
The book centres on the influence of simulation and cinematic design on visionary or speculative architecture. It outlines the impact of film and animation in architectural representation through key projects. The opening analysis is useful in contextualizing speculative architectural projects, while the later chapters link the theory to the imagery. Stasiowski uses a diverse collection of interesting case studies that are easy to read and well-chosen to support his argument.
This is a well-researched work and comprehensive review of speculative architecture and various media that describe it. Stasiowski makes a thorough argument about the use of cinema and animation as a method of architectural visualization.
Stasiowki’s book sets itself apart from other work in the same area by in discussing speculative projects in relation to cinema. and specifically, the effect that modern technologies are having on the subject now and in its potential futures.
The borderline between material environment and spatialized imagery becomes progressively more blurred, while demand for visionary works that would make sense of this merging, has never been greater.
It will appeal primarily to architects and designers, filmmakers and academics. It may also be of interest to artists, set designers, and film production designers.
Somatic Movement Dance Therapy
The Healing Art of Self-regulation and Co-regulation
This book focuses on Somatic Movement Dance Therapy and the importance of self-regulation and co-regulation. The chapters attend to self-regulating different tissues through movement, breath, sound and the imagination.
Throughout the book the author shares processes and practices that support participants to balance their living tissues, moving from sympathetic arousal into parasympathetic ease and release. The study of the autonomic nervous system and how to innervate the parasympathetic through breath awareness, heart-sensing and intero-ception is the central through-line in the book.
Uniquely, Williamson attends to the anatomical and physiological complexity underlying the apparent simplicity of somatic movement dance practice. How to sense-perceive and move with attuned awareness of specific body tissues, such the skeletal-muscular and craniosacral system invites the reader into a deep anatomical and physiological excavation of self-regulation. The interconnectivity of fascia, and the importance of cardio-ception, breath awareness and gravity lie at the heart of this book. Sensory-perceptual awareness of the heart is foregrounded as the most important ingredient in the efficacy of practice, as well as gravi-ception, soft-tissue-rolling and fascial unwinding.
Includes a collective foreword from Sarah Whatley, Daniel Deslauriers, Celeste Snowber and Karin Rugman
This is a must-read practice-as-research book, for under- and postgraduate students, researchers and educators and especially important for practitioners who feel the weight and condescension of the mechanistic paradigm.
Bernhard Lang
Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers
Bernhard Lang: Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers offers a critical guide and introduction to the work of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957). It identifies the phenomenon of repetition as a central concern in Lang’s thinking and making. The composer’s artistic practice is identified as one of ‘loop aesthetics’: a creative poetics in which repetition serves not only as methodology, but also as material, language, and subject matter.
The book is structured around the four central thematic nodes of philosophy, music, theatre, and politics. After introducing Lang as a composer whose work is thoroughly influenced by philosophical thought, the book develops a typology of musical repetition as it is explored and activated in Lang’s oeuvre.
Pointing towards the several repetitions within the performance of Lang’s works, the book explores the heavily trans-medial nature of the repeat across domains such as literature, dance, and theatre. Finally, the book investigates Lang’s use of textual quotation and musical borrowing.
Christine Dysers is a musicologist specialising in contemporary music aesthetics. Her research centres around repetition, politics, absence, the liminal, and the uncanny. This is the first full-length study of the works of Bernhard Lang and is a new volume in the Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers series from Intellect.
Urban Exile
Theories, Methods, Research Practices
Explores cities of exile from different perspectives and presents different methods and sources for exile and urban studies. The essays are written by internationally recognized scholars, and contain a wide range of themes including mapping, oral history, queerness, photography. This book will make a significant contribution to the theory and methodology of research on historical exile, cities and modernities, as well as present multidisciplinary exile research from an urban perspective.
With a blend of case studies, and theoretical approaches, it interweaves histories of modernism and exile in different urban environments and focuses on historical dislocations in the first half of the twentieth century, when artistic and urban movements constituted themselves in global exchange. Although this book takes a historical perspective, it is written with an awareness of current flight movements and will make a significant contribution to the theory and methodology of research on exile.
The knowledge of previous historical exile experiences is important for the understanding of contemporary flight movements: after all, these are not singular phenomena. For migration movements in the first half of the 20th century and for those of today, it is equally possible to speak of urban centres of attraction for refugees: Today, Berlin is a European metropolis of exile; in the 1930s and 1940s, Paris, Prague, London, New York, Istanbul and Shanghai were destinations for refugees.
With contributions from Maddalena Alvi, Ekaterina Aygün, Claudia Cendales Paredes, Julia Eichenberg, Margit Franz, Nils Grosch, Mareike Hetschold, Louis Kaplan, Laura Karp Lugo, Katya Knyazeva, Merve Köksal, Rachel Lee, Chris McConville, Anna Messner, Alexis Nuselovici, Robert Pascoe, Valentina Pino Reyes, Helene Roth, Valeria Sánchez Michel, Marine Schütz, Seza Sinanlar Uslu, Felicitas Söhner, Mareike Schwarz, Marina Sorokina, Xin Tong, Diana Wechsler, Jessica Williams Stark and Federico Vitelli.
Town is the Garden Chapbooks
The Town is the Garden (2017–20) was a three-year creative community food-growing project run by Deveron Projects, a socially engaged arts organisation in the northeast of Scotland. The project set out to explore how a rural agricultural town might begin to rethink its relationship to food and to food growing in an era of increasing awareness of climate and ecological emergency, from the community up. Through a collective investigation into the processes of learning and sharing skills related to food growing, the project explored how a community might also begin to pay better attention to the entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds. Food became a lens through which to investigate more broadly the dichotomies between culture and nature, ecology and economy that together with the colonial, racist and patriarchal systems have led to the current environmental catastrophes.
This set of seven chapbooks captures the diverse creative learning programme developed through the project. Working with a range of practitioners that contributed to the project, the series includes critical texts, instructions and recipes, and poetry.
Story I and Story II contextualise the project and include an essay by art historian Elisabetta Rattalino on artists and art practices working with food and farming, alongside an introductory text on the project, written by Joss Allen and Caroline Gatt, the project coordinators and series editors.
Compost includes an essay by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa titled “Permaculture practices as ethical doings”, which explores the relationships of care developed through permaculture practices illustrated through the example of making compost. This is paired with three compost recipes for making cold compost, hot compost and working with hugelkultur.
Seeds includes a text by Dawn Finch on practices of seed saving, blending seed saving instructions with poetry and a critique of the industrial seed economy. Dawn Finch is curator of a Huntly-based seed library developed through the Town is the Garden project, the Strathbogie Seed Collective, a poet and a children’s author.
Plants includes a text by Eleanor Brown, an Aberdeenshire-based forager, which documents her foraging year through a number of recipes and anecdotes. This is paired with a text by anthropologist Alexandra Falter on plant-human relations; particularly those studied through her field work in the Bolivian Andes.
Garden includes a text by gardener and architect Joe Crowdy exploring queer ecology and role of plants and gardens in fostering human sensuality and intimacy. Joe delivered two workshops in Huntly on this topic, one with the local school’s LQBTQ+ group, who the project has been supporting to develop a garden in the school grounds.
Orchard includes a text and series of drawings by Jonathan Baxter & Sarah Gittins on their project Future Fruit, commissioned as part of the Town is the Garden project. Future Fruit explores how an existing orchard could be rethought in response to the current climate and ecological emergency, particularly drawing on the work and theories of Patrick Geddes.
The original project had a very specific geographical focus in a literal sense but the themes are topical and universal – this set will appeal to anyone with an interest in the project principles and themes.
A stunning set of beautiful books; a thought provoking and thoughtful gift for a friend, or for yourself.
Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance
Unbecoming Rhythms
Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance: Unbecoming Rhythms develops a new framework to understand how temporality is performed in contemporary dance. It combines an in-depth analysis of the choreographic practices of Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion, Ivana Müller, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg with a close study of the philosophical work of Bergson, Deleuze and Bachelard.
In the field of dance and performance studies the notion of ‘unbecoming rhythms’ will stand out and spark the interest of a wide readership. Dance is still mostly associated with notions of flow and continuity. Dancers are supposed to create a continuous rhythm in which the different movements melt together. They should create the feeling of spontaneous renewal or becoming. Recently however, several choreographers have experimented with rhythms that create an experience of temporal unbecoming, a feeling of being stuck in time. This is the first book to develop an in-depth analysis of these rhythms and the unsettling temporal regimes they produce.
The book situates itself at the intersection of dance and philosophy. Its focus on temporality and its innovative methodological approach it will also prove to be an important contribution to the field, and will be a significant resource for students, scholars and practitioners.
Dystopian and Utopian Impulses in Art Making
The World We Want
Contemporary art has a complex relationship to crisis. On the one hand, art can draw us toward apocalypse: it charts unfolding chaos, reflects and amplifies the effects of crisis, shows us the dystopian in both our daily life and in our imagined futures. On the other hand, art’s complexity helps fathom the uncertainty of the world, question and challenge the order of things, and allows us to imagine new ways of living and being – to make new worlds.
This collection of written and visual essays includes artistic responses to various crises – including the climate emergency, global and local inequalities and the COVID-19 pandemic – and suggests new forms of collectivity and collaboration within artistic practice. It surveys a wide variety of practices, oriented from the perspective of Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Art making has always responded to the world; the essays in this collection explore how artists are adapting to a world in crisis.
The contributions to this book are arranged in four sections: artistic responses; critical reflections, new curatorial approaches and the art school reimagined. Alongside the written chapters, three photographic essays provide specific examples of new visual forms in artistic practice under crisis conditions.
The primary market for the book will be scholars and upper-level students of art and curating at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Specifically, the book will appeal to the burgeoning field of study around socially engaged art.
Beyond the academic and student market, it will appeal to practicing artists and curators, especially those engaged in social practice and community-based art.
Off Book
Devised Performance and Higher Education
In the theatre world, ‘off book’ signifies a deadline in the creative process: the date by which performers are to have memorised their lines and will no longer be allowed to carry their play script – the ‘book’ – on stage. As such, Off Book makes a strangely appropriate title for a book about devised performance in higher education. In its usual context, ‘off book’ captures the tension between ephemeral, live performance and durable, author-ized literature: in one sense, the book – the written play – is the essential core, the seed that gives the performance life and meaning. Yet the opposite could be equally true: an ‘on book’ performance would not really be a play at all, and an actor reciting lines out of a script in hand is not really acting. A play is only realised in, or through, a performance. We cannot really learn, or play, our part until we can put the book down and enter the stage without it.
Devised performance might be described as ‘theatre without the book.’ Yet devisors also often use books – books like this one, practical guidebooks and how-to manuals, as well as a myriad of literature outside the discipline mined for inspiration. This is particularly manifest when devising in the context of higher education - a milieu, like theatre, wherein books traditionally signify authority, status, and meaning. So, to the extent that theatres and campuses are places where one expects everything to be done ‘by the book,’ devising on campuses is rebellious, even sacrilegious. But on the other hand, both the theatre and the university are expected to challenge tradition, defy expectations, and conduct experiments.
The book is presented in four sections reflecting the range of roles devising plays in higher education. The first section, Devising Pedagogy: Teaching Transferable Tools, examines how and why practitioners, educators, and programs conceptualise and plan for devising with adult learners in a range of higher education contexts. The second, Devising Friction: Ensembles, Individuals, and the Institution, shifts the discussion to the classroom, where abstract, pedagogical rubber meets the road of concrete reality. The third, Devising (by) Degrees, Practice-led postgraduate devising projects features contributions by emerging scholar-practitioners who engage with devising as both an object and method of creative scholarship. Finally, the chapters in Devising Bridges: University-Community Engagement explore how devising connects higher education institutions with the public they are intended to serve — particularly in populations and communities that are marginalised within, or even explicitly excluded from participating in, higher education, such as children and people with intellectual disabilities.
A valuable and unique resource for drama educators in universities, university students in education, drama, and arts managements, graduate students conducting research, theatre historians, practicing devised theatre artists.
Punk Pedagogies in Practice
Disruptions and Connections
With practitioners, management and policy makers continuing to critically examine pedagogical practice in post 16 education, the need to engage in conversations concerning the exact nature of this practice remains extremely pertinent.
This collection develops existing work on punk pedagogies by connecting up theory and practices whilst simultaneously disrupting current accepted approaches to pedagogy in post 16 education.
The insights generated within the various settings outlined in this book – further education, higher education, migrant education, zine workshops, community education and for speakers of other languages – are relevant beyond those contexts. They are applicable to a wide range of disciplines, settings, teaching and learning styles.
Contributions from Ipsita Chatterjea, Mike Dines, Asya Draganova, Jon Evans, Muhammad Fakhran al Ramadhan, Michael Gratzke, Matt Grimes, Craig Hamilton, Michael Hepworth, Adam Hounslow-Eyre, Dave Kane, Nathan Kerrigan, Marco Milano, Ces Pearson, Sarah Raine, Katie Shaw, Francis Stewart, Iain Taylor, Dean Thiele, Elke Van dermijnsbrugge, L. Viner and Laura Way.
A new volume in the Global Punk series from Intellect.
Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre
He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night
Critics and fans alike often mistake theatrical song and dance as evoking a sweeping sense of simplicity, heteronormativity, and traditionalism. Nothing drove home this cultural misunderstanding for Kelly Kessler as when a relative insisted she watch the Clint Eastwood-Lee Marvin cinematic transfer of Paddy Chayefsky’s Paint Your Wagon (1969) with a young niece and nephew because it was a ‘sweet movie.’ In the relative’s memory, good old-fashioned singing and dancing—matched with the power of an assumed hegemonic embrace of social norms—far outweighed the whoremongering, alcoholism, wife-selling, and what appears to be narratively sanctioned polyamory.
This collection seeks to trouble such an over-idealized impression of musical theatre. Tackling Rockettes, divas, and chorus boys; hit shows such as Hamilton and Spring Awakening; and lesser-known but ground-breaking gems like Erin Markey’s A Ride on The Irish Cream and Kirsten Childs’s Bella: An American Tall Tale.
Gender, Sex and Sexuality in Musical Theatre: He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night takes a broad look at musical theatre across a range of intersecting lenses such as race, nation, form, dance, casting, marketing, pedagogy, industry, platform-specificity, stardom, politics, and so on. This collection assembles an amazing group of established and emergent musical theatre scholars to wrestle with the complexities of the gendered and sexualized musical theatre form. Gender and desire have long been at the heart of the musical, whether because ‘birds and bees’ (and educated fleas’) were doing it, a farm girl simply couldn’t ‘say no,’ or one’s ‘tits and ass’ were preventing them from landing the part.
An exciting and vibrant collection of articles from the archives of Studies in Musical Theatre, with contributions from Ryan Donovan, Michele Dvoskin, Sherrill Gow, Jiyoon Jung, David Haldane Lawrence, Stephanie Lim, Dustyn Martinich, Adrienne Gibbons Oehlers, Deborah Paredez, Alejandro Postigo, George Rodosthenous, Janet Werther, Stacy Wolf, Elizabeth L. Wollman, Bryan Vandevender and Kelly Kessler, brought together with a newly commissioned piece by Jordan Ealey. All set against the backdrop of Kelly Kessler’s scene-setting introduction.
Excellent potential for classroom and course use on undergraduate and graduate courses in theatre studies, musical studies, women’s and gender studies.
Performing Collaboration in Solo Performance
A Duet Without You and Practice as Research
The book provides an investigation grounded in creative writing and practice-as-research methodology and explores the issues of authorship and collaborative labour in contemporary performance. This investigation is set in the context of a world more and more characterized by fragmentation, displacement and virtual communication and relationships. It addresses and playfully engages with the following questions: what is a collaborative body? Can a sole performer carry out a collaborative practice ? Can we stand in for others? What forms of “coming-together” might take place when distance remains between those who perform and those who spectate?
The book contains the full-length version of the score from A Duet Without You, an original performance piece created between 2013 and 2015 by Chloé Déchery in collaboration with a range of artistic collaborators working inter- and cross-disciplinary, including Karen Christopher, Pedro Iñes, Simone Kenyon, Marty Langthorne, Tom Parkinson, Michael Pinchbeck and Deborah Pearson.
Alongside the playtext, the book entails a collection of essays written by independent writers, artists and academics and dedicated to the politics of collaboration, ranging from performative responses and co-authored articles to in-depth theoretical essays.
Primary readership will be those teaching, researching or studying in theatre and performance studies, visual arts, fine arts, art history, creative writing, poetry, philosophy or French literature. Will also be of interest to art school students and those with an interest in theatre.
Reframing Berlin
Architecture, Memory-Making and Film Locations
Reframing Berlin is about how architecture and the built environment can reveal the memory of a city, an urban memory, through its transformation and consistency over time by means of ‘urban strategies’, which have developed throughout history as cities have adjusted to numerous political, religious, economic and societal changes. These strategies are organised on a ‘memory spectrum’, which range from demolition to memorialisation.
It reveals the complicated relationship between urban strategies and their influence on memory-making in the context of Berlin since 1895, with the help of film locations. It utilises cinematic representations of locations as an audio-visual archive to provide a deeper analysis of the issues brought up by strategies and case studies in relation to memory-making.
Foreword by Kathleen James-Chakraborty
A new volume in the Mediated Cities series from Intellect
Radical Intimacies
Designing Non-Extractive Relationalities
An extradisciplinary investigation into the radical potentials of design by the global Memefest network.
This book is an investigation of the key aspects of capitalist domination and resistance to it through design; its five sections explore dialogue, power, land, interventions, and radical praxis. Vodeb’s curated chapters engage radical intimacies with design and connects it with media, communication, and art. Radical intimacies imply a closeness to the world created through our relations, which work towards the decolonization of knowledge and the public sphere. The closeness is political as it involves qualities that constitute and enable an alternative and opposition to extractive relationalities imposed by capitalism.
Radical Intimacies connects frameworks on (de)colonization with the work of Memefest, a global network of people interested in social change through radical design. Bringing together original written and visual contributions from around the world, the collection connects universities, practitioners, and social movements. This book explores design as a central domain of thought and action concerned with the meaning and production of sociocultural life. Contributors are interested in design that operates outside the dominant social orders, narrow disciplines and extractive paradigms and imagines and builds new worlds and social relations.
An inter/ extradisciplinary collection of original works, the audience will be academics, artists, designers and activists and adventurous professionals who are interested in the crossovers between design, arts, and social change. Students of design, art, media, and communication interested in social change. Higher level undergraduate and graduate students.
Content warning: Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders are advised that the following publication contains the words & images of deceased persons.
Storying the Self
Performance and Communities
The chapters in this collection explore the constellation of points where stories of individual experience and experiences are in dialogue with political, cultural and social narratives.
Encompassing themes of individual and social identities and relationships, (un)belonging, motherhood, academic lives and what it means to be an arts practitioner, these stories and accounts continue and expand the ongoing conversations of how practitioners and academics do their work. They show the ongoing need to rethink and re-examine how to do critical and engaging scholarly work. Life stories are necessarily, messy, complex, personal and often deal with experiences that have been challenging for the author in some way.
Contributions from Ross Adamson, Suzy Bamblett, Emily Bell, Jenni Cresswell, Hannah Davita Ludikhuijze, Sandra Lyndon, Vanessa Marr, Jess Moriarty, Éva Mikuska, Holly Stewart, Deirdre Russell, Louise Spiers, Lucianna Whittle.
This is the first book in a new series. The Performance and Communities Book Series celebrates, challenges and researches performance in the real world. The series will consider how contemporary performance can engage, build and learn from previous, existing, evolving and new communities of people – practitioners, academics, students, audiences.
Transacting as Art, Design and Architecture
A Non-Commercial Market
Transacting as Art, Design and Architecture: A Non-Commercial Market re-performs the original event #TransActing: A Market of Values as a printed text with the ambition of investing in the published word and image at least some of the original market’s depth and liveness. Holding fast to the experimental ethos of Critical Practice, this anthology does not shy away from risk when the aim is expanding the fields of art, design and architectural research. The authors’ distinct but also overlapping forms (practical, poetic, analytical, etc.) track with the plurality of voices, the processes that have nurtured the cluster as it has worked internationally for more than a decade to produce unique projects.
The book opens with contributions that reflect on TransActing as collaborative practice-based research. The introduction contextualizes this popup market within London’s long history of local marketplaces. Cued by emerging government policy on market sustainability, the tripartite of place, people and prosperity helps to frame TransActing. Taking a different approach, a partial self-portrait of Critical Practice traces TransActing’s becoming over more than a decade of activity and five years of research on value. This is followed by an account of the market’s physical infrastructure: the prototyping of bespoke stalls which were built from recycled materials, an approach inspired by an early example of open-source furniture design. This comes to life in the next section: polyphonic observations on the stalls in use and the market more generally. The stallholders’ reflections capture the experience of those directly involved and are richly illustrated with images of or related to their stalls.
The second part of Transacting as Art, Design and Architecture is composed of commissioned texts to contextualise the market by weaving together references from various fields. These include celebrating the value system of TransActing, especially its critique econometrics. Closely connected to the latter, which was occasioned by Critical Practice’s tenth anniversary, is the subsequent paper's consideration of invisible, feminized labour, which is as undervalued as it is indispensable to cultural production. Taking a slightly different tack is the use of architectural theory (past and present) to trace the transforming nature of the public market, especially as an arena of consumerism. This is followed by an account that looks at the experience of TransActing from the perspective of its local currency. This story is followed by a conversation on the art market and/or the markets of art. This brings the reader to a manifesto-like text that calls for solidarity through publishing, understood as the co-production of meaning through a distributed social process. The penultimate contribution to this collection considers TransActing as a built environment with reference to the market’s shelters and platforms. Finally, a glossary rounds off and opens up the publication as a resource. This compilation of key terms adds nuance to the language used throughout this publication to indicate its resonance in the discourse of Critical Practice.
The collection aims to prioritize practice-based insights as an alternative to knowledge-based ones. In this way the book aims to be a refreshing take, one that moves art-research discussions beyond the creation of knowledge. As such, this book will appeal to all those involved in the ‘research turn’ in contemporary cultural production, including those working in institutions and organizations, especially ones with strong community engagement programmes, as well as independent practitioners working in social and socially engaged practice.
Primary readership will be practitioners of art, design, curating and architecture and students studying in these fields. The secondary audience will include cultural producers, theorists, educators and others who are interested in how art and other forms of creative practice can challenge the ‘usual’ financial circuits of value and open up alternatives.
Patchwork
Essays & Interviews on Caribbean Visual Culture
The patchwork is an apt metaphor for the region not only because of its colourfulness and the making of something whole out of fragments but as an attempt to make coherence out of disorder. The seeking of coherence was the exact process of putting together this book and foregrounds the process of Caribbean societies forging identity and identities out of plural and at times conflicting and contested groups that came to call the region home.
Within the metaphor of the patchwork however is the question, where are the vernacular needlework artists within the visual art tradition of the Caribbean? The introduction sets out to both clarify and rectify this situation, and several common themes flow through the following essays and interviews. Themes include that that the land and colonization remain baseline issues for several Caribbean artists who stage and restage the history of conquest and empire in varying ways. That artists in the region amalgamate as part of their practice and seem to prefer an open-endedness to art making as opposed to expressing fidelity to a particular medium. That artists and scholars alike are dismantling long-held perceptions of what Caribbean art is thought to be, and are challenging boundaries in Caribbean art.
These are among the issues addressed in the book as it looks at ecological concerns and questions of sustainability, how the practices of the artists and their art defy the easy categorization of the region, and the placement of women in the visual art ecology of the Caribbean. The latter is one of the most contested areas of the book. Readers should come away with the sense that questions of race, colour, and class loom large within questions of gender in the Jamaican art scene and that the book, dedicated to Sane Mae Dunkley, aims to insert vernacular needleworkers into the visual art scene in both Jamaica and the larger Caribbean.
Audience will include researchers and scholars of Caribbean and African diasporic art, college students, those interested in post-colonial studies, Caribbean artists, art professionals interested in a wider, globalized view of contemporary art; students curious to know about the many phases of art production throughout the Caribbean. General readers interested in the culture of the region.
Design for the New World
From Human Design to Planet Design
Design for the New World aims to introduce a new paradigm in design and design thinking, by shifting our approach from a human perspective that is primarily focused on human scales, needs, and desires, to a planet perspective, in which design is guided by the ambition to create a balanced coexistence between humans and the other species that make up the global ecosystem.
The book intervenes in current discussions within design research about what role design can play in the sustainable transition, by offering new methods and mindset to handle the giant-scale complexity of the climate and environmental crisis, as well as specific tools to turn these theoretical reflections into a transformative practice.
Essential reading for researchers, students, and practitioners in the fields of design, innovation, development, entrepreneurship, leadership, art, and creativity. The book is structured so that it can be easily used in an educational context, both at under- and postgraduate level and in courses of business, innovation, or management training. The practical suggestions and process-management tools can be used to facilitate sustainable transformations in in commercial businesses, organizations, and political networks.
Written in an accessible and clear style, where all technical terms are fully introduced and unpacked. The chapters can be read in order or independently, and the practical tools for facilitating processes of change are supplemented with additional questions for reflection and further development.
Design for the New World
From Human Design to Planet Design
Design for the New World aims to introduce a new paradigm in design and design thinking, by shifting our approach from a human perspective that is primarily focused on human scales, needs, and desires, to a planet perspective, in which design is guided by the ambition to create a balanced coexistence between humans and the other species that make up the global ecosystem.
The book intervenes in current discussions within design research about what role design can play in the sustainable transition, by offering new methods and mindset to handle the giant-scale complexity of the climate and environmental crisis, as well as specific tools to turn these theoretical reflections into a transformative practice.
Essential reading for researchers, students, and practitioners in the fields of design, innovation, development, entrepreneurship, leadership, art, and creativity. The book is structured so that it can be easily used in an educational context, both at under- and postgraduate level and in courses of business, innovation, or management training. The practical suggestions and process-management tools can be used to facilitate sustainable transformations in in commercial businesses, organizations, and political networks.
Written in an accessible and clear style, where all technical terms are fully introduced and unpacked. The chapters can be read in order or independently, and the practical tools for facilitating processes of change are supplemented with additional questions for reflection and further development.
The Performing Observer
Essays on Contemporary Art, Performance and Photography
The Performing Observer is a collection of short, critical writings on contemporary art, performance, and photography written over the course of the past two decades. These texts were originally published in a variety of settings, including art magazines and exhibition catalogues, online journals and websites.
A wide range of global practitioners are analysed, from emerging to established artists. As the title suggests, Patrick feels that he is simultaneously performing a role while observing and writing about the field. The intention is to present a well-informed but jargon free survey of many significant developments in contemporary art and culture. Among the artists discussed are: Francis Alÿs, Laurie Anderson, Chris Burden, William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol.
The book examines an important series of interconnected contemporary art practices. Layering writings on performance-based work, material forms and photography, it positions performance within a larger context. The artists selected are genuinely international with a strong focus on the southern hemisphere, and are grouped together in sections Patrick calls Performance, Photography, Publicness, Video, Books and Exhibitions.
It aims to make sense of a specific modality of art making with an interesting - and to a degree unspoken - interest in art writing itself. Both elements are compelling separately but especially so together.
Accessibly written and especially approachable for a range of interested readers. It offers scholarly and critical depth while retaining a writing style that will appeal beyond a strictly scholarly audience. It will appeal to readers closely involved in contemporary art theory and practice, whether students, artists, academics or simply curious to know more.
Under the Counter
Britain’s Trade in Hardcore Pornographic 8mm Films
Prior to 2000, it was a criminal offence to sell hardcore pornography in Britain. Despite this, there was a thriving alternative economy producing and distributing such material “under the counter” of Soho’s bookshops and via mail-order. British entrepreneurs circumvented obscenity laws to satisfy the demand for uncensored adult films and profit from their enterprise, with the corrupt Obscene Publications Squad permitting them to trade.
By the late 1960s, Britain had developed an international reputation for producing ‘rollers’, short films distributed on 8mm, which were smuggled out of Britain for sale in Western Europe. Following an exposé by Britain’s tabloid press, a crackdown on police corruption and several high-profile obscenity trials, the trade was all but decimated, with pornography smuggled in from Europe dominating the market.
Under the Counter is the first book of its kind to investigate Britain’s trade in illicit pornographic 8mm film. Drawing on extensive archival research, including the use of legal records, police files, media reportage, and interviews with those who were involved in the business, Under the Counter tells the story of Britain’s trade in 8mm hardcore pornographic films and its regulation, incorporating ideas from cultural studies, political economy, history and criminology.
Under the Counter is a scholarly monograph that will be of interest to researchers across a wide range of disciplines and will be of use to students at undergraduate, Masters level and PhD.
The book will be of particular relevance to students and researchers interested in the study of pornography, sexual cultures, illicit media enterprise and entrepreneurship, but also those with an interest in film production and distribution, particularly within a British context. The theoretical frameworks that underpin the book mean that researchers with an interest in the creative industries will be able to make use of it and the book makes a contribution to media and cultural history.
It is suitable for use on university courses relating to these specific areas, specifically media and communication, film studies, creative industries, and potentially on criminology or socio-legal studies, given the books attention to obscenity law and regulation of illicit practices.
Leaping into Dance Literacy through the Language of Dance®
The main aim of this book is to present the theory and purpose underpinning the approaches to dance literacy as explored by the Language of Dance® community in the USA and UK. Through their teacher training programs, they are changing the face of dance-based dance literacy using motif notation.
Through their teacher training programs, they are changing the face of dance-based dance literacy using motif notation. This book reveals how dance notation literacy has changed due to practices being focused on constructivist and constructionist pedagogy. Based on work by dance educator Ann Hutchinson Guest and expanded upon by her protégés, this is the first book of its kind to bring together theory, praxis, original research outcomes, taxonomies, model lesson plans, learning domain taxonomies of dance, and voices of dance teachers who have explored using dance notation literacy. We are in a new era for educating with dance notation, focusing on learners’ engagement by making connections between the learning domains using constructivist and constructionist learning approaches.
Arts-literate dancers can deepen their dance craft and transfer their arts knowledge, capacities, and skills to lifelong learning. Dance-based dance literacy practices using notation enhance learners’ flexibility, adaptability, self-direction, initiative, productivity, responsibility, leadership, and cross-cultural skills.
The book will appeal to dance educators focusing on cognitive and metacognitive learning in dance using communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking.
Useful for preschool and primary teachers aiming to integrate dance into classroom experiences and for secondary teachers teaching dance and looking to upgrade their approach to dance literacy so students are able to achieve higher level cognitive learning, problem solving, and social skills in dance classrooms.
Choreographers and dance teachers will find new approaches to dance making and to expressing their craft using a system that is well codified and now augmented with examples to guide them with making their own projects and processes.
Anyone with an interest in the idea of dance literacy will find concrete examples of how to put their knowledge into practice to advance their teaching and dance making.
Performing Institutions
Contested Sites and Structures of Care
Performing Institutions: Contested Sites and Structures of Care builds upon scholarly work rooted in the social and cultural histories of education, self-organization, activist practices, performance, design, and artistic research, (at)tending to the ways that institutions are necessarily political and performed.
By evoking the idea of Performing Institutions, it foregrounds all kinds of ‘actors’ that engage with (re)imagining creative practices - social, artistic, and pedagogical - that critically interact with institutional frameworks and the broader local and global society of which these institutions are part.
With case studies and critical reflections from Denmark, Ireland, Finland, the UK, Canada, the USA, Chile, Asia and Australasia contributors show how they envision or pursue performing artistic, cultural, social and educational practices as caring engagements with contested sites, addressing the following questions. How do current institutions perform – academically, spatially, custodially and structurally? How might we stay engaged with the ways that institutions are inherently contested sites, and what role do care, and counter-hegemonic practices play in rearticulating other ways of performing institutions, and how they perform on us?
These are the questions central to this book as it stages a productive tension between two main themes: structures of care (instituting otherwise) and sites of contestations (desiring change).
Some of the texts in this collection stage a productive tension between ideas about caring contestations and contestation as a caring engagement in practice, with a view towards institutional transformation. Other contributors investigate the idea of caring contestations as a critical concept that draws attention to questions of power and to the exclusions produced and reproduced in and through specific institutional practices. As such, this collection of writing puts forward caring contestations as a critical mode for (re)enacting institutional engagements. This also brings forward questions of agency and how, for those of us who perform within institutional structures, we care to engage and/or contest those institutional engagements.
It is primarily aimed at scholars, educators, research-practitioners and postgraduate students in the fields of performance studies, theory, creation and design, those working at art institutions and art schools Also relevant to researchers working across various fields of organizational as well as educational approaches to performance culture.
Fan Phenomena: Disney
Fan Phenomena: Disney collects essays on Disney fans, spanning a variety of media (such as film, television, novels, stage productions and theme parks) and different fannish approaches (cosplay, fan art), as well as the company's reactions to them.
It is a timely intervention that deals with crucial issues such as race and racism within the Disney fandom and in Disney texts, the role of queerness, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the advent of the streaming service Disney+.
The authors come from variety of disciplines, such as cultural and media studies, marketing and communications, cultural history or theatre and performance studies, and include both leading experts in fan and Disney studies, as well as emerging voices in these fields, plus interviews with fan practitioners.
It will be popular with scholars of cultural studies, cultural history, media studies, fan studies; Disney fans, and students at any level