Browse Books

Effective Journalism
How the Information Ecosystem Works and What Journalists Should Do About It
This book provides journalists and the public with a broad overview of all the ways modern communication technologies and information approaches make it difficult for people to effectively find and interpret information and what they can do about it. The public may have a general awareness that things like confirmation bias content algorithms and the backfire effect exist and can influence their behaviour but this book will explain them in one place in plain language. Journalists likewise know that their audiences are dealing with some of these issues but continue to operate under the assumption that if they just publish facts the truth will win out in the court of public opinion.
The central argument of the book is that journalists and audiences can no longer afford to pretend that all information is competing on an even playing field and that it is enough for journalists to simply publish “the facts.” Just as behavioural economics provided a new way of thinking about economics one that understood people as non-rational actors this book attempts to explain the reality rather than the ideal of how people seek and process information and what journalists and their audiences can do to try to create an informed public in the face of that reality.
For many American journalists their work and their responsibility to the public is grounded in the concept of a marketplace of ideas. Journalists believe they should just report the facts as neutrally as possible and let the public judge those facts and put them in context. The marketplace of ideas requires individuals to rationally consider the information that is presented to them and weigh it against other available information. Through this process bad ideas will be judged and dismissed and good ideas will win out. We might like to believe that we are all capable of carefully and rationally evaluating information but the evidence is clear that it is simply not true. If it were true we would not observe such things as the continued persistence of flat-Earthers and moon-landing sceptics and others who champion backward social ideas that were dismissed decades or even centuries ago. The fact that these ideas continue to persist tells us that the public is not engaging in a clear-eyed rational consideration of all the available verified facts.

Walking in Art Education
Ecopedagogical and A/r/tographical Encounters
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.

Applied Theatre, Third Edition
International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice
Applied Theatre was the first collection to assist practitioners and students in developing critical frameworks for their own community-based theatrical projects. The editors draw on thirty case studies in applied theatre from fifteen countries—covering a wide range of disciplines from theatre studies to education medicine and law—and collect essential readings to provide a comprehensive survey of the field.
Infused with a historical and theoretical overview of practical theatre Applied Theatre offers clear developmental approaches and models for practical application.
This third edition offers refreshed case studies from many countries worldwide that provide exemplars for the practice of applied theatre. The book will be useful to both instructors and students in its focus on providing clear introductory chapters that lay out the scope of the field dozens of case studies in all areas of the field and a new chapter on responses to the global pandemic of 2020.
Also includes a new section on representation in its final chapter looking at the issues of how we represent ourselves and others on stage.

Fashion Projects
15 Years of Fashion in Dialogue
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.

Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear
Tribal Streetwear is lifestyle streetwear brand that seeks to represent a variety of southern California sub-cultures that includes graffiti street art skateboarding surfing tattoos hip hop breakdancing punk lowriders and custom culture. Based in San Diego California Tribal has strong Chicano roots in its aesthetic and spans the globe with retail stores on several continents.
The text presents a series of articles essays and personal reflections that explore the various dimensions of Tribal Streetwear and how the impact of their designs continues to balance the precarious act of being relevant and responsible with their resources.
The book is divided into four sections.
Section 1 features essays that set a context for the text. This includes a history of Tribal and where it fits within the history of streetwear a personal narrative of the founding of Tribal and lastly an essay on the uniqueness of southern California aesthetics and the fascination with this southern California inspired fashion.
Section 2 is a series of interviews with notable artists musicians and cultural tastemakers that have contributed toward street culture and Tribal. These include Mr. Cartoon (tattoo artist) RISK (graffiti artist) PERSUE (street artists) Mike Giant (tattoo artist) Dyse One (graffiti artist) Craig Craig Stecyk III (skateboard culture) Bob Hurley (surf culture) and the Beastie Boys (hip hop).
Section 3 includes a series of invited and peer-reviewed academic articles on distinct subjects within the street culture genre that further dive into the inputs and influences of Tribal Streetwear. They include breakdancing surfing skateboarding graffiti street art tattooing music (hip-hop/punk) lowriders custom culture and Chicano Studies.
Section 4 is a series of photo essays that capture the three decades of Tribal Streetwear and serves as a visual history of the brand and the evolution of its graphics.

Art from Your Core
A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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.

Art, Sustainability and Learning Communities
Call to Action
By engaging with education contemporary art and global sustainability goals this book connects the artistic way of communication with ecological obligations and social issues and promotes a sense of active citizenship. International empirical and curricular research presents a case for strong learning communities that take a clear political stand in favour of socially engaged art pedagogies.
The main aim of is to show how shared spaces for exchange in the fields of art education and continuous professional development can reflect inspire and integrate sustainability principles that are becoming crucial in today’s world. The authors propose the idea that coordinated action can lead to a more sustainable future by promoting a sense of community lifelong learning and confidence in the possibility of changing current conditions.
Its three parts combine expertise in visual arts education education for sustainable development contemporary art practice and sustainability activism. While Part I focuses on literature in the field and the interrelation of different disciplines Part II provides concrete examples of professional learning communities and pedagogies that can be used to enrich the field of art education. Finally Part III presents brief case studies illustrating international projects by contemporary artists curators environmentalists and others providing educators with several inspirational models of concrete and creative action.

The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood
Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity
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.

The Urban Refugee
Space, Agency, and the New Urban Condition
The presence of the refugee in the contemporary metropolis is marked by precarity a quality that has become a characteristic feature of the neoliberal urban milieu. Bringing together essays from diverse disciplines from architectural history to cultural anthropology and urban planning this collection sheds light on both the specificities of the contemporary urban condition that affects the refugees and the multi-dimensional impact that the refugees have on the city. The authors propose investigating this connection through three interlinked themes: identity (informality imagination and belonging); place (transnational homemaking practices); and site (the navigation of urban space).
In recent years there has been a significant growth in scholarship on forced migration particularly on the relationship between displacement and the built environment. Scholars have focused on spatial practices and forms that arise under conditions of displacement with much attention given to refugee camps and the social and political aspects of temporariness. While these issues are important the essays in this volume aim to contribute to a less explored aspect of displacement namely the interaction between refugees and the cities they inhabit. In this respect the volume underlines the specificity of the urban refugee as well as their spatial agency and investigates the irreversible effect they have on the contemporary urban condition.
The authors argue that viewing urban refugees solely as dislocated individuals outside the camp-like spaces of containment fails to understand the agency of the urban refugee and the blurred boundaries of identity that result. The term "refugee crisis" objectifies and denies active agency to refugees homogenizing dislocated individuals and groups. The neoliberalization of the past four decades has led to the precarization of labour and the displacement of refugees who frequently blend into the urban environment as hidden populations. Refugees are subjected to constant surveillance and the state's attempts to control them. However these attempts are not uncontested and the involvement of activist interventions further politicizes the urban refugee.

LIFE
A Transdisciplinary Inquiry
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

An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Performance Art
SELF/s
This original and unique new book takes an integrated approach to interrogating the experience and location of the self/s within the context of performance art practice. In its framing and execution of practical exercises and focused snapshots of internationally recognized performance practice Bacon situates their argument within the boundaries of specialism in the critical curation of performance art praxis as well as contemporary phenomenological scholarship.
Introducing the study and application of performance art through phenomenology for radical artists educators and practitioner-researchers; this exciting new book invites readers to take part explore contemporary performance art and activate their own practices.
Applying a queer phenomenology to unpack the importance of a multiplicity of Self/s the book guides readers to be academically rigorous when capturing embodied experiences featuring exercises to activate their practices and clear introductory definitions to key phenomenological terms. Includes interviews and insights from some of the best examples of transgressive performance art practice of this century help to help unpack the application of phenomenology as Bacon calls for a queer reimagining of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’
This is an important contribution to the field and will be welcomed by performance artists and academics interested in performance. It may also appeal to those teaching concepts of phenomenology.
It will be relevant to students of performance as well as to artists audiences and museum goers. The approachable layout and clear authorial voice will add to the appeal for students early career researchers and mean that it has strong potential for inclusion in undergraduate and postgraduate syllabi within the field.

Performance Art in Practice
Pedagogical Approaches
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.

A/r/tography
Essential Readings and Conversations
The focus of this edited book is to evoke and provoke conceptual conversations between early a/r/tographic publications and the contemporary scholarship of a/r/tographers publishing and producing today. Working around four pervasive themes found in a/r/tographic literature this volume addresses relationality and renderings ethics and embodiment movement and materiality and propositions and potentials.
In doing so it advances concepts that have permeated a/r/tographic literature to date. More specifically the volume simultaneously offers a site where key historical works can easily be found and at the same time offer new scholarship that is in conversation with these historical ideas as they are discussed expanded and changed within contemporary contexts. The organizing themes offer conceptual pivots for thinking through how a/r/tography was first conceptualized and how it has evolved and how it might further evolve.
Thus this edited book affords an opportunity for all those working in and through a/r/tography to offer refined revised revisited or new conceptual understandings for contemporary scholarship and practice.
Part of the Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education series.

The Making of Modern Muslim Selves through Architecture
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.

Fighting for the Soul of General Practice
The Algorithm Will See You Now
This collection of stories from two practising GPs describes the reality of working within a failing and highly bureaucratic system where there is a balancing act: regulation versus relationships; autonomy versus standard practice; algorithm versus individual attention.
We aren’t suggesting a return to a ‘better’ time. We don’t object to being bureaucrats embedded within and accountable to the systems we are in. But we do want to consider how and with what the gap left by the old-fashioned GP has been filled. We use stories based on our experience to describe the effect of different facets of bureaucracy on our ability to maintain a nuanced individualised approach to each patient and encounter; and to question the prominence and effect of protocol. We are interested in the way professional relationships are influenced by protocol: between and within organisations; and most importantly with patients/clients/service users..
We are accustomed nowadays to automated telephone lines chatbots website FAQs- the frustration of being unable to connect with another human being who will listen to our particular question and give us something other than a generic answer. The same issues that are facing society at large have changed the way in which we work as GPs and the care we give.

Drawing, Well-being and the Exploration of Everyday Place
228 Sketches of Clifton Street
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.

Throbbing Gristle
An Endless Discontent
In 1976 the British band Throbbing Gristle emerged from the radical arts collective COUM Transmissions through core members Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti joined by Hipgnosis photographer Peter Christopherson and electronics specialist Chris Carter. Though having performed previously in more low-key arts environments their major launch coincided with the COUM retrospective exhibition Prostitution at London’s ICA gallery showcasing and contextualising an array of challenging objects from COUM’s various actions in performance art and pornography. In a deliberately curated strategy inviting press civic and arts dignitaries extravagant followers of the nascent punk scene and music journalists the band created an instant controversy and media panic that tapped into the restrictive climate and encroaching conservatism of late 1970s Britain. Any opportunities that were being explored by a formative punk ethos and movement around sex censorship and transgression were amplified and exposed by Throbbing Gristle and Prostitution. An outraged Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn took the bait and called the ensemble the ‘wreckers of civilisation’ providing the suitable newspaper headline that would be followed a month later by ‘the filth and the fury’ as the Sex Pistols uttered strong profanities on live television.
The switch from COUM to Throbbing Gristle encompassed a primary mode of expression in making music as opposed to art to further coincide with the energy of the nascent punk scene. The band quickly developed a radically deviant and challenging reputation through pushing the punk format past its strictures in terms of lyrical themes amateurism and considerations of what constitutes music. Through a handful or record releases on their own label Industrial Records and a sporadic string of live performances the band nurtured a strong and devoted following including key journalists and fanzine editors of the punk and post-punk scenes such as Jon Savage and Sandy Robertson. The band’s style of exploring harsh pre-recorded sounds samples of disconcerting narrative and conversation and feeding all sounds through messy electronic processing devices gave rise to the title industrial music. This was further buttressed by performing a strictly timed set of one hour and adopting a non-rockstar mode by appearing disinterested and preoccupied with electronic devices. Having given a name and impetus to the industrial music scene many of their followers and fans formed bands in later years.
Drawing on works such as Andy Bennett’s When the Lights Went Out this book looks at late 1970s Britain before during and immediately after the Winter of Discontent to situate the activism of Throbbing Gristle in this time. It explores how the band worked in and against the time and how they worked in and against punk as punk worked in and against the time and place. Punk acts as a mediating factor and nuisance value as Throbbing Gristle emerged with punk in late 1976 seemingly grappled with it through 1977 and then went on to create and eventually criticise a number of post-punk scenes that had flourished around 1979. Trowell narrates the story through a series of live performances as this is a point where Throbbing Gristle interact with the various city-scenes around England during their original period of operation (1975-1981). The band reflected (and incorporated into their live music) key tropes form the time both ‘mainstream’ and fringe (subcultural avant-garde art counter-culture taboo subjects extremes) such that Throbbing Gristle events had an impact and affect and Trowell traces these as a series of impressions and reverberations amongst fans who went on to do their own music and projects.

Media Materialities
Form, Format, and Ephemeral Meaning
Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats materiality and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured transformed and redefined through changing social cultural and technological values.
Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film board games maps videogames cassette tapes transistor radios and Twitter amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context.
We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media culture and society.

Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life
Critical Intersections and Creative Practice
This collection explores critical and visual practices through the lens of interactions and intersections between pattern and chaos. The dynamic of the inter-relationship between pattern and chaos is such as to challenge disciplinary boundaries critical frameworks and modes of understanding perception and communication often referencing the in-between territory of art and science through experimentation and visual scrutiny. A territory of 'pattern-chaos' or 'chaos-pattern' begins to unfold.
Drawing upon fields such as visual culture sociology physics neurobiology linguistics or critical theory for example contributors have experimented with pattern and/or chaos-related forms processes materials sounds and language or have reflected on the work of other artists scientists and scholars. Diagrams tessellations dust knots mazes folds creases flux virus fire and flow are indicative of processes through which pattern and chaos are addressed.
The contributions are organized into clusters of subjects which reflect the interdisciplinary terrain through a robust yet also experimental arrangement. These are 'Pattern Dynamics' 'Morph Flux Mutate' 'Decompose Recompose' 'Virus; Social Imaginary' and 'Nothings in Particular'.

Women's Work in Post-war Italy
An Oral and Filmic History
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.