Browse Books

Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective
Constellating performance archives
Taking as its starting point the first-ever retrospective exhibition (2021) of performance art icon Jess Dobkin, the book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as performer, activist, curator, and community leader. At the same time, it grapples with a question that is vital for art and performance studies: How do archives perform?
More than a discrete showing of a single artist’s work, the exhibition, including its new staging in book form, is a large-scale research experiment in performance curation, investigating what it might mean for art institutions to take seriously the embodied and communal nature of performance art in their practices of archiving and museological display.
In Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective, a cast of renowned international performance theorists and artists dive into this exploration alongside Dobkin, curator Emelie Chhangur, and performance theorist and dramaturg Laura Levin. These contributions appear alongside a riot of full colour photographs, providing access to Dobkin’s celebrated artistic productions from the last 30 years.

Call Me by Your Name
Perspectives on the Film
Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release.
A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and set in 1983 ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’, Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures, prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen, its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative, thematic and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity.
This edited collection addresses how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general, between the open and the hidden, and between the past and the present? The contributors to the collection explore these questions in stimulating and contemplative manners.

In Smithereens
The Costume Remains of Lea Anderson's Stage
What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilised towards representational repair, post-performance? Located within Lea Anderson’s choreographic archive, this book charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centred on practices of Disintegration, Preservation, Transaction and Display, they offer provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance, the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work, and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.
How might we regard these mercurial items? As precious relics to be protected in museum holdings, ghostly harbingers of residual performance histories, or inconvenient detritus? The book travels from props-makers’ studios to auction houses and galleries, incorporating film-making, artefact handling and curation along the way, in lively dialogue with perspectives from dance history, material culture, sociology and performance studies. The choreographic archive is envisioned as repository of the awkward, scattered remains of legacy blown apart into fragments. Smithereens, which can, if we allow them, demand an alternative after-life that disrupts the vanishing inflicted on these costumes and the companies who danced in them.

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.

Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art
Some have called this an age of absurdity, and as such Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art presents the contributions of artists, theorists, and scholars whose words and works investigate the absurd as a condition of, a tactic for, and a subject in the contemporary.
The absurd is a lens on the disturbances of our moment and a challenge to the propositions about and solutions for the world. The absurd shakes off the paralysis that what we know must be the only thing we (re)produce. Those willing to recognize that and confront it, rather than flee from it, are thereby introduced to the political writ large.
This edited collection adopts ideas and practices associated with the absurd to explain how the contemporary moment is absurd and how absurdity is a useful, potentially radical tool within the contemporary.
Critical art allows the absurd a space within which audiences can observe their own tendencies and assumptions. The absurd in art reveals our inculcation into hegemonic belief structures and the necessity to question the systems to which we subscribe. Today we see the absurd in memes, performative politics, and art, expressing the
confusion and disorientation wrought by the endless, emerging crises of our 24/7 relations.

Obsessions of a Showwoman
The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky
Explores ‘showwomanry’ tracing a trajectory of incredible, weird women at work: women who were stone eaters, fire walkers, women who hypnotized alligators, or presented crucifixion shows; women in entertainment who worked for themselves; women that were often referred to as showgirls, despite their extraordinary skill and artistry.
Carnesky continues an important lineage of performing women with bombastic theatrical flair and an extraordinary skill that ‘do not work for the management or the man. Showwomen work for themselves and other people work for them”. Carnesky has been a central figure in performance and live art during the last thirty years; her practice as a showwoman promotes alternative visions of matriarchal entertainment utopias and a new relationship to women’s position to power and politics.
The term showwoman introduces a new identity, a new kind of performer who does not control or exploit others, but opens up a possibility for collaboration that enables ‘shared experiences of visceral euphoria, applause, loss, shape, abjection, hustle and struggle, marginalisation and the fight against patriarchal injustices’ (Carnesky,
2019, 53). The book will use Carnesky’s work to showcase women working in radical ways, treading the margins of cabaret and live art, disrupting normative ideologies through the spectacular and opening new lines of feminist enquiry through weirdness, absurdity, provocation in live art and popular culture.

The Physical and the Digital City
Invisible Forces, Data, and Manifestations
The Physical and the Digital City is a unique collection of projects where researchers and designers show how the theories of technology underpinning the digital urban environment are applied in practical and spatial terms. The authors are experts in their respective fields, who pursue cutting edge solutions for city-making and consider the theoretical premise critically. It is designed to be a self-contained and interdisciplinary reference text to introduce students, designers and scholars to the idea of physical/digital and its urban application.
The book will help students and designers to develop a clear understanding of the physical and digital principles underpinning urban assemblages and a solid set of references to start working within this topic with confidence. Of interest to all students and scholars interested in urban studies (geography, planning, urban design, social sciences and humanities) and human-computer interaction (media studies, computer science, social sciences, cognitive sciences, anthropology and psychology). The book will clarify the role of digital technologies within the city, along with its possible implications for people and communities.
It is oriented to the academic and professional communities interested in architectural, urban and digital design from different angles. This includes those interested in computational architecture, for example, eCAADe Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe, ACADIA Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture, CAADRIA Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia, SIGraDi Sociedad Iberoamericana de Grafica Digital, CAAD Futures Foundation as well as those interested in the human-computer interaction.

Entangled Histories of Art and Migration
Theories, Sites and Research Methods
Dedicated to the stories of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles, this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art, art practices, activism, reception, and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration, flight, and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts - the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
These entanglements take centre stage when migration shapes forms and aesthetics (and vice versa), when actors employ image politics and visualisation strategies in and about migration at different times and places, or when materialities, sites, and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes.
Giving space to these stories of art and migration and its power of pluriverse knowledge production, the book takes an art and cultural studies perspective and questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration and elaborates on new or different theory formation. Bringing together its case studies and theoretical approaches, the argumentation unfolds over the five sections of the book Visibilities | Invisibilities, Sites | Spaces, Materiality | Materialisation, Racism | Resistance and Practices | Performativity.

Consent Practices in Performing Arts Education
This book explores consent as a foundational principle to guide practices and policies in university level performing arts education. It includes descriptions of the structural power dynamics present in educational spaces as well as tools for defusing them. It adapts the consent-forward protocols that are foundational to intimacy training in order to apply them to classroom and rehearsal spaces across performing arts disciplines.
This includes opening lines of communication, actively discussing personal boundaries and modeling behavior that respects those boundaries. Additionally, the book uses experiential reflections to address the real-world challenges that teachers face as they work to reshape their teaching habits and processes to include consent practices.

Digital Embodiment and the Arts
Exploring Hybrid Spaces through Emerging Technologies
A timely examination of the use of emerging technologies in the arts in recent decades, from the first wave of Virtual Reality through to the current use of Mixed, Augmented and Extended Realities. It highlights the necessity of understanding technological experiences through the assumption that all experience is embodied. An explosion of digital culture and experience has most certainly given artists and creative practitioners new ways of exploring a hybridisation of creative practices with access to technological tools only previously dreamt of. Further, there are a number of threads around digital embodiment and its centrality to the digital experience.
The book is divided into 3: Section 1 explores the whole notion of embodied experience through a study of space and virtuality, imagination, and technology. Section 2 lays the ground for a more explicit understanding of the role the body has in our engagement with the digital technologies focussing on three distinct bodies: the gravitational body, the virtual body, and finally the hybrid body. Section 3 is split into three chronological chapters in terms of technological developments, that of VR, Virtual Worlds, and Augmented, Mixed, and Extended Realities.
While individual aspects and themes covered here can be found in some recent books, there is little that places digital embodiment within the arts in the way this book does. A unique synthesis.

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

Becoming a Visually Reflective Practitioner
An Integrated Self-Study Model for Professional Practice
Professional practice is increasingly becoming more complex, demanding, dynamic and diverse. This important and original new book considers how self-study using arts-based methods can enable purposeful reflection toward understanding and envisioning professional practice. Ideally for visual arts practitioners on all levels, this book presents a self-study model grounded in compelling research that highlights arts-based methods for examining four areas of professional practice: professional identities, work cultures, change and transitions and envisioning new pathways.
Chapters address the components of the self-study model, artistic methods and materials, and strategies for interpreting self-study written and visual outcomes with the aim of goal setting. Each chapter includes visuals, references and end-of-chapter prompts to engage readers in critical and visual reflection. Appendices offer resources and guidelines for creating and assessing self-study outcomes.
The fluctuating nature of professional practice necessitates the pursuit of discernment and clarity that can be achieved through an ongoing reflective practice. Self-study is a systematic and flexible methodology for purposeful reflection on professional practice that embraces dialogic, interpretive, rhizomatic and visual inquiry. Self-study can occur at any level of practice and in the context of work-related professional development, formal study or as a self-initiated inquiry. An arts-based self-study model for visual arts practitioners is explored and focuses on four intersectional components shaping professional practice: professional identities, work cultures and communities, transition and change within professional practice and envisioning new pathways for professional practice.
The self-study model is grounded in contemporary theory, practice and compelling research, and embraces robust strategies for understanding the complexities of professional practice that can include dual, multiple, overlapping, hybrid and conflicting professional identities, tensions within work cultures and unexpected changes within professional practice. Each chapter focuses on a component of the self-study model and an area of professional practice, concluding with references and end-of-chapter prompts that are aimed to facilitate critical reflection-on-practice and the creation of written and visual responses.
With visual arts practitioners in mind, various arts-based methods for self-study are discussed that highlight visual journaling as a key method for engaging in self-study. Interpretive research methods are discussed to guide readers in understanding the phases and processes for interpreting written and visual self-study outcomes. Processes are outlined to help readers determine key insights, themes, issues and questions from their self-study outcomes, how to use them in formulating new questions and articulating new professional goals. Several levels for interpretation are presented to offer readers options relative to their professional needs and aims.
Throughout the text, charts and visuals serve to summarize and visualize key chapter points. Images by visual arts practitioners appear throughout the text and represent a wide range of artistic media, methods and approaches appropriate for self-study. The appendices provide additional resources for enhanced understanding of chapter concepts and key terms, guidelines and rubrics for writing reflections, creating visual responses and using a visual journal in the self-study process.
Primary readership will be visual arts practitioners at all levels. Ideal for university level graduate courses or as a guide for individuals and small groups of practitioners who seek to engage in arts-based self-study as professional development.

From Broadway to The Bronx
New York City’s History through Song
The depiction of New York City in song across a variety of different genres, focusing on jazz genres, as well as the work of both New York born artists like Billy Joel or Lin-Manuel Miranda and artists living most of their life in New York City like Shinehead or Debbie Harry, that are intimately connected with the city.
The book analyzes songs written about New York City, and engage with the depiction of the city within them, but mainly use it as a way to deal with several musical genres that the city has been home to, and instrumental in developing. These include the musical theatre scene on Broadway and beyond, but also early 20th century sheet music, hip hop, disco, punk, dancehall, jazz, swing, rock or pop music. The collection includes essays from authors with a cultural studies, media studies, cultural history or musicology background, making possible a far-ranging treatment of the interconnection of the city space and its musical history.

Ethno Music Gatherings
Pedagogy, Experience, Impact
This book presents key findings from a 4-year project that sought to understand Ethno Gatherings, an organized residential folk, world, and traditional music programme for young people aged 18-30. In response to three lines of enquiry, pedagogy and professional development, participant experience, and the impact it had upon those who attended, the authors examine the complexity of an Ethno music experience. By considering its history and current practices, the following themes are explored: non-formal music making, personal authenticity, holistic praxis, musical possible selves, intercultural music exchange, sustainability, social media engagement, song sharing, and future practices. Constructed through data drawn from participant observations, interviews, online social media analysis, onsite and video observations, surveys, and questionnaires the authors ask critical questions concerning Ethno’s history, ethos, pedagogy, and philosophical ideals. First held in Sweden in 1990, Ethno Gatherings are now located in over 40 countries worldwide and are part of JM Internationals youth music programmes. As a collection of integrated thought, the book’s purpose is to illuminate new understandings of what Ethno does to support its future growth and development.

Material Media-Making in the Digital Age
There is now no shortage of media for us to consume, from streaming services and video-on-demand to social media and everything else besides. This has changed the way media scholars think about the production and reception of media. Missing from these conversations, though, is the maker: in particular, the maker who has the power to produce media in their pocket.
How might one craft a personal media-making practice that is thoughtful and considerate of the tools and materials at one's disposal? This is the core question of this original new book. Exploring a number of media-making tools and processes like drones and vlogging, as well as thinking through time, editing, sound and the stream, Binns looks out over the current media landscape in order to understand his own media practice.
The result is a personal journey through media theory, history and technology, furnished with practical exercises for teachers, students, professionals and enthusiasts: a unique combination of theory and practice written in a highly personal and personable style that is engaging and refreshing.
This book will enable readers to understand how a personal creative practice might unlock deeper thinking about media and its place in the world.
The primary readership will be among academics, researchers and students in the creative arts, as well as practitioners of creative arts including sound designers, cinematographers and social media content producers.
Designed for classroom use, this will be of particular importance for undergraduate students of film production, and may also be of interest to students at MA level, particularly on the growing number of courses that specifically offer a blend of theory and practice. The highly accessible writing style may also mean that it can be taken up for high school courses on film and production.
It will also be of interest to academics delivering these courses, and to researchers and scholars of new media and digital cinema.

Ulrike Ottinger
Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination
The first English language scholarly collection of articles on the leading Berlin based German artist and film-maker Ulrike Ottinger. The articles engage with the full range of the works, from the early Berlin feature films of the 1970s and .'80s to the ethnographic documentaries also including the art exhibitions, photography shows, installations, and artist books. The book brings together feminist film theorists with art historians and cultural theorists, each with a distinctive and detailed perspective on the queer fabulist genres of Ottinger now in her 80s.

Socially Engaged Creative Practice
Contemporary Case Studies
This is the second book in the Performance and Communities series. An edited collection from academics and artists engages with both these notions of performance – that of identities in and through time and space - and of more formal instances of specific time-limited performances; textual, embodied, visual and communal.
Each chapter focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines and media – from community opera to online queer performance, from anti-racist class-room pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs, from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges, the performers, writers and creators represented here all engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problematic.
The personal perspective of each performer – directors, librettists, producers, writers, performers – is explicitly located in a community and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.

Modelling International Collaborations in Art Education
Based on over a decade of collective teaching, this volume explores the hybrid use of online and in-person collaboration as a means of offering international experience to university-level arts students. Chapters articulate a collective learning based on the experiences of the International Art Collaborations Network (INTAC), Collective Body group and related programs which the authors and contributors have participated in as educators and students.
Illustrated with photographs, screenshots and student projects, the book inspires reflection on teaching methodologies and student artmaking strategies across cultures and languages. Pedagogical and methodological topics trace an evolution of curricular approaches and use of evolving online platforms. Examples of themes and visual strategies demonstrate the power of student-directed collaborative learning. Diverse voices have been gathered through research conducted with educators and alumni connected to INTAC, providing perspectives on working collaboratively in a global context.
Student projects exemplify responses to the challenges of communication and creation that come with distanced artistic partnership. Chapters end with suggested points for conversation, whether between educators, students of art education or students entering collaborations. Although based on experiences in the visual arts, the ideas and methods are applicable to others engaging in inter-institutional education or online collaborative practices.
Fully illustrated with examples of collaborative art projects, photographs, screenshots, diagrams and posters.

The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine
Using both photographs and written narratives, The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine provides a depiction of the lives and struggles faced by Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territories on the West Bank, in particular the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley. It sheds light on issues including house demolitions, conflicts between Palestinian shepherds or farmers and Israeli settlers, soldiers, and police, the daily struggles brought about by the occupation's efforts to displace Palestinians from their land, and the resilience and bravery required to endure these conditions. This moving book conveys the beauty of the landscape, the essence of the language, the value of friendships, and the richness of a threatened way of life.
Voices of activists, both Palestinian and Jewish, are brought into focus. The historical context that generated present realities in Palestine is outlined briefly, as well as the history of the authors’ partnership. Their perspective mirrors extensive years of involvement in peace and human rights activism in Palestine. It also captures the ongoing dialogue between the two authors, who have experienced together the continually renewed astonishment that comes with such experiences and encounters.

Art Education in Canadian Museums
Practices in Action
This collection considers how Canadian art educators are engaging with a new range of approaches to museum education, and why educators are responding to 21st century challenges in ways that are unique to Canada.
Organized into three sections, this collection reconceptualizes museums to consider accessibility, differences in lived experiences, and how practices create impactful change.
With the overarching concept of relationality between art museums and interdisciplinary perspectives, authors consider methodological, philosophical, experiential and aesthetic forms of inquiry in regional museum contexts from coast-to-coast-to-coast that bring forward innovative theoretical standpoints with practice-based projects in museums, articulating how museums are shifting, and why museums are evolving as sites that mediate different and multiple knowledges for the future. Informed by social justice perspectives, and as catalysts for public scholarship, each chapter is passionate in addressing the mobilization of equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) in relation to practices in the field.
By weaving the learning potential of interacting with artworks more fully within situated and localized social and cultural communities, the authors present a distinct socio-political discourse at the heart of teaching and learning. Rupturing preconceived ideas and sedimentary models, they suggest a discourse of living futures is already upon us in museums and in art education.