Cultural Studies

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How is illness represented in today’s cultural texts? In Ghostbodies, Maia Dolphin-Krute argues that the illusive sick body is often made invisible – a ghost – because it does not always fit society’s definition of disability. In these pages, she reflectively engages in a philosophical discussion of the lived experience of illness alongside an examination of how language and cultural constructions influence and represent this experience in a variety of forms. The book provides a linguistic mirror through which the reader may see his or her own specific invalidity reflected, enabling an examination of what it is like to live within a ghostbody. In the end, Dolphin-Krute asks – if illness is not what it seems, what then is health?

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Professor Jin's new book, Global Technological Change: From Hard Technology to Soft Technology, is a powerful re-conceptualization of technological options and innovation management, which can help steer societies in assessing technologies for the 21st century. As Zhouying Jin correctly points out: in emerging knowledge societies, the "soft" technologies are drivers of physical "hard" technologies. These soft technologies include management, organizational design, education for creativity and entrepreneurship, good governance, preudent regulation, patent systems, efficient banking as well as fostering systems of thinking, ecological and cultural balance. This book is a major intellectual advance that can help clarify human choices for decades to come.

(Hazel Henderson, Advisory Council Member, US Office of Technology Assessment, National Science Foundation, National Academy of Engineering (1974-1980); President, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil); member, Club of Rome)

This volume indicates that the complex problems we are facing in the 21st Century can only be solved by a balance between 'yin-yang' environment, between hard technology (machine-centred) and soft technology (human-centred). This concept is invaluable as it conveys a new perspective of the assumptions about the relationships between technological innovation, institutional innovation as well as of the gap between the developed and developing countries at the turn of the millennium.

(Karamjit S Gill, Editor, AI & Society: Journal of Human-Centred Systems)

 

Most discussions of health care center on medical advances, cost, and the roles of insurers and government agencies. With The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, Alan Blum offers a new perspective, outlining a highly nuanced theoretical approach to health and health care alike. Drawing on a range of thinkers, Blum explains how our current understanding of health care tends to posit it as a sort of state of permanent emergency, like the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. To move beyond that, he argues, will require a complete rethinking of health and sickness, self-governance and negligence. A heady, cutting-edge intervention in a critical area of society, The Grey Zone of Health and Illness will have wide ramifications in the academy and beyond.

This collection of new essays addresses a topic of established and expanding critical interest throughout the humanities. It demonstrates that genre matters in a manner not constrained by disciplinary boundaries and includes new work on Genre Theory and applications of thinking about genre from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond. The essays focus on economies of expectation and competency, genre as media form, recent developments in television broadcast genres, translation and genericity, the role played by genre in film publicity, gender and genre, genre in fiction, and the problematics of classification. An introductory essay places the contributions in the context of a wide range of thinking about genre in the arts, media and humanities. The volume will be of interest to both undergraduates and postgraduates, especially those following courses on Genre Theory and Genre Criticism, and to academics working in a range of subject areas such as Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies and Literary Studies.