Cultural Studies
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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.
The Right Way uses the methods of design history material culture studies and the social construction of technology to analyse the domestic spaces and objects in the homes of the middle class in India. The book describes how people make meaning of the objects they buy own and gift.
This is a book about the biography of projects and objects. The projects in the book serve as book ends to a detailed and affectionate account of the biographies of objects within the homes of the not so rich.
The aim of the author has been to silence the voice of the designer to allow the accounts of objects to emerge as periodic irruptions that reveal a hidden maelstrom of passion ideas and failed projects. The book opens with the biography of a project dealing with waste leading the reader to a very particular kind of object the bads. This object is illicit handled by criminals and in the writing by the author serves to invert the dominant discourse of objects as commodities. This book makes the case that the program of design is better seen as a democratic community where the householders the zietgiest technology and all manner of hidden agents collide to allow unforseen periodic objects to emerge.
Varadarajam argues against a simplistic universal account off the way we think about how objects are designed. As an enterprise the book was a journey to assemble the evidence - of places and objects - and observe the enactment of practices with the objects. It was also a project of speculation upon the possible ways in which objects come to be as local collaborations of action.
This cultural history critically examines product design and its development from pre-industrial times to the present day considering major milestones in the mass production of goods and services aiming to incorporate a more inclusive worldview than traditional surveys of the topic.
The breadth and versatility of product design through history has been profound. Products have long supported the integration and interpretation of emerging technologies into our lives. These objects include everything from tools accessories furniture and clothing to types of transportation websites and mobile apps. Products provide singular or multiple functions are tangible and intangible and in many instances have impacted the quality of our lives by saving time or money or by increasing feelings of personal satisfaction. At the same time many products have negatively impacted people and the environment. For nearly every product that makes it into the hands of a consumer there is also a designer who created it and someone who laboured to make it.
Examines the relationship between products consumption sustainability politics and social movements. This "pocket history" surveys product design from the agricultural revolution and the birth of cities through industrialisation and a digital design revolution.
This edited collection will draw attention to how the mainstreamification of queer identities has crafted a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences.
Queer critics and queer theory as a whole tend to frame queer identities as marginal (Sedgwick 1990; Halberstam 2011) and these landmark scholars have cemented a foundational understanding of queerness that is now at odds with current shifts in media production. The chapters here will present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual genres and shows in an effort to reconsider the marginalisation of queerness in the twenty-first century. Doing so challenges pre-existing notions that such mainstreamification necessitates being subsumed by the cisheteropatriarchy. Therefore the project argues the converse: that heteronormative assumptions are outdated and new queer representations lay the groundwork for filling gaps that queer criticism has left open.
This edited collection features fourteen newly commissioned articles each of which responds to the theme of plague from different disciplinary perspectives. Contributors focus on the effects of COVID-19 on everyday life drawing also on insights from different historical experiences of plague as a way of exploring human responses to epidemics past and present.
Each chapter opens with a different illustration that serves as a source for subsequent discussion enabling readers to make connections between everyday objects experiences and broader critical debates about plague and its impact on humanity. Thought-provoking commentaries stem from a variety of humanities disciplines including archaeology electronic literature history linguistics media and cultural studies and musicology.
Encountering the Plague explores ways in which humanities research can play a meaningful role in key social and political debates and provides compelling examples of how the past can inform our understanding of the present.
Focusing on the incidence of the ‘Westerns’ film genre in the 120-odd years of Australian cinema history exploring how the American genre has been adapted to the changing Australian social political and cultural contexts of their production including the shifting emphases in the representation of the Indigenous population.
The idea for the book came to the author while he was writing two recent articles. One was an essay for Screen Education on the western in Australian cinema of the 21st century; the other piece was the review of a book entitled Film and the Historian for the online journal Inside Story . Between the two he saw the interesting prospect of a book-length study of the role of the western genre in Australia’s changing political and cultural history over the last century – and the ways in which film can without didacticism provide evidence of such change. Key matters include the changing attitudes to and representation of Indigenous peoples and of women's roles in Australian Westerns.
When one considers that the longest narrative film then seen in Australia and quite possibly the world was Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) it is clear that Australia has some serious history in the genre and Kelly has ridden again in Justin Kurzel’s 2020 adaptation of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism with a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction - and worse. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds.
If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world the presence of infrastructure whether old or retrofitted or new offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Film imaginings energy transportation water waste and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.
This collection explores the dynamic place of Muslim visual and expressive culture in processes of decolonization across the African continent. Presenting new methodologies for accentuating African agency and expression in the stories we tell about Islamic art it likewise contributes to recent widespread efforts to “decolonize” the art historical canon.
The contributors to this volume explore the dynamic place of Islamic art architecture and creative expression in processes of decolonization across the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together new work by leading specialists in the fields of African Islamic and modern arts and visual cultures the book directs unprecedented attention to the agency and contributions of African and Muslim artists in articulating modernities in local and international arenas. Interdisciplinary and transregional in scope it enriches the under-told story of Muslim experiences and expression on the African continent home to nearly half a million Muslims or a third of the global Muslim population.
Furthermore it elucidates the role of Islam and its expressive cultures in post-colonial articulations of modern identities and heritage as expressed by a diverse range of actors and communities based in Africa and its diaspora; as such the book counters notions of Islam as a retrograde or static societal phenomenon in Africa or elsewhere. Contributors propose new methodologies for accentuating human agency and experience over superficial disciplinary boundaries in the stories we tell about art-making and visual expression thus contributing to widespread efforts to decolonize scholarship on histories of modern expression.
Presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa region from queer artists as well as scholars who work on queer themes. With contributions from both scholars and artists this volume demonstrates that queer visual culture in the SWANA region is not only extant but is also entering an era of exciting growth in terms of its versatility and consciousness. The volume focuses on artworks produced in the contemporary era while recognizing historical and contextual connections to Islamic art and culture within
localities and regions from the pre-modern and modern eras.
By framing this volume as unambiguously located within queer studies the editors challenge existing literature that merely includes some examples of queer studies or queer representation but does not necessarily use queer studies as a lens through which to engage with visual culture and/or with the SWANA region. Through four interrelated sections - Gender and Normativity Trans* Articulations Intersectional Sexuality and Queer SWANA - this volume probes several previously unexplored academic areas namely the intersections of queer studies with other fields.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.
This book provides semiotically-focused analyses and interpretations of video game music focusing specifically on musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as representation of gender race and religion in video games.
An original and welcome contribution to the field it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender race and religion. This book will help readers to develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas.
Yee analyses music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings specifically concerning three master categories of identity – gender race and religion. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music it sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game's soundtrack as mere 'background music' this research demonstrates video game music's social relevance as a major factor impacting players' cultural attitudes values and beliefs.
Part I explores immersion interactivity and interpretation in video game music proposing a theory of 'interpretative interactivity' to account for players' semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction alternative femininities/masculinities and potential for non-binary representational possibilities. Part III explores musical representation of nationality culture and race proposing the concept of 'racialised fantasy' and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion introducing the concept of 'sonic iconography' to connect theological
meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.