Cultural Studies
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.
The Social Object
Apprehending Materiality for Industrial Design Practice
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.
Product Design, Technology, and Social Change
A Short Cultural History
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.
New Queer Television
From Marginalization to Mainstreamification
Though queer critics and queer theory tend to frame queer identities as marginal this edited volume draws attention to a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences. Cementing a foundational understanding of queerness that is at odds with current shifts in media production contributors present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual shows and genres to reconsider the marginalization of queerness in the twenty-first century. Doing so challenges preexisting notions that such “mainstreamification” necessitates being subsumed by the cisheteropatriarchy. This project argues the opposite showing that heteronormative assumptions are outdated and that new queer representations lay the groundwork for filling gaps that queer criticism has left open.
Thomas Brassington is a researcher whose work explores intersections of queerness and the Gothic in contemporary popular culture. Debra Ferreday is a feminist cultural theorist whose research concerns gender feminist theory sexuality critical race theory queer theory and embodiment. Dany Girard is a queer researcher whose work primarily explores representations of gender asexualities and queer theory in television and film.
Encountering the Plague
Humanities Takes on the Pandemic
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.
Outback
Westerns in Australian Cinema
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.