The title of this book, Refugee Performance, suggests there is a constituency of practices that might be unified under a definite term or god forbid to propose a new field of study. This is far from the intentions of the collection. This collection has grown out of an interest in performance and theatre in sites of war and the impact of conflict on diasporic communities. The chapters represent stories from a range of countries and war contexts, including Iraq, Thailand, Burma, Uganda, Palestine, Croatia, Serbia, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

A key interdisciplinary concept in our understanding of social interaction across creative and cultural practices, kinesthetic empathy describes the ability to experience empathy merely by observing the movements of another human being. Encouraging readers to sidestep the methodological and disciplinary boundaries associated with the arts and sciences, Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices offers innovative and critical perspectives on topics ranging from art to sport, film to physical therapy.

After sixty surgeries at a cost of almost $200,000 to feminize and beautify her originally male body, transgendered Canadian artist Nina Arsenault has created a body of work emanating from her experiences that includes photographs, videos disseminated online, a website, a blog, several social networking presentation sites, stage plays, print media writing and performance of the body in both celebrity appearances and daily public life. Arsenault was born in rural Ontario in 1974 and until the age of six lived as Rodney in a trailer park with her working-class family. Her father delivered bread.

Digital technologies are playing an increasingly instrumental role in guiding the curatorial and institutional strategies of contemporary art museums today. Designed around contextual studies of virtuality and the art of exhibition, this interdisciplinary volume applies practice-based research to a broad range of topics, including digital mediation, spatial practice, the multimedia museum, and curatorial design. Rounding out the volume are case studies with accompanying illustrations.

Covering the silent era to the present, this wide-ranging collection of essays examines Greek cinema as an aesthetic, cultural, and political phenomenon with the potential to appeal to a diverse range of audiences. Using a range of methodological tools, the authors investigate the ever-shifting forms and meanings at work within Greece’s national cinema and locate it within the booming interdisciplinary study of European cinema at large. Designed for undergraduate courses in film studies, this well-researched volume fills a substantial gap in the market for critical works on Greek cinema in English.

Few men have rightly earned the title of genius, but one must surely be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In his short lifetime he pioneered the railways, built bridges, tunnels and termini. He also built three ships - theGreat Western, Great Britain and Great Eastern. Each one contributed more to the development of maritime engineering than any other vessel built before or since. This book tells the story of Brunel and his three ships, from the time that the Great Western developed from a dream to a reality, until the recent years. In 1970 the Great Britain, the only one of the three surviving, was rescued from a windswept cove in the Falkland Islands and brought home to Britain. She was restored in Bristol, in the same dock in which she was built, and she now looks exactly as she did in 1843. There she will stay, a proud example of British engineering in the nineteenth century and a fitting memorial to her brilliant designer.

British playwright Howard Barker coined the term 'theatre of catastrophe' to describe his unique brand of complex, ambiguous, and often unsettling drama. Revered in continental Europe, North America, and Australia as one of the greatest living dramatists working in the English language, Barker is also a celebrated poet, theatre theorist and painter. The first collection of interviews conducted with Barker, Howard Barker Interviews 1980–2010 covers his entire career and gives a strong sense of the life and work of this innovative dramatist.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the medical and social articulation of death, this anthology considers to what extent a subject as elusive as death can be examined. Though it touches us all, we can perceive it only in life – with the predictable result that we treat it either as a clinical or social problem to be managed or as a phenomenon to be studied quantitatively. This volume goes beyond these models to question self-reflexively how the management of death is organized and motivated and the ways that death is at once feared and embraced. Drawing on the very latest in the medical humanities, Spectacular Death gives us an enlightening new perspective on death from the classical world to the twenty-first century.

Cultural production as we know it has been undergoing significant restructuring. In an effort to compensate for the global decline in economic growth, governments and corporations have begun to seriously consider the creative fields as markets that can be stimulated through venture capital and regional development initiatives. Along with the neoliberalization of cultural institutions, a conservative agenda that is buttressed by a war economy confronts critics and activists with the repressive forms of state censorship and police control.

From art collectives to the US-led war on terror, from cultural contestation to neoliberal governmentality and from alter-global anti-capitalism to the creative industries, this collection of essays examines the issues and politics that have marked cultural production in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the context of a proliferation of socially engaged art practices and the interventions of autonomous art collectives, Culture and Contestation in the New Century presents the viewpoints of leading international artists and intellectuals working in the fields of critical and cultural theory. After the impasse of a postmodern post-politics ‘beyond left and right’, what are the possibilities for a radical politicization of cultural discourse? How has oppositionality shifted away from identity and difference, as well as social constructionism, to consider the universal determinations of contemporary neoliberal capitalism? These essays present a number of untimely reflections on the conditions of contemporary cultural practice, subjectivity and political dissidence, making new connections between cultural production, politics, economics and social theory. Simply stated, the book provides an account of the current interface between art and politics.