Research today demands the application of sophisticated and powerful research tools. Fulfilling this need, The Oxford Handbook of Quantitative Methods in Psychology is the complete tool box to deliver the most valid and generalizable answers to today's complex research questions. It is a one-stop source for learning and reviewing current best-practices in quantitative methods as practiced in the social, behavioral, and educational sciences. Comprising two volumes, this handbook covers a wealth of topics related to quantitative research methods. It begins with essential philosophical and ethical issues related to science and quantitative research. It then addresses core measurement topics before delving into the design of studies. Principal issues related to modern estimation and mathematical modeling are also detailed. Topics in the handbook then segway into the realm of statistical inference and modeling with chapters dedicated to classical approaches as well as modern latent variable approaches. Numerous chapters associated with longitudinal data and more specialized techniques round out this broad selection of topics. Comprehensive, authoritative, and user-friendly, this two-volume set will be an indispensable resource for serious researchers across the social, behavioral, and educational sciences.

What meaning can be found in calamity and suffering? This question is in some sense perennial, reverberating through the canons of theology, philosophy, and literature. Today, The Politics of Consolation reveals, it is also a significant part of American political leadership. Faced with uncertainty, shock, or despair, Americans frequently look to political leaders for symbolic and existential guidance, for narratives that bring meaning to the confrontation with suffering, loss, and finitude. Politicians, in turn, increasingly recognize consolation as a cultural expectation, and they often work hard to fulfill it. The events of September 11, 2001 raised these questions of meaning powerfully. How were Americans to make sense of the violence that unfolded on that sunny Tuesday morning? This book examines how political leaders drew upon a long tradition of consolation discourse in their effort to interpret September 11, arguing that the day's events were mediated through memories of past suffering in decisive ways. It then traces how the struggle to define the meaning of September 11 has continued in foreign policy discourse, commemorative ceremonies, and the contentious redevelopment of the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.

This essential textbook provides a clear and authoritative introduction to qualitative and quantitative methods for studying media and communication. Written by two highly experienced researchers, the book draws on a wide range of media and communication research to introduce students to the relative strengths of the different research approaches. Beginning with an overview of the changing contexts and trends in media and communication research approaches, the book demystifies 'research' and the 'research process' by offering practical and accessible guidance on how to design, plan and carry out successful research projects in media and communication. This is an indispensable text for all students of media and communication studies, particularly those undertaking their own research projects or taking modules in research methods.

Screenwriters and film directors have long been fascinated by the challenges of representing the listening experience on screen. While music has played a central role in film narrative since the conception of moving pictures, the representation of music listening has remained a special occurrence. In Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema, author Giorgio Biancorosso argues for a redefinition of the music listener as represented in film. Rather than construct the listener as a reverential concertgoer, music analyst, or gallery dweller, this book instead shows how films offer a new way of thinking about listening as distributed experience, an activity made public and shareable across vast cultural spaces rather than an insular motion. It shows how cinema functions as not only a reservoir of established modes of listening, but also an agent in the development of new listening practices. As Biancorosso argues, many films have perpetuated a long-existing paradox of music as a means of silencing. Consider an aggressive score overlaying battle scenes or a romantic scene conveying unspoken intimacy. In the place of conversational exchange exists a veil of sound in the form of music, and Situated Listening explains why this function influences both the course of interpretation and empathy experienced by film spectators. By focusing on cinematic, physical, and emotional scenery surrounding a character, viewers can recognize aspects of their own lives, developing a deeper empathy for each fictional character through real and shared listening practices.

Music and the Broadcast Experience explores the complex ways in which music and broadcasting have developed together throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. It brings into dialogue researchers working in media and music studies; explores and develops crucial points of contact between studies of music in radio and music in television; and investigates the limits, persistence, and extensions of music broadcasting in the Internet era. The book presents a series of case studies that address key moments and concerns in music broadcasting, past and present, written by leading scholars in the field, who hail from both media and music studies. Unified by attentiveness both to musical sound and meaning and to broadcasting structures, practices, audiences, and discourses, the chapters in this collection address the following topics: the role of live orchestral concerts and opera in the early development of radio and their relation to ideologies of musical uplift; the relation between production culture, music, and television genre; the function of music in sponsored radio during the 1930s; the fortunes of musical celebrity and artistic ambition on television; questions of music format and political economy in the development of online radio; and the negotiation of space, community, and participation among audiences, online and offline, in the early twenty-first century. The collection's ultimate aim is to explore the usefulness and limitations of broadcasting as a concept for understanding music and its cultural role, both historically and today.

This book tackles online social networks by navigating these systems from the birth to the death of their digital presence. Navigating the social within the digital can be a contentious undertaking, as social networks confuse the boundary between offline and online relationships. These systems work to bring people together in an online environment, yet participation can dislocate users from other relationships and deviant online behaviour can create offline issues. The author begins by examining the creation of a digital presence in online networks popularized by websites such as Facebook and MySpace. The book explores how the digital presence influences how social, cultural and professional relationships are discovered, forged, maintained and broken, and journeys through the popular criticisms of social networking such as employee time-wasting, bullying, stalking, the alleged links between social networks and suicide and the decline of a user s public image. Social networks are often treated as morally ambiguous spaces, which highlights a dissonance between digital and social literacies. This discord is approached through an exploration of the everyday undercurrents present in social networks. The discussion of the digital presence ends by addressing the intricacies of becoming digitally dead, which explores how a user removes their identity, with finality, from social networks and the entire web.
Identifies the undercurrents present in social networks and explores how these influence everyday lifeProvides insight into how the digital presence insidiously encroaches on offline aspects of a user s lifeExamines the idea of becoming digitally dead by discussing the often taboo subject of virtual and non-virtual suicide in the context of social networks"

The term "emerging media " responds to the "big data " now available as a result of the larger role digital media play in everyday life, as well as the notion of "emergence " that has grown across the architecture of science and technology over the last two decades with increasing imbrication. The permeation of everyday life by emerging media is evident, ubiquitous, and destined to accelerate. No longer are images, institutions, social networks, thoughts, acts of communication, emotions and speech-the "media " by means of which we express ourselves in daily life-linked to clearly demarcated, stable entities and contexts. Instead, the loci of meaning within which these occur shift and evolve quickly, emerging in far-reaching ways we are only beginning to learn and bring about. This volume's purpose is to develop, broaden and spark future philosophical discussion of emerging media and their ways of shaping and reshaping the habitus within which everyday lives are to be understood. Drawing from the history of philosophy ideas of influential thinkers in the past, intellectual path makers on the contemporary scene offer new philosophical perspectives, laying the groundwork for future work in philosophy and in media studies. On diverse topics such as identity, agency, reality, mentality, time, aesthetics, representation, consciousness, materiality, emergence, and human nature, the questions addressed here consider the extent to which philosophy should or should not take us to be facing a fundamental transformation.

This book offers a state-of-the-art guide to linguistic fieldwork, reflecting its collaborative nature across the subfields of linguistics and disciplines such as astronomy, anthropology, biology, musicology, and ethnography. Experienced scholars and fieldworkers explain the methods and approaches needed to understand a language in its full cultural context and to document it accessibly and enduringly. They consider the application of new technological approaches to recording and documentation, but never lose sight of the crucial relationship between subject and researcher. The book is timely: an increased awareness of dying languages and vanishing dialects has stimulated the impetus for recording them as well as the funds required to do so. The Handbook is an indispensable source, guide, and reference for everyone involved in linguistic and cultural fieldwork.

Anita Pomerantz is one of the pioneers of Conversation Analysis (CA), a field that has grown from a small and marginalized subfield into a significant, international, multidisciplinary field of inquiry. CA now enjoys widespread acceptance and appreciation, thanks in large part to Pomerantz's contributions. Asking and Telling in Conversation collects Pomerantz's most influential articles across the span of her career, focusing on the complexities of asking and telling something to another person. The actions of asking and telling may seem straightforward, but speakers deal with a number of complexities when they ask and tell. Pomerantz's work focuses on the ways in which the performances of asking and telling are shaped by, and shape, the identities of the participants, the activities in which they are engaged, what was said and done prior to the actions in question, and the anticipated reactions to their talk and action. Each of the volume's nine chapters is framed by original pieces by Pomerantz which discuss the significance and contribution of the article to current studies in CA. In addition to the new introductions and closing commentary for each work, this book includes full introductory and concluding chapters that draw out the connections across the author's work. Pomerantz also shares her reflections on preference organization, which she first analyzed in her foundational research nearly fifty years ago. Bringing together seminal works of CA with contemporary analysis in the field, this book sheds new light on important questions-and answers-in communication studies. A collection of work from a foremost scholar, Asking and Telling in Conversation is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Conversation Analysis.

Aimed at academics, academic managers and administrators, professionals in scientometrics, information scientists and science policy makers at all levels. This book reviews the principles, methods and indicators of scientometric evaluation of information processes in science and assessment of the publication activity of individuals, teams, institutes and countries. It provides scientists, science officers, librarians and students with basic and advanced knowledge on evaluative scientometrics. Especially great stress is laid on the methods applicable in practice and on the clarification of quantitative aspects of impact of scientific publications measured by citation indicators.
Written by a highly knowledgeable and well-respected scientist in the fieldProvides practical and realistic quantitative methods for evaluating scientific publication activities of individuals, teams, countries and journalsGives standardized descriptions and classification of the main categories of evaluative scientometrics

The Protection of Subjects in Human Research rule by the USEPA, including the establishment of the Human Studies Review Board (HSRB), has resulted in changes to both study design and study evaluation processes, particularly with respect to ethical considerations. Non-Dietary Human Exposure andRisk Assessment is a compilation of the presentations given in a symposium of the same name at the 238th ACS National Meeting in Washington D.C. The purpose of the symposium was to provide a forum for scientists from industry, academia, and government to share investigative methods used to generate data for use in non-dietary human risk assessments and to share methodology for performing and evaluating those assessments.
This compilation is intended to provide the reader with a concise overview of the current status of both the scientific and regulatory aspects of non-dietary human exposure and risk assessment as applied to pesticides. It is the hope of the editors that it will also be the starting point for discussions leading to the further refinement of study and risk assessment design, data evaluation, and regulatory harmonization.
Three major areas are covered in this symposium edition. The first area is regulatory issues including the development of the Protection of Subjects in Human Research rule and the HSRB, statistical procedures involved in designing human exposure studies, handling of the data generated in those studies, and quality assurance processes related to worker exposure studies. The second area, study design, includes processes for the identification and recruitment of volunteers for human exposure studies, overviews of several studies that have been recently performed, the development of procedures for evaluating the resulting data by Regulatory Agencies, and efforts towards international cooperation in the generation and use of exposure data. The final area, methodology, includes examples of the development of methods for the analysis of samples generated in non-dietary human exposure studies with particular emphasis on the use of hyphenated techniques and the development of a model for determining greenhouse exposures that is currently being used in Europe.

This book examines the following factors: sponsorship of research, control of the dissemination of research, effects of dominant research paradigms, financial interests of authors, publishers, and editors, role of new technologies (for example, Web 2.0).
It is widely accepted among researchers and educators that the peer review process, the reputation of the publisher and examination of the author's credentials are the gold standards for assessing the quality of research and information. However, the traditional gold standards are not sufficient, and the effective evaluation of information requires the consideration of additional factors. Controversies about positive evaluations of new medications that appear in peer-reviewed journals, the financial reports on Enron prior to the revelations that led to its collapse, and obstacles to the publication of research that does not conform to dominant paradigms are just a few examples that indicate the need for a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to evaluating information.
Each of the factors is discussed in a factual manner, supported by many examples that illustrate not only the nature of the issues but also their complexity. Practical suggestions for the evaluation of information are an integral part of the text.
Highlights frequently overlooked criteria for evaluating researchChallenges the assumption that the gold standards for evaluation are sufficientExamines the role of new technologies in evaluating and disseminating research

Method in the Madness is presented as a companion to researchers investigating the complex world of work. Rather than a How to text on performing research, this book presents a record of experiences. Research so often evolves in the field or the planning stages and a successful researcher need to be aware of serendipitous opportunities as they arise and how to solve problems as they occur. The book comprises an introduction written by the editors followed by thirteen chapters written by different contributors. The introduction draws together the disparate experiences that follow and discusses the ways in which the contributors, all of whom are respected researchers, dealt with and learned from the research experience. In the following chapters, the contributors describe and reflect on the research process, the challenges they met during their research and the lessons learned. The style varies, but includes narratives, anecdotes and descriptions of individuals experiences as research was designed and carried out and the results generated.
Presents twelve chapters of research experiences where the researcher learnt more about performing research whilst in the field than they did from prescriptive textsRepresents a fresh and accessible look at research and research methods"

Why are some civic associations better than others at getting--and keeping--people involved in activism? From MoveOn.org to the National Rifle Association, Health Care for America Now to the Sierra Club, membership-based civic associations constantly seek to engage people in civic and political action. What makes some more effective than others?
Using in-person observations, surveys, and field experiments, this book compares organizations with strong records of engaging people in health and environmental politics to those with weaker records. To build power, civic associations need quality and quantity (or depth and breadth) of activism. They need lots of people to take action and also a cadre of leaders to develop and execute that activity. Yet, models for how to develop activists and leaders are not necessarily transparent. This book provides these models to help associations build the power they want and support a healthy democracy. In particular, the book examines organizing, mobilizing, and lone wolf models of engagement and shows how highly active associations blend mobilizing and organizing to transform their members' motivations and capacities for involvement.
This is not a simple story about the power of offline versus online organizing. Instead, it is a story about how associations can blend both online and offline strategies to build their activist base. In this compelling book, Hahrie Han explains how civic associations can invest in their members and build the capacity they need to inspire action.

People use online social forums for all sorts of reasons, including political conversations, regardless of the site's main purpose. But what leads some of these people to take their online political activity into the offline world of activism?
In Expect Us, Jessica L. Beyer looks at political consciousness and action in four communities, each born out of chaotic online social spaces that millions of individuals enter, spend time in, and exit moment by moment: Anonymous (4chan), IGN, World of Warcraft, and The Pirate Bay. None of these sites began as places for political organization per se, but visitors to each have used them as places for political engagement to one degree or another. Beyer explains the puzzling emergence of political engagement in these disparate social spaces and offers reasons for their varied capacity to generate political activism. Her comparative ethnography of these four online communities demonstrates that the technological organization of space itself has a strong role in determining the possibility of political mobilization. Overall, she shows that political mobilization rises when a site provides high levels of anonymity, low levels of formal regulation, and minimal access to small-group interaction. Furthermore, her findings reveal that young people are more politically involved than much of the civic engagement literature suggests.
Expect Us offers surprising and compelling insights for anyone interested in understanding which factors and online environments lead to the greatest amount of impact offline.

Since the advent of the cinema, Jesus has frequently appeared in our movie houses and on our television screens. Indeed, it may well be that more people worldwide know about Jesus and his life story from the movies than from any other medium. Indeed, Jesus' story has been adapted dozens of times throughout the history of commercial cinema, from the 1912 silent From the Manger to the Cross to Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. No doubt there are more to come.
Drawing on a broad range of movies, biblical scholar Adele Reinhartz traces the way in which Jesus of Nazareth has become Jesus of Hollywood. She argues that Jesus films both reflect and influence cultural perceptions of Jesus and the other figures in his story. She focuses on the cinematic interpretation of Jesus' relationships with the key people in his life: his family, his friends, and his foes. She examines how these films address theological issues, such as Jesus' identity as both human and divine, political issues, such as the role of the individual in society and the possibility of freedom under political oppression, social issues, such as gender roles and hierarchies, and personal issues, such as the nature of friendship and human sexuality.
Reinhartz's study of Jesus' celluloid incarnations shows how Jesus movies reshape the past in the image of the present. Despite society's profound interest in Jesus as a religious and historical figure, Jesus movies are fascinating not as history but as mirrors of the concerns, anxieties, and values of our own era. As the story of Jesus continues to capture the imagination of filmmakers and moviegoers, he remains as significant a cultural figure today as he was 2000years ago.

Risk model validation is an emerging and important area of research, and has arisen because of Basel I and II. These regulatory initiatives require trading institutions and lending institutions to compute their reserve capital in a highly analytic way, based on the use of internal risk models. It is part of the regulatory structure that these risk models be validated both internally and externally, and there is a great shortage of information as to best practise. Editors Christodoulakis and Satchell collect papers that are beginning to appear by regulators, consultants, and academics, to provide the first collection that focuses on the quantitative side of model validation. The book covers the three main areas of risk: Credit Risk and Market and Operational Risk.
*Risk model validation is a requirement of Basel I and II
*The first collection of papers in this new and developing area of research
*International authors cover model validation in credit, market, and operational risk

Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen is the first systematic study of jazz on screen media. Where earlier studies have focused almost entirely on the role and portrayal of jazz in Hollywood film, the present book engages with a plethora of technologies and media from early film and soundies through television to recent developments in digital technologies and online media. Likewise, the authors discuss jazz in the widest sense, ranging from Duke Ellington and Jimmy Dorsey through the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus to Pat Metheny. Much of this rich and fascinating material has never been studied in depth before, and what emerges most clearly are the manifold connections between the music and the media on which it was and is being recorded. Its long association with film and television has left its trace in jazz, just as online and social media are subtly shaping it now. Vice versa, visual media have always benefited from focusing on music and this significantly affected their development. The book follows these interrelations, showing how jazz was presented and represented on screen and what this tells us about the music, the people who made it and their audiences. The result is a new approach to jazz and the media, which will be required reading for students of both fields.

Devices of Curiosity excavates a largely unknown genre of early cinema, the popular-science film. Primarily a work of cinema history, it also draws on the insights of the history of science. Beginning around 1903, a variety of producers made films about scientific topics for general audiences, inspired by a vision of cinema as an educational medium. This book traces the development of popular-science films over the first half of the silent era, from its beginnings in England to its flourishing in France around 1910. Devices of Curiosity also considers how popular-science films exemplify the circulation of knowledge. These films initially relied upon previous traditions such as the magic-lantern lecture for their representational strategies, and they continually had recourse to established visual iconography, but they also created novel visual paradigms and led to the creation of ambitious new film collections. Finally, the book discerns a transit between nonfictional and fictional modes, seeing affinities between popular-science films and certain aspects of fiction films, particularly Louis Feuillade's crime melodramas. This kind of circulation is important for an understanding of the wider relevance of early popular-science films, which impacted the formation of the documentary, educational, and avant-garde cinemas.

For a long time, conventional reliability analyses have been oriented towards selecting the more reliable system and preoccupied with maximising the reliability of engineering systems. On the basis of counterexamples however, we demonstrate that selecting the more reliable system does not necessarily mean selecting the system with the smaller losses from failures! As a result, reliability analyses should necessarily be risk-based, linked with the losses from failures.
Accordingly, a theoretical framework and models are presented which form the foundations of the reliability analysis and reliability allocation linked with the losses from failures.
An underlying theme in the book is the basic principle for a risk-based design: the larger the cost of failure associated with a component, the larger its minimum necessary reliability level. Even identical components should be designed to different reliability levels if their failures are associated with different losses.
According to a classical definition, the risk of failure is a product of the probability of failure and the cost given failure. This risk measure however cannot describe the risk of losses exceeding a maximum acceptable limit. Traditionally the losses from failures have been 'accounted for' by the average production availability (the ratio of the actual production capacity and the maximum production capacity). As demonstrated in the book by using a simple counterexample, two systems with the same production availability can be characterised by very different losses from failures.
As an alternative, a new aggregated risk measure based on the cumulative distribution of the potential losses has been introducedand the theoretical framework for risk analysis based on the concept potential losses has also been developed. This new risk measure incorporates the uncertainty associated with the exposure to losses and the uncertainty in the consequences given the exposure. For repairable systems with complex topology, the distribution of the potential losses can be revealed by simulating the behaviour of systems during their life-cycle. For this purpose, fast discrete event-driven simulators are presented capable of tracking the potential losses for systems with complex topology, composed of a large number of components. The simulators are based on new, very efficient algorithms for system reliability analysis of systems comprising thousands of components.
An important theme in the book are the generic principles and techniques for reducing technical risk. These have been classified into three major categories: preventive (reducing the likelihood of failure), protective (reducing the consequences from failure) and dual (reducing both, the likelihood and the consequences from failure). Many of these principles (for example: avoiding clustering of events, deliberately introducing weak links, reducing sensitivity, introducing changes with opposite sign, etc.) are discussed in the reliability literature for the first time.
Significant space has been allocated to component reliability. In the last chapter of the book, several applications are discussed of a powerful equation which constitutes the core of a new theory of locally initiated component failure by flaws whose number is a random variable.
This book has been written with the intention to fill two big gaps in the reliability and riskliterature: the risk-based reliability analysis as a powerful alternative to the traditional reliability analysis and the generic principles for reducing technical risk. I hope that the principles, models and algorithms presented in the book will help to fill these gaps and make the book useful to reliability and risk-analysts, researchers, consultants, students and practising engineers.
- Offers a shift in the existing paradigm for conducting reliability analyses.
- Covers risk-based reliability analysis and generic principles for reducing risk.
- Provides a new measure of risk based on the distribution of the potential losses from failure as well as the basic principles for risk-based design.
- Incorporates fast algorithms for system reliability analysis and discrete-event simulators.
- Includes the probability of failure of a structure with complex shape expressed with a simple equation.

Everyone makes decisions, but not everyone is a decision analyst. A decision analyst uses quantitative models and computational methods to formulate decision algorithms, assess decision performance, identify and evaluate options, determine trade-offs and risks, evaluate strategies for investigation, and so on. This book is written for decision analysts.
The term "decision analyst" covers an extremely broad range of practitioners. Virtually all engineers involved in design (of buildings, machines, processes, etc.) or analysis (of safety, reliability, feasibility, etc.) are decision analysts, usually without calling themselves by this name. In addition to engineers, decision analysts work in planning offices for public agencies, in project management consultancies, they are engaged in manufacturing process planning and control, in financial planning and economic analysis, in decision support for medical or technological diagnosis, and so on and on. Decision analysts provide quantitative support for the decision-making process in all areas where systematic decisions are made.
This second edition entails changes of several sorts. First, info-gap theory has found application in several new areas - especially biological conservation, economic policy formulation, preparedness against terrorism, and medical decision-making. Pertinent new examples have been included. Second, the combination of info-gap analysis with probabilistic decision algorithms has found wide application. Consequently "hybrid" models of uncertainty, which were treated exclusively in a separate chapter in the previous edition, now appear throughout the book as well as in a separate chapter. Finally, info-gapexplanations of robust-satisficing behavior, and especially the Ellsberg and Allais "paradoxes," are discussed in a new chapter together with a theorem indicating when robust-satisficing will have greater probability of success than direct optimizing with uncertain models.
* New theory developed systematically.
* Many examples from diverse disciplines.
* Realistic representation of severe uncertainty.
* Multi-faceted approach to risk.
* Quantitative model-based decision theory.

This volume contains the proceedings of ADHS 06: the 2nd IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems, organized in Alghero (Italy) on June 7-9, 2006.
ADHS is a series of triennial meetings that aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with a background in control and computer science to provide a survey of the advances in the field of hybrid systems, and of their ability to take up the challenge of analysis, design and verification of efficient and reliable control systems. ADHS'06 is the second Conference of this series after ADHS'03 in Saint Malo.
* 65 papers selected through careful reviewing process
* Plenary lectures presented by three distinguished speakers
* Featuring interesting new research topics

Digital Dilemmas is a groundbreaking ethnographic, mixed method approach to understanding dynamics of power and resistance as they are played out around the future of the internet. M. I. Franklin looks at the way that publics, governments, and multilateral institutions are being redefined and reinvented in digital settings that are ubiquitous and yet controlled by a relative few. Franklin does this through three original and wide-ranging case studies that get at the way that computer-mediated power relations play out "on the ground" through a mixture of overlapping online and offline activity, at personal, community, and transnational levels. Case studies include online activities around homelessness and street papers in the U.S. and around the world, digital and human rights activism carried out though the United Nations, and the ongoing battle between proprietary and free and open source software proponents. The result is a thought-provoking and seminal work on the way that the new paradigms of power and resistance forged online reshape localized and traditional power structures offline.

Since 1997, the war in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has taken more than 6 million lives and shapes the daily existence of the nation's residents. While the DRC is often portrayed in international media as an unproductive failed state, the Congolese have turned increasingly to art-making to express their experience to external eyes. Author Cherie Rivers Ndaliko argues that cultural activism and the enthusiasm to produce art exists in Congo as a remedy for the social ills of war and as a way to communicate a positive vision of the country. Ndaliko introduces a memorable cast of artists, activists, and ordinary people from the North-Kivu province, whose artistic and cultural interventions are routinely excluded from global debates that prioritize economics, politics, and development as the basis of policy decision about Congo. Rivers also shows how art has been mobilized by external humanitarian and charitable organizations, becoming the vehicle through which to inflict new kinds of imperial domination. Written by a scholar and activist in the center of the current public policy debate, Necessary Noise examines the uneasy balance of accomplishing change through art against the unsteady background of civil war. At the heart of this book is the Yole!Africa cultural center, which is the oldest independent cultural center in the east of Congo. Established in the aftermath of volcano Nyiragongo's 2002 eruption and sustained through a series of armed conflicts, the cultural activities organized by Yole!Africa have shaped a generation of Congolese youth into socially and politically engaged citizens. By juxtaposing intimate ethnographic, aesthetic, and theoretical analyses of this thriving local initiative with case studies that expose the often destructive underbelly of charitable action, Necessary Noise introduces into heated international debates on aid and sustainable development a compelling case for the necessity of arts and culture in negotiating sustained peace. Through vivid descriptions of a community of young people transforming their lives through art, Ndaliko humanizes a dire humanitarian disaster. In so doing, she invites readers to reflect on the urgent choices we must navigate as globally responsible citizens. The only study of music or film culture in the east of Congo, Necessary Noise raises an impassioned and vibrantly interdisciplinary voice that speaks to the theory and practice of socially engaged scholarship.