This book is the first comprehensive account of the Argentine magazine Punto de Vista (1978-2008), a cultural review that gathered together prominent Argentine intellectuals throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century. Directed by cultural historian and public intellectual Beatriz Sarlo, the story of the magazine serves as a lens to study the evolution of Argentine intellectuals from the leftist mobilization of the 1960s through periods of military dictatorship and then the shifting politics of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s. The book argues that the way in which the Argentine intellectual left negotiated the political and cultural transformations of the late twentieth century can be understood as the history of two political defeats: that of the revolutionary utopias of the 1960s and 1970s and that of the social democrat project in the 1980s. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book encompasses a wide range of debates taking place in Argentina, from the years prior to the dictatorship to the postdictatorship period.

This book explores the emergence of 'Australasia' as a way of thinking about the culture and geography of this region. Although it is frequently understood to apply only to Australia and New Zealand, the concept has a longer and more complicated history. 'Australasia' emerged in the mid-18th century in both French and British writing as European empires extended their reach into Asia and the Pacific, and initially held strong links to the Asian continent. The book shows that interpretations and understandings of 'Australasia' shifted away from Asia in light of British imperial interests in the 19th century, and the concept was adapted by varying political agendas and cultural visions in order to reach into the Pacific or towards Antarctica. The Making and Remaking of Australasia offers a number of rich case studies which highlight how the idea itself was adapted and moulded by people and texts both in the southern hemisphere and the imperial metropole where a range of competing actors articulated divergent visions of this part of the British Empire. An important contribution to the cultural history of the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies, this collection shows how 'Australasia' has had multiple, often contrasting, meanings.

This book uses the long and profitable career of Cecil B. DeMille to track the evolution of Classical Hollywood and its influence on emerging mass commercial culture in the US. DeMille's success rested on how well his films presumed a broad consensus in the American public-expressed through consumer hedonism, faith, and an "exceptional" national history-which merged seamlessly with the efficient production methods developed by the largest integrated studios. DeMille's sudden mid-career shift away from spectator perversity to corporate propagandist permanently tarnished the director's historical standing among scholars, yet should not overshadow the profound links between his success and the rise and fall of mid-century mass culture.

This book, comprised of entirely original research, collects data on the socioeconomic situation of China's 56 ethnic groups. Although the majority of China's population is of the Han nationality (which accounts for more than 90% of China's population), the non-Han ethnic groups have a population of more than 100 million. China has officially identified, except for other unknown ethnic groups and foreigners with Chinese citizenship, 55 ethnic minorities. In addition, ethnic minorities vary greatly in size. With a population of more than 15 million, the Zhuang are the largest ethnic minority, and the Lhoba, with a population of only about three thousand, the smallest. China's ethnic diversity has resulted in a special socioeconomic landscape for China itself. However, till presently, a complete socioeconomic picture of China's ethnic groups - especially of its smallest ethnic minorities - still remained unclear. How different have China's ethnic groups been in every sphere of daily life and economic development during China's fast transition period? In order to answer these questions, we have created a detailed and comparable set of data for each of China's ethnic groups. This book presents, in an easy-to-use format, a broad collection of social and economic indicators on China's 56 ethnic groups. This useful resource profiles the general social and economic situations for each of these ethnic groups. These indicators are compiled and estimated based on the regional and local data gathered from a variety of sources up to 2012.

This book examines the governance of Asian student and academic mobility, which has transformed the higher education landscape. While campuses are experiencing an unprecedented level of diversity, knowledge creation remains explicitly Eurocentric and dominated by the Global North. The authors advocate for a new educational paradigm that takes into account the transcultural flow of knowledge on campus as a public good, capitalises on Asian students and academics' multilingual competencies, and offers them equal access to creating quality-orientated education. The book argues that international higher education must be grounded in both a plurality of knowledges and the ethics of cognitive justice, and that the governing policies should facilitate the higher education sector to build a platform of internationalising affect and effect on campus.

Van Eyck is now seen as the artist who bridged the gap between the medieval and the modern. His story is the story of modern art - the turbulent clash of ideologies, the shifting and making of taste, the perfect timing of historical event and technological change, the politics of the art world and the cult of celebrity. The Enlightenment had quietly placed van Eyck in the Gothic tradition. Then Napoleon looted panels of his masterwork, the Ghent Altar-piece, and took them back to the Louvre. With his work centre stage in the greatest art gallery of the time, interest in van Eyck exploded across Europe. The nineteenth century saw the arrival of van Eyck mania, with ever-more fanciful tales in the art press of his life as inventor of oil painting, monkish painter, even arsonist and murderer; with scenes from his life, cheap colour prints and van Eyck carpets and mirrors vying for popular consumption; and with the claiming of van Eyck as the first Pre-Raphaelite. Today, van Eyck is regarded as the first realist painter, with popular and scholarly attention shifted from the Ghent Altar-piece - also looted by Hitler and stored in an Austrian salt-mine during the Second World War - to the riddle of his celebrated Arnolfini Portrait. Inventing van Eyck tells the extraordinary story of the making of an artist for the modern age.

The first translation of the volumes in Michel Serres' classic 'Humanism' tetralogy, this ambitious philosophical narrative explores what it means to be human. With his characteristic breadth of references including art, poetry, science, philosophy and literature, Serres paints a new picture of what it might mean to live meaningfully in contemporary society. He tells the story of humankind (from the beginning of time to the present moment) in an attempt to affirm his overriding thesis that humans and nature have always been part of the same ongoing and unfolding history. This crucial piece of posthumanist philosophical writing has never before been released in English. A masterful translation by Randolph Burks ensures the poetry and wisdom of Serres writing is preserved and his notion of what humanity is and might be is opened up to new audiences.

This volume investigates alternative epistemological pathways by which knowledge production in Africa can proceed. The contributors, using different intellectual dynamics, explore the existing epistemological dominance of the West-from architecture to gender discourse, from environmental management to democratic governance-and offer distinct and unique arguments that challenge the denigration of the different and differing modes of knowing that the West considered "barbaric" and "primitive." This volume therefore constitutes a minimal gesture that further contributes to the ongoing discourse on alternative modes of knowing in Africa.

Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationship between sentimental literature, political activism and the public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on critical theorists such as Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Marcuse and Foucault, it attempts to demonstrate how major literary and political figures of the 1790s can be read in terms of the broader dynamics of modernity. Reading a diverse range of political and literary material from the period, it examines how relationships between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, mark the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois behavioural norms and the simultaneous marginalization of potentially more radical forms of political and cultural production.

This text offers a theoretical engagement with the ways in which private and public interests - and how those interests have been understood - have framed the changing rationale for broadcasting regulation, using the first century of UK broadcasting as a starting point. Unlike most books on broadcasting, this text adopts an explicitly Foucauldian and genealogical perspective in its account of media history and power, and unpicks how the meanings of terms such as 'public service' and 'public interest', as well as 'competition' and 'choice', have evolved over time. In considering the appropriation by broadcasting scholars of concepts such as neoliberalism, citizenship and the public sphere to a critical account of broadcasting history, the book assesses their appropriateness and efficacy by engaging with interdisciplinary debates on each concept. This work will be of particular significance to academics and students with an interest in media theory, history, policy and regulation, as well as those disposed to understanding as well as critiquing the neoliberalization of public media.

This is a critical analysis of the Titanic as modern myth, focusing on the second of the two Titanics. The first was the physical Titanic, the rusting remains of which can still be found 12,000 feet below the north Atlantic. The second is the mythical Titanic which emerged just as its tangible predecessor slipped from view on 15 April 1912. It is the second of the two Titanics which remains the more interesting and which continues to carry cultural resonances today. The book begins with the launching of the "unsinkable ship" and ends with the outbreak of the "war to end all wars". It provides an insight into the particular culture of late Edwardian Britain and beyond this draws far greater conclusions about the complex relationship between myth, history, popular culture and society as a whole.

This book offers an overview of social media usage in Japan and describes its role in society during mid-level disruptions by natural disasters. Conceived during and after the Great East Japan Earthquake that devastated large portions of the north-eastern area of Japan, this volume addresses the links between Japanese civil society and the social media scene, using both traditional hypothesis testing, social surveys and large-scale big data analysis to provide insight into the development of an online community for connecting citizens. Considering the connection of civil society organizations, citizens and local governments through online communication, notably social media, and how to promote higher levels of citizen engagement in Japan, it offers solutions for a more prepared, resilient communication network among citizens in case of another large scale disaster.

This book is a cultural critique of labor and globalization that considers whether one can represent the other. The cultural representation of labor is a challenge in how globalization is understood. Workers may be everywhere in the world but cultural correlatives are problematic. By elaborating cultural theory and practice this book examines why this might be so. If globalization unites workers via production and capital flows, it often writes over traditional or progressive forms of unity. Worlds of work have expanded in the last half century, yet labor has receded within cultural discourse. By considering critical and historical concepts in the workers' inquiry, the subject, and value, and provocative projects in cultural representation itself, this study expands our lexicon of labor to understand more fully what "workers of the world" means under globalization. As such the book offers broad appeal to students and teachers of Global and Cultural Studies and will interest all those who take seriously how the worker is articulated at a global scale.

This book is about international students from Asia studying at American universities in the age of globalization. It explores significant questions, such as: Why do they want to study in America? How do they make their college choices? To what extent do they integrate with domestic students, and what are the barriers for intergroup friendship? How do faculty and administrators at American institutions respond to changing campus and classroom dynamics with a growing student body from Asia? Have we provided them with the skills they need to succeed professionally? As they are preparing to become the educational, managerial and entrepreneurial elites of the world, do Asian international students plan to stay in the U.S. or return to their home country? Asian students constitute over 70 percent of all international students. Almost every major American university now faces unprecedented enrollment growth from Asian students. However, American universities rarely consider if they truly understand the experiences and needs of these students. This book argues that American universities need to learn about their Asian international students to be able to learn from them. It challenges the traditional framework that emphasizes adjustment and adaptation on the part of international students. It argues for the urgency to shift from this framework to the one calling for proactive institutional efforts to bring about successful experiences of international students.

In this book various scholars explore the material in science and science education and its role in scientific practice, such as those practices that are key to the curriculum focuses of science education programs in a number of countries. As a construct, culture can be understood as material and social practice. This definition is useful for informing researchers' nuanced explorations of the nature of science and inclusive decisions about the practice of science education (Sewell, 1999). As fields of material social practice and worlds of meaning, cultures are contradictory, contested, and weakly bounded. The notion of culture as material social practices leads researchers to accept that material practice is as important as conceptual development (social practice). However, in education and science education there is a tendency to ignore material practice and to focus on social practice with language as the arbiter of such social practice. Often material practice, such as those associated with scientific instruments and other apparatus, is ignored with instruments understood as "inscription devices", conduits for language rather than sources of material culture in which scientists share "material other than words" (Baird, 2004, p. 7) when they communicate new knowledge and realities. While we do not ignore the role of language in science, we agree with Barad (2003) that perhaps language has too much power and with that power there seems a concomitant loss of interest in exploring how matter and machines (instruments) contribute to both ontology and epistemology in science and science education.

This book examines representations of home in literary and visual cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries. The collection brings together scholars working on literature, film, and photography with the aim of showcasing new research in a burgeoning field focusing on representations of domesticity. The chapters span a diverse range of contexts from across the world and use a variety of approaches to exploring representations of home including studies of space, material culture, sexuality, gender, multiculturalism, diaspora, memory and archival practice. They include explorations of the Finnish Suburban home on film, home and the diasporic imagination in Chinese Canadian women's writing and the archiving practices and photographs used to document the homes of two gay writers from Australia and New Zealand. By bringing together this range of approaches and subjects, the book explores domestic imaginaries as part of a multi-faceted, mutable and amorphous conception of home in a modern, world context. This collection therefore seeks to further studies of home by investigating how the page, screen and photograph have constructed domestic imaginaries - experiencing, critiquing, reconfiguring and archiving home - in a global age.

This book examines the impacts of tourism-led transformations on the industrial historical waterfront at Darling Harbour and The Rocks in Sydney, Australia in the context of urban restructuring and deindustrialisation. The book also offers an extended reflection on the paradoxes between tourism and heritage. This discussion is not a new concept. However, this book critically explores the significance of the industrial heritage assets of these areas and the implications of the transformation procedures. Although Darling Harbour and The Rocks have generally been considered success stories of transformation with mixed touristic, recreational, residential and commercial activities, this book examines and evaluates how industrial history and heritage values have been affected. It demonstrates that tourism/leisure-led developments create urban landscapes in which cultural identity and historical assets are sacrificed and/or reinvented.

In this book, participation in the arts is analyzed as a substantial contributory factor to European citizenship, and also as a tool for improving individual and societal wellbeing through educational and inclusive policies. It offers an up-to-date overview of ongoing research on the measurement and analysis of, and prospects for, traditional and new forms of cultural engagement in Europe. It describes and assesses available methods and participation in the arts and seeks to determine how and to what extent the various drivers, policies and barriers matter. This publication is the final output of the work done by the members of the EU Project "Assessing effective tools to enhance cultural participation," which brought together social scientists and cultural practitioners in joint projects, conferences and seminars, to reflect on the current situation and the challenges faced by managers of cultural and arts institutions and cultural policy makers.

Exploring the roles of Muslim guards and guides in Jewish cemeteries in Morocco, Cory Thomas Pechan Driver suggests that these custodians use performances of ritual and caring acts for Jewish graves for multiple reasons. Imazighen [Berbers] stress their close ties with Jews in order to create a moral self intentionally set apart from the mono-ethically Arab and mono-religiously Muslim Morocco. Other subjects, and particularly women, use their ties with Jewish sites to harness power and prestige in their communities. Others still may care for these grave sites to express grief for a close Jewish friend or adoptive family. In examining these motives, Driver not only documents the flow of material and spiritual capital across religious lines, but also moves beyond Muslim memory of the past on the one hand and Jewish dread of the future on the other to think about the Muslim/Jewish present in Morocco.

The legal treatment of sexual behavior is a subject that receives little scholarly attention in the field of Middle East women's studies. Important questions about the relationship between sexuality and the law and about the societies enforcing that relationship are rarely addressed in the current literature. Elyse Semerdjian's ""Off the Straight Path"" takes a bold step toward filling that gap, offering a fascinating look at the historical progression of Islamic law's treatment of illicit sex.Semerdjian provides a comprehensive review of the concept of zina, sexual indiscretion, exploring the diverse interpretation of zina crime as presented in a variety of sources from the Qur'an and hadith to legal literature. She then delves into the history of legal responses to zina within the specific community of Aleppo, Syria.Drawing on a wealth of shari 'a court records, Semerdjian brings to life Syrian society during the Ottoman period. With vivid detail, she describes specific women's lives and experiences as their cases are presented before the court. Semerdjian argues that the actual treatment of zina crimes in the courts differs substantially from sentences prescribed by codifed Islamic jurisprudence. In contrast to the violent corporal punishments dictated in the Islamic legal code, the courts often punished crimes of sexual indiscretion with nonviolent sentences, such as removal from the community. Employing exceptional insight, ""Off the Straight Path"" presents a powerful challenge to the traditional view of Islamic law, enabling a richer understanding of Islamic society.

This book investigates the intersection of Indian society, the encoding of post-millennial modernity and 'ways of seeing' through the medium of Indian graphic narratives. If seeing in Indian cultures is a mode of knowing then what might we decode and know from the Indian graphic narratives examined here? The book posits that the 'seeing' of post-millennial Indian graphic narratives revolves around a visuality of the inauspicious, complemented by narratives of the same. Examining both form and content across nine Indian, post-millennial graphic narratives, this book will appeal to those working in South Asian visual studies, cultural studies and comics-graphic novel studies more broadly.

This set gathers together a collection of previously out-of-print titles that examine China's great heritage in literature, poetry, theatre and performance, painting and crafts. This reference resource spans Chinese traditions and artforms to provide in-depth analysis of some of China's great cultural treasures from many different periods in the country's long history.

What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated - from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side. In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation. By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space - an astro-culture - in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.