Increasingly over the past decade, fan credentials on the part of writers, directors, and producers have come to be seen as a guarantee of quality media making - the "fanboy auteur". Figures like Joss Whedon are both one of "us" and one of "them". This is a strategy of marketing and branding - it is a claim from the auteur himself or industry PR machines that the presence of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming. Such claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are often contested, with fans and critics alike rejecting various auteur figures as the true leader of their respective franchises. That split, between assertions of fan and auteur status and acceptance (or not) of that status, is key to unravelling the fan auteur. In A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises, authors Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill examine this phenomenon through a series of case studies featuring fanboys. The volume discusses both popular fanboys, such as J.J. Abrams, Kevin Smith, and Joss Whedon, as well as fangirls like J.K. Rowling, E.L. James, and Patty Jenkins, and dissects how the fanboy-fangirl auteur dichotomy is constructed and defended by popular media and fans in online spaces, and how this discourse has played in maintaining the exclusionary status quo of geek culture. This book is particularly timely given current discourse, including such incidents as the controversy surrounding Joss Whedon's so-called feminism, the publication of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and contestation over authorial voices in the DC cinematic universe, as well as broader conversations about toxic masculinity and sexual harassment in Hollywood.

This book is the first full-length study to focus on the representation of masculinity in Elizabeth Gaskell's novels. In examining Gaskell's understanding of masculine identity as a social construct and considering how her writing engages with Victorian ideologies of gender, this book demonstrates that Gaskell defies an essentialist approach to gender and instead explores masculinity over time, genre, region, and class, making it clear that masculinity is not monolithic but relational, culturally constructed, and dependent on many contexts. It analyses Gaskell's depiction of what it means to be a 'man' and a 'gentleman', exploring Mary Barton, North and South, Ruth, Cousin Phillis, Sylvia's Lovers, and Wives and Daughters, as well as contemporary Victorian works and key contexts such as sympathy, historic change, and industrialism. The target audiences are academics, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students and research specialists, and it will most appeal to Victorian Literature, Gender Studies, and Masculinity Studies disciplines.

This book addresses the changing relationships among political participation, political representation, and popular mobilization in Spain from the 1766 protest in Madrid against the early Bourbon reforms until the citizen revolution of 1868 that first introduced universal suffrage and led to the ousting of the monarchy. Popular Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain shows that a notion of the "crowd" internally dividing the concept of "people" existed before the advent of Liberalism, allowing for the enduring subordination of popular participation to representation in politics. In its wider European and colonial American context, the study analyzes semantic changes in a range of cultural spheres, from parliamentary debate to historical narrative and aesthetics. It shows how Liberalism had trouble reproducing the legitimacy of limited suffrage and traces the evolution of an imagination on democracy that would allow for the reconfiguration of an all-encompassing image of the people eventually overcoming representative government. "Focused on the nation and identities, Spanish historiography had a pending debt with that other historical subject of modernity, the people. With this book, Pablo Sanchez Leon starts cancelling the debt with an innovative methodology combining conceptual history with social and political history. Brilliantly, this books also proposes a novel chronology for modern history and renewed categories of analysis. In many senses, this is an extraordinarily renovating senior work." -Jose Maria Portillo Valdes, University of the Basque Country, Spain "This book by Pablo Sanchez Leon is an original and detailed study of one of the essential components of modernity, the relation between the concepts of plebe and pueblo. The author shows that plebe and people were shaped in a process of mutual differentiation and how the enduring tension between them deeply marked out the evolution of Spanish politics from the end of the Old Regime and throughout the 19th century. As the author brilliantly argues, such tension is tightly imbricated with the enduring dilemma between representation and participation underlying modern political systems. Through a historical analysis of the influence of people and plebe over Spanish, the book makes clear the degree to which the power of language contributes to shape political actors and institutional frames." -Miguel Angel Cabrera - Professor, University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain "Most accounts of Spain's transition to modern democracy begin with the popular uprising against the French invasion in 1808, the creation of a national parliament and the promulgation of an advanced Liberal constitution in 1812. Pablo Sanchez Leon begins the story half a century earlier in the mass street protests in Madrid and other cities in 1766 sparked by Charles III's sweeping reform programme. Sanchez Leon focuses unrepentantly on plebeian groups and crowd action - how they are described and conceived by contemporaries - as a key to understanding Spain's precocious and troubled passage from absolutism to the promulgation of universal male suffrage in September 1868. This audacious and highly original interpretation will surely strike a chord with students of modern Spain." -Guy Thomson, University of Warwick, UK "This is a book for exploring (from current needs) the history of political participation in Spanish society in order to rethink the very notion of modern citizenship." -Maria Sierra, University of Seville, Spain "Motivated by the current crisis in political representation in parliamentary democracies, this work by Pablo Sanchez Leon departs from the process of construction of modern citizenship. Representation, participation and mobilization are put into play as an interactive triad whose dynamics and changing conceptualization have the key to the social, political and cultural changes between the Old Regime and the early establishment of democracy in 1868. The "They do not represent us!" and other current claims for deliberative democracy provide the guiding thread for a demanding research on the tension between representation and participation shaping the period 1766-1868. The work reflects on the relevance of popular participation and, in presenting the modern history of Spain as singular and relevant on its own, provides an account of the building of modern citizenship. -Pablo Fernandez Albaladejo, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain This exciting book is both topical and historiographically valuable. It offers a fresh perspective on current debates about the limits of representation and the pros and cons of participation; it makes Spanish political culture in the age of revolutions accessible to anglophone readers, and it engagingly illustrates one way of doing the 'history of concepts'. Recommended on all three counts. Joanna Innes, Oxford University

This title provides a succinct, readable, and comprehensive treatment of how the Obama administration reacted to what was arguably the most difficult foreign policy challenge of its eight years in office: the Arab Spring. As a prelude to examining how the United States reacted to the first wave of the Arab Spring in the 21st century, this book begins with an examination of how the U.S. reacted to revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries and a summary of how foreign policy is made. Each revolution in the Arab Spring (in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen) and the Obama administration's action-or inaction-in response is carefully analyzed. The U.S.' role is compared to that of regional powers, such as Turkey, Israel, and Iran. The impact of U.S. abdication in the face of pivotal events in the region is the subject of the book's conclusion. While other treatments have addressed how the Arab Spring revolutions have affected the individual countries where these revolutions took place, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, and President Barack Obama's overall foreign policy, this is the only work that provides a comprehensive examination of both the Arab Spring revolutions themselves and the reaction of the U.S. government to those revolutions. Stands as the only academic book that specifically considers U.S. foreign policy with regard to the Arab Spring Presents the Arab Spring as a pivotal event, the U.S. reaction as a watershed, and an understanding of this interplay as vital to understanding international politics in our time Traces the often roundabout paths to the creation of U.S. policy during the Arab Spring and examines the effects of those policies Serves as an essential text for academics studying the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, the progress of revolution, and politics in the developing world; policymakers wishing to understand how the Obama administration dealt with the most complex crisis of its eight years; and interested readers

This book is about machines: those that have been actualized, fantastical imaginal machines, to those deployed as metaphorical devices to describe complex social processes. Machines argues that they transcend time and space to emerge through a variety of spaces and places, times and histories and representations. They are such an integral fabric of daily reality that their disappearance would have immediate and dire consequences for the survival of humanity. They are part and parcel to our contemporary social order. From labor to social theory, art or consciousness, literature or television, to the asylums of the 19th century, machines are a central figure; an outgrowth of affective desire that seeks to transcend organic limitations of bodies that whither, age and die. Machines takes the reader on an intellectual, artistic, and theoretical journey, weaving an interdisciplinary tale of their emergence across social, cultural and artistic boundaries. With the deep engagement of various texts, Machines offers the reader moments of escape, alternative ways to envision technology for a future yet to materialize. Machines rejects the notion that technological innovations are indeed neutral, propelling us to think differently about those "things" created under specific economic or historical paradigms. Rethinking machines provides a rupture to our current technocratic impetus, shining a critical light on possible alternatives to our current reality. Let us sit back and take a journey through Machines, holding mechanical parts as guides to possible alternative futures.

This book synthesizes Jacques Derrida's hauntology and spectrality with affect theory, in order to create a rhetorical framework analyzing the felt absences and hauntings of written and oral texts. The book opens with a history of hauntology, spectrality, and affect theory and how each of those ideas have been applied. The book then moves into discussing the unique elements of the rhetorical framework known as the rhetorrectional situation. Three case studies taken from the Christian tradition, serve to demonstrate how spectral rhetoric works. The first is fictional, C.S. Lewis 'The Great Divorce. The second is non-fiction, Tim Jennings 'The God Shaped Brain. The final one is taken from homiletics, Bishop Michael Curry's royal wedding 2018 sermon. After the case studies conclusion offers the reader a summary and ideas future applications for spectral rhetoric.

This book discusses the geopolitics of development from the point of view of the Global South. Written by scholars and development experts from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this volume presents reflections on various historical, current, and future trajectories of development in the contemporary Global South. The book is divided into five parts. Part I focuses on the relationship of development in the Global South to globalization, discussing the diversity of situations across countries in structural terms. Part II critiques and analyzes the concept and paradigms of development, emphasizing alternative discourses and policy models. Part III focuses on the analysis of the relationship between environment and development, showing how environmental conditions have become a key factor in the renewal of development thinking. Part IV examines different cultural strategies and conceptions constituting the basis of development thinking and policy in different fields. Part V addresses the construction of knowledge pertaining to the Global South, revisiting the theoretical trajectory of development models and advocating for the construction of new ideas around the region. Providing a multidimensional look at development in the Global South, this volume will benefit academics, development experts, and postgraduate students interested in having a global vision of the ideas of development in different territorial and cultural fields.

Throughout time and in every culture, human beings have eaten together. Commensality - eating and drinking at the same table - is a fundamental social activity, which creates and cements relationships. It also sets boundaries, including or excluding people according to a set of criteria defined by the society. Particular scholarly attention has been paid to banquets and feasts, often hosted for religious, ritualistic or political purposes, but few studies have considered everyday commensality. Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast offers an insight into this social practice in all its forms, from the most basic and mundane meals to the grandest occasions. Bringing together insights from anthropologists, archaeologists and historians, this volume offers a vast historical scope, ranging from the Late Neolithic period (6th millennium BC), through the Middle Ages, to the present day. The sixteen chapters include case studies from across the world, including the USA, Bolivia, China, Southeast Asia, Iran, Turkey, Portugal, Denmark and the UK. Connecting these diverse analyses is an understanding of commensality's role as a social and political tool, integral to the formation of personal and national identities. From first experiences of commensality in the sharing of food between a mother and child, to the inaugural dinner of the American president, this collection of essays celebrates the variety of human life and society.

This book is about three key dimensions in economics-globalization, migration and the welfare state-that are of enduring interest. These issues are particularly important to consider at the present moment given the strains posed by the pandemic: there is at least a temporary setback to trade-globalization and migration, and the cost of fighting the pandemic will strain the ability of governments to provide welfare state services in a style and scope to which many of their citizens have become accustomed. The book explains the changing function of the welfare state in the presence of intensified globalization, or de-globalization, forces. The welfare state's policy-maker attitudes toward openness and migration depend on open-economy fundamentals, and the income class it represents. The author demonstrates the interactions between migration, globalization and macroeconomic policy in practice, using real-world unique episodes, with Israel deemed as well-functioning trifecta, and the US and Europe as imperfectly functioning trifecta.

The second edition of Pitch, Tweet, or Engage on the Street offers a modern guide for how to adapt public relations strategies, messages, and tactics for countries and cultures around the globe. Drawing on interviews with public relations professionals in over 30 countries as well as the author’s own experience, the book explains how to build and manage a global public relations team, how to handle global crisis communication, and how to practice global public relations on behalf of corporations, non-profit organizations, and governments. It takes readers on a tour of the world, explaining how to adapt their campaigns for Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Along the way, readers are introduced to practitioners around the globe and case studies of particularly successful campaigns. This new edition includes updates to country profiles to reflect changes in each local context, as well as expanded coverage of social media and the role of influencer engagement, and a brand-new chapter on global crisis communication. The book is ideal for graduate and upper-level undergraduate public relations students, as well as practitioners in intercultural markets.

Nurse Memoirs from the Great War in Britain, France, and Germany examines an understudied corpus of memoirs in English, French, and German stemming from the unprecedented involvement of women in the war effort. Jerry Palmer considers the memoirs in relationship to public opinion, collective memory and other women's writing about the war. Through close-readings of the memoirs and their contexts, the book identifies themes present in the texts and considers the nurse memoir as rhetoric-examining to what extent the texts are promoting or countering arguments in the public sphere about their involvement or more widely about women's position in society. Palmer explores the multiple contexts related to the nurse memoirs, including public response to volunteer wartime nursing, the organisation of the military health services of the three nations and their conduct in the war, and changes in the post-war organization of public health services and the professionalization of nursing.

IN LITTLE MORE THAN HALF A DECADE, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effects--even becoming instrumental in political protests from Colombia to Iran.
Veteran technology reporter David Kirkpatrick had the full cooperation of Facebook's key executives in researching this fascinating history of the company and its impact on our lives. Kirkpatrick tells us how Facebook was created, why it has flourished, and where it is going next. He chronicles its successes and missteps, and gives readers the most complete assessment anywhere of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the central figure in the company's remarkable ascent. This is the Facebook story that can be found nowhere else.
How did a nineteen-year-old Harvard student create a company that has transformed the Internet and how did he grow it to its current enormous size? Kirkpatrick shows how Zuckerberg steadfastly refused to compromise his vision, insistently focusing on growth over profits and preaching that Facebook must dominate (his word) communication on the Internet. In the process, he and a small group of key executives have created a company that has changed social life in the United States and elsewhere, a company that has become a ubiquitous presence in marketing, altering politics, business, and even our sense of our own identity. This is the Facebook Effect.

Modern Conspiracy attempts to sketch a new conception of conspiracy theory. Where many commentators have sought to characterize conspiracy theory in terms of the collapse of objectivity and Enlightenment reason, Fleming and Jane trace the important role of conspiracy in the formation of the modern world: the scientific revolution, social contract theory, political sovereignty, religious paranoia and mass communication media. Rather than see in conspiratorial thinking the imminent death of Enlightenment reason, and a regression to a new Dark Age, Modern Conspiracy contends that many characteristic features of conspiracies tap very deeply into the history of the Enlightenment itself: among other things, its vociferous critique of established authorities, and a conception of political sovereignty fuelled by fear of counter-plots. Drawing out the roots of modern conspiratorial thinking leads us to truths less salacious and scandalous than the claims of conspiracy theorists themselves yet ultimately far more salutary: about mass communication; about individual and crowd psychology; and about our conception of and relation to knowledge.Perhaps, ultimately, what conspiracy theory affords us is a renewed opportunity to reflect on our very relationship to the truth itself.

This collection advances vigilance as a critical feminist concept and strategy for addressing contemporary challenges. The assembled chapters develop feminist vigilance by elaborating concrete examples that emphasize action, ethics, and hope. Chapter authors expand on current feminist discussions about such issues as Black women's self-care and anticipatory vigilance; media portrayals of race, gender, and violence; religion and social justice; technofeminist activism; postcolonial feminist critique; research ethics; and collective civic action. The contributions engage with larger discussions of social precarity, public anxiety, post-feminist appeals, and future feminist trajectories. Particular benefits of the collection include relatable content based in contemporary experiences, insightful and pragmatic conceptions of vigilance from feminist perspectives, and critical engagement with issues of intersectionality, agency, embodiment, and care ethics. The collection aims to address the need for productive academic responses to contemporary challenges to gendered identities, feminism, and intersectional relations that avoid abstractions or overwhelmingly negative analyses. Instead, this collection invites readers to engage in feminist vigilance as a fresh perspective, commitment, and strategy.

"Understanding Development "is the ideal introduction to the major issues and critical debates about development in the contemporary world. Perfectly suited to students, it offers an accessible overview of the key topics that have come to define this crucial subject. Drawing on a wide range of case studies from across the globe, the book explores such areas as: health and population growthconflict and securityglobal inequality and povertyfair trade and trade liberalizationgender and educationforeign aid and debtsustainability and the environment

This issues-driven text has been designed to offer something different to the standard introductions to the topic, focusing on the debates that have generated the most interest and passion among practitioners and non-practitioners alike. Always attentive to the contested and plural nature of the field, it makes the case for a genuinely interdisciplinary approach which takes full account of the impact of globalization. Both comprehensive and critical, "Understanding Development "is the essential guide to one of the most challenging subjects of our age.

How can we get the most out of our close relationships? Research in the area of personal relationships continues to grow, but most prior work has emphasized how to overcome negative aspects. This volume demonstrates that a good relationship is more than simply the absence of a bad relationship, and that establishing and maintaining optimal relationships entails enacting a set of processes that are distinct from merely avoiding negative or harmful behaviors. Drawing on recent relationship science to explore issues such as intimacy, attachment, passion, sacrifice, and compassionate goals, the essays in this volume emphasize the positive features that allow relationships to flourish. In doing so, they integrate several theoretical perspectives, concepts, and mechanisms that produce optimal relationships. The volume also includes a section on intensive and abbreviated interventions that have been empirically validated to be effective in promoting the positive features of close relationships.

Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser's The Making of Jane Austen turns to the people, performances, activism, and images that fostered Austen's early fame, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know. Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen's reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet's audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead. Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen's reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen's evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen's literary and cultural power. Whether you're a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.

The Routledge Handbook on Africana Criminologies plugs a gaping hole in criminological literature, which remains dominated by work on Europe and settler-colonial locations at the expense of neocolonial locations and at a huge cost to the discipline that remains relatively underdeveloped. It is well known that criminology is thriving in Europe and settler-colonial locations while people of African descent remain marginalized in the discipline. This handbook therefore defines and explores this field within criminology, moving away from the colonialist approach of offering administrative criminology about policing, courts, and prisons and making a case for decolonizing the wider discipline. Arranged in five parts, it outlines Africana criminologies, maps its emergence, and addresses key themes such as slavery, colonialism, and apartheid as crimes against humanity; critiques of imperialist reason; Africana cultural criminology; and theories of law enforcement and Africana people. Coalescing a diverse range of voices from Africa and the diaspora, the handbook explores outside Eurocentric canons in order to learn from the experiences, struggles, and contributions of people of African descent. Offering innovative ways of theorizing and explaining the criminological crises that face Africa and the entire world with the view of contributing to a more humane world, this groundbreaking handbook is essential reading for criminologists and sociologists worldwide, as well as scholars of Africana studies and African studies.

America's broken food system has provoked an outcry from consumer advocates seeking to align food policies with public health objectives. This book examines both sides of the conflict for solutions. Many believe that America's food system is in dire need of reform, with concerns ranging from the obesity epidemic to exploitative labor practices and negative environmental impact. This eye-opening book answers provocative questions about what changes are needed, who is advocating the changes, what parties are opposing these changes (and why), and what a new food system would look like. Organized into three sections, the work identifies the problems with the current system, reviews the changing landscape of food policy, and suggests workable solutions for progress. Washington insider Steve Clapp takes a comprehensive look at the struggle over the future of food. He examines the vision for a reformed national food policy that includes calculating the true cost of food, providing universal access to healthful food, adopting farm policies supporting public health and environmental objectives, improving food safety, paying fair wages to food employees, treating food animals with compassion, and reducing the food system's carbon footprint. The book explores the ways in which these issues can be resolved, drawing upon lessons learned from the early food advocates of the 1960s and 1970s. Traces the development of a national food policy proposed by food movement leaders Reveals the true cost of food and its toll on consumers and taxpayers Discusses the opposition against a national food policy from the agricultural-industrial complex Shows the effects of changing the current food system Analyzes efforts to fix the food system and the efforts to oppose them Introduces early food advocates who changed the food policy landscape

This book combines various theoretical approaches to explore how Finland and its people responded to the European Union (EU) refugee crisis. Combining interviews with Finns, voluntary migrants to Finland and refugees in Finland, the text presents differing perspectives on migration in this country. Key themes addressed in the text include the extent to which the different groups perceive one another to be economic, political, and cultural threats to Finnishness. In addition, the cultural fusion of Finnish and migrant culture is presented as a threat and opportunity for Finland and its future.

Russia in Britain offers the first comprehensive account of the breadth and depth of the British fascination with Russian and Soviet culture, tracing its transformative effect on British intellectual life from the 1880s, the decade which saw the first sustained interest in Russian literature, to 1940, the eve of the Soviet Union's entry into the Second World War. By focusing on the role played by institutions, disciplines and groups, libraries, periodicals, government agencies, concert halls, publishing houses, theatres, and film societies, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to highlight the role of a small number of individuals, notably Sergei Diaghilev, Constance Garnett, Theodore Komisarjevsky, Katherine Mansfield, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. Drawing on recent research and newly available archives, Russia in Britain shifts attention from individual figures to the networks within which they operated, and uncovers the variety of forces that enabled and structured the British engagement with Russian culture. The resulting narrative maps an intricate pattern of interdisciplinary relations and provides the foundational research for a new understanding of Anglo-Russian/Soviet interaction. In this, it makes a major contribution to the current debates about transnationalism, cosmopolitanism and 'global modernisms' that are reshaping our knowledge of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British culture.

Although the last three decades have offered a growing body of scholarship on images of fantastic women in popular culture, these studies either tend to focus on one particular variety of fantastic female (the action or sci-fi heroine), or on her role in a specific genre (villain, hero, temptress). This edited collection strives to define the ""Woman Fantastic"" more fully. The Woman Fantastic may appear in speculative or realist settings, but her presence is always recognizable. Through futuristic contexts, fantasy worlds, alternate histories, or the display of superpowers, these insuperable women challenge the laws of physics, chemistry, and/or biology. In chapters devoted to certain television programs, adult and young adult literature, and comics, contributors discuss feminist negotiation of today's economic and social realities. Senior scholars and rising academic stars offer compelling analyses of fantastic women from Wonder Woman and She-Hulk to Talia Al Ghul and Martha Washington; from Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville series to Cinda Williams Chima's The Seven Realms series; and from Battlestar Gallactica's female Starbuck to Game of Thrones's Sansa and even Elaine Barrish Hammond of USA's Political Animals. This volume furnishes an important contribution to ongoing discussions of gender and feminism in popular culture.