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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies
What was the role of mousike, the realm of the Muses, in Greek
life? More wide-ranging in its implications than the English
'music', mousike lay at the heart of Greek culture, and was often
indeed synonymous with culture. In its commonest form, it
represented for the Greeks a seamless complex of music, poetic
word, and physical movement, encompassing a vast array of
performances - from small-scale entertainment in the private home
to elaborate performances involving the entire community. Yet the
history of the field, particularly in anglophone scholarship, has
been hitherto narrowly conceived, and the broader cultural
significance of mousike largely ignored. Focusing mainly on
classical Athens these new and specially commissioned essays
analyse the theory and practice of musical performance in a variety
of social contexts and demonstrate the centrality of mousike to the
values and ideology of the polis. The so-called 'new musical
revolution' in late fifth-century Athens receives serious treatment
in this volume for the first time. A major theme of the book is the
musical and mousike dimension of Greek religion, rarely analysed in
its own right. The ethical and philosophical aspects of Athenian
mousike are another central concern, with the figure of the dancing
philosopher as an emblem of music's role in intellectual life. The
book as a whole provides an integrated cultural analysis of central
aspects of Greek mousike, which will be of interest to classical
scholars, to cultural historians, and to anyone concerned with
understanding the power of music as a cultural phenomenon.
From its earliest days, the cinema has enjoyed a special kinship
with the railroad, a mutual attraction based on similar ways of
handling speed, visual perception, and the promise of a journey.
PARALLEL TRACKS is the first book to explore and explain this
relationship in both historical and theoretical terms, blending
film scholarship with railroad history. This highly original work
reveals the profound impact that the railroad and the cinema have
had on Western society and modern urban industrial culture. It will
be eagerly received by those involved in film studies, American
studies, feminist theory and the cultural study of modernity. It
will also have appeal to general readers interested in silent films
or in the history of the railroad.
The Weimar period, which extended from 1919 to 1933, was a time of
political violence, economic crisis, generational and gender
tension, and cultural experiment and change in Germany. Despite
these major issues, the Republic is often treated only as a preface
to the study of the rise of Fascism. This text seeks to restore the
balance, exploring the Weimar period in its own right. Amongst the
topics discussed are: Weimar as the avant-garde artistic centre of
Europe in the 1920s when many cultural figures were politically
engaged on both sides of the political spectrum; Weimar as a German
state racked by conflict over questions of morality versus ideas of
greater sexual freedom for women, homosexual rights, abortion and
birth control; the struggle to win the hearts and minds of German
youth, a struggle won decisively by the right-wing; and Weimar as
the first German state in which women played a significant
political role. -- .
The Age of New Waves examines the origins of the concept of the
"new wave" in 1950s France and the proliferation of new waves in
world cinema over the past three decades. The book suggests that
youth, cities, and the construction of a global market have been
the catalysts for the cinematic new waves of the past half century.
It begins by describing the enthusiastic engagement between French
nouvelle vague filmmakers and a globalizing American cinema and
culture during the modernization of France after World War II. It
then charts the growing and ultimately explosive disenchantment
with the aftermath of that massive social, economic, and spatial
transformation in the late 1960s. Subsequent chapters focus on
films and visual culture from Taiwan and contemporary mainland
China during the 1980s and 1990s, and they link the recent
propagation of new waves on the international film festival circuit
to the "economic miracles" and consumer revolutions accompanying
the process of globalization. While it travels from France to East
Asia, the book follows the transnational movement of a particular
model of cinema organized around mise en scene-or the interaction
of bodies, objects, and spaces within the frame-rather than montage
or narrative. The "master shot" style of directors like Hou
Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Jia Zhangke has reinvented a
crucial but overlooked tendency in new wave film, and this cinema
of mise en scene has become a key aesthetic strategy for
representing the changing relationships between people and the
material world during the rise of a global market. The final
chapter considers the interaction between two of the most global
phenomena in recent film history-the transnational art cinema and
Hollywood-and it searches for traces of an American New Wave.
Beyond Interdisciplinarity examines the broadening meaning of core
concept across academic disciplines and other forms of knowledge.
In this book, Associate Editor of The Oxford Handbook of
Interdisciplinarity and internationally recognized scholar Julie
Thompson Klein depicts the heterogeneity and boundary work of
inter- and trans-disciplinarity in a conceptual framework based on
an ecology of spatializing practices in transaction spaces,
including trading zones and communities of practice. The book
includes both "crossdisciplinary" work (encompassing multi-,
inter-, and trans-disciplinary forms) as well as "cross-sector"
work (spanning disciplines, fields, professions, government and
industry, and communities). The first section of the book defines
and explains boundary work, discourses of interdisciplinarity, and
the nature of interdisciplinary fields. In the second section,
Klein examines dynamics of working across disciplines, including
communication, collaboration, and learning with concrete examples
and lessons from research projects and programs that transcend
traditional fields. The closing chapter examines reasons for
failure and success then presents gateways to literature and other
resources. Throughout the book, Klein emphasizes the roles of
contextualization and historical change while factoring in the
shifting relationship of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity,
ascendancy of transdisciplinarity, and intersections with other
constructs including Mode 2 knowledge production, convergence, team
science, and postdisciplinarity. The conceptual framework she
provides also includes the role of boundary objects, agents, and
organizations in brokering differences and creating for platforms
for change. Klein further explains why translation, interlanguage,
and a communication boundary space are vital to achieving
intersubjectivity and collective identity. They foster not only
pragmatics of negotiation and integration but also reflexivity,
transactivity, and co-production of knowledge with stakeholders
beyond the academy. Rhetorics of holism and synthesis compete with
instrumentalities of problem solving and transgressive critiques.
However, typical warrants today include complexity,
contextualization, collaboration, and socially-robust knowledge.
Crossing boundaries remains complex, but this book guides readers
through the density of pertinent literature while expanding
understandings of crossdisciplinary and cross-sector work.
Soon after 9/11, wild rumors began to spread: that Arab-Americans
were celebrating publicly, that some people had been warned, that
politicians knew all along.
The Global Grapevine reveals how--through our everyday thoughts and
conversations, and the rumors we spread--we grapple with the new
global world. Drawn from diverse sources, the book illuminates
urban legends like the claim that a certain t-shirt with a Chinese
pictogram brands the wearer as a prostitute, conspiracy theories
such as the "9/11 Truth Movement," or stories of tourists infected
with AIDS by locals. These rumors, the authors argue, reflect our
anxieties and fears about contact with foreign cultures--how we
believe foreign competition to be poisoning the domestic economy
and foreign immigration to be eroding American values. Focusing on
the threat posed by terrorism, the impact of immigration, the risks
involved in international trade, and the dangers faced by naive
tourism, the book provides a broad survey of the most widely
circulated rumors and examines what these tales reveal about
contemporary society.
Up until the end of World War II, academe in central Europe showed
little interest in American culture. However, this rapidly changed
as American culture became an increasingly inescapable part of
everyday life in the postwar period. Drawing on a series of
transatlantic encounters in the years following 1945, George
Blaustein chronicles how issues like race, gender, and empire, as
they relate to the United States, became areas of intense interest
among members of the European academy. A major part of Blaustein's
book revolves around the exchange of ideas that took place at the
Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, founded in 1947. Through the
period of occupation, the seminar hosted a who's-who of American
and European intellectual life: figures like F. O. Matthiessen,
Margaret Mead, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Alain
Locke, and John Hope Franklin. In four concise chapters, Nightmare
Envy and Other Stories explores how the ruin of postwar Europe led
writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to
understand America in new ways. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories
will interest scholars in the fields of American Studies, postwar
intellectual history, and cultural diplomacy.
In Landscape of the Now, author Kent De Spain takes readers on a
deep journey into the underlying processes and structures of
postmodern movement improvisation. Based on a series of interviews
with master teachers who have developed unique approaches that are
taught around the world - Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Lisa Nelson,
Deborah Hay, Nancy Stark Smith, Barbara Dilley, Anna Halprin, and
Ruth Zaporah - this book offers the rare opportunity to find some
clarity in what is often a complex and confusing experience. After
more than 20 years of research, De Spain has created an extensive
list of questions that explore issues that arise for the improviser
in practice and performance as well as resources that influence
movements and choices. Answers to these questions are placed side
by side to create dialog and depth of understanding, and to see the
range of possible approaches experienced improvisers might explore.
In its nineteen chapters, Landscape of the Now delves into issues
like the influence of an audience on an improviser's choices or how
performers "track" and use their experience of the moment. The book
also looks at the role of cognitive skills, memory, space, emotion,
and the senses. One chapter offers a rare opportunity for an honest
discussion of the role of various forms of spirituality in what is
seen as a secular dance form. Whether read from cover to cover or
pulled apart and explored a subject at a time, Landscape of the Now
offers the reader a kind of map into the mysterious realm of human
creativity, and the wisdom and experience of artists who have spent
a lifetime exploring it.
Amidst the growing forums of kinky Jews, orthodox drag queens, and
Jewish geisha girls, we find today's sexy Jewess in a host of
reflexive plays with sexed-up self-display. A social phantasm with
real legs, she moves boldly between neo-burlesque striptease,
comedy television, ballet movies, and progressive porn to construct
the 21st Century Jewish American woman through charisma and comic
craft, in-your-face antics, and offensive charm. Her image
redresses longstanding stereotypes of the hag, the Jewish mother,
and Jewish American princess that have demeaned the Jewish woman as
overly demanding, inappropriate, and unattractive across the 20th
century, even as Jews assimilated into the American mainstream. But
why does "sexy" work to update tropes of the Jewish woman? And how
does sex link to humor in order for this update to work? Entangling
questions of sexiness to race, gender, and class, The Case of the
Sexy Jewess frames an embodied joke-work genre that is most often,
but not always meant to be funny. In a contemporary period after
the thrusts of assimilation and women's liberation movements,
performances usher in new versions of old scripts with ranging
consequences. At the core is the recuperative performance of
identity through impersonation, and the question of its radical or
conservative potential. Appropriating, re-appropriating, and
mis-appropriating identity material within and beyond their midst,
Sexy Jewess artists play up the failed logic of representation by
mocking identity categories altogether. They act as comic
chameleons, morphing between margin and center in countless number
of charged caricatures. Embodying ethnic and gender positions as
always already on the edge while ever more in the middle,
contemporary Jewish female performers extend a comic tradition in
new contexts, mobilizing progressive discourses from positions of
newfound race and gender privilege.
The Conservative Party has been the dominant force in
twentieth-century British politics. On its own or as the
predominant partner in a coalition it has held power for more than
sixty years since 1900. Despite this it has been the most neglected
and misunderstood of all the main parties. This book is the first
systematic attempt to survey the history and politics of the
Conservative Party across the whole of the twentieth century from
the `Khaki' election of 1900 to John Major's victory of 1992 and
beyond. Traditional boundaries between history and political
science have been ignored, with each of the authoritative team of
contributors pursuing an important theme within three main areas;
the composition and structure of the Party; its ideas, policies and
actions in government; and its public image and sources of support
in the country. The essays are based upon new research, in
particular in the Conservative Party archives. Conservative Century
will be essential reading for both students and specialists, and it
offers a mine of fascinating information for anyone interested in
British politics.
Crisis Cities blends critical theoretical insight with a
historically grounded comparative study to examine the form,
trajectory, and contradictions of redevelopment efforts following
the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of
research in the two cities, Gotham and Greenberg contend that New
York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic crisis cities,
representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment
that is increasingly dominant for crisis-stricken cities around the
world. This approach, which Gotham and Greenberg term crisis driven
urbanization, emphasizes the privatization of disaster aid and
resources, the devolution of disaster recovery responsibilities to
the local state, and the use of generous tax incentives to bolster
revitalization. Crisis driven urbanization also involves global
branding campaigns and public media events to repair a city's image
for business and tourism, as well as internally-focused political
campaigns and events that associate post-crisis political leaders
and public-private partnerships with this revitalized urban image.
By focusing on past and present conditions in New York and New
Orleans, Gotham and Greenberg show how crises expose long-neglected
injustices, underlying power structures, and social inequalities.
In doing so, they reveal the impact of specific policy reforms,
public-private actions, and socio-legal regulatory strategies on
the creation and reproduction of risk and vulnerability to
disasters. Crisis Cities questions the widespread narrative of
resilience and reveals the uneven and contradictory effects of
redevelopment activities in the two cities.
Democracy of Sound is the first book to examine music piracy in the
United States from the dawn of sound recording to the rise of
Napster and online file-sharing. It asks why Americans stopped
thinking of copyright as a monopoly-a kind of necessary evil-and
came to see intellectual property as sacrosanct and necessary for
the prosperity of an "information economy." Recordings only became
eligible for federal copyright in 1972, following years of struggle
between pirates, musicians, songwriters, broadcasters, and record
companies over the right to own sound. Beginning in the 1890s, the
book follows the competing visions of Americans who proposed ways
to keep obscure and noncommercial music in circulation, preserve
out-of-print recordings from extinction, or simply make records
more freely and cheaply available. Genteel jazz collectors swapped
and copied rare records in the 1930s; radicals pitched piracy as a
mortal threat to capitalism in the 1960s, while hip-hop DJs from
the 1970s onwards reused and transformed sounds to create a freer
and less regulated market for mixtapes. Each challenged the idea
that sound could be owned by anyone. The conflict led to the
contemporary stalemate between those who believe that "information
wants to be free" and those who insist that economic prosperity
depends on protecting intellectual property. The saga of piracy
also shows how the dubbers, bootleggers, and tape traders forged
new social networks that ultimately gave rise to the social media
of the twenty first century. Democracy of Sound is a colorful story
of people making law, resisting law, and imagining how law might
shape the future of music, from the Victrola and pianola to iTunes
and BitTorrent.
A Times Bestseller Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for UK
Nature Writing 2020 'Remarkable, and so profoundly enjoyable to
read ... Its importance is huge, setting down a vital marker in the
21st century debate about how we use and abuse the land' - Joyce
McMillan, Scotsman Desperate to connect with his native Galloway,
Patrick Laurie plunges into work on his family farm in the hills of
southwest Scotland. Investing in the oldest and most traditional
breeds of Galloway cattle, the Riggit Galloway, he begins to
discover how cows once shaped people, places and nature in this
remote and half-hidden place. This traditional breed requires
different methods of care from modern farming on an industrial,
totally unnatural scale. As the cattle begin to dictate the pattern
of his life, Patrick stumbles upon the passing of an ancient rural
heritage. Always one of the most isolated and insular parts of the
country, as the twentieth century progressed, the people of
Galloway deserted the land and the moors have been transformed into
commercial forest in the last thirty years. The people and the
cattle have gone, and this withdrawal has shattered many centuries
of tradition and custom. Much has been lost, and the new forests
have driven the catastrophic decline of the much-loved curlew, a
bird which features strongly in Galloway's consciousness. The links
between people, cattle and wild birds become a central theme as
Patrick begins to face the reality of life in a vanishing
landscape.
Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media
technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping
strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate
conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long
been instrumental in establishing, maintaining, and challenging
political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature
of religious practice. This collection of essays emerged from a
two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of
Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands
and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the
University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, an interdisciplinary
team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases
in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media
instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built
around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized
conflict, is multi-authored. The book's central question is: "When
ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or
by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict
change?"
From the USA's Big 4 to Pele's Beautiful Game, sport is a major
player in global cultural relations and commerce. Sport fuels the
media, stimulates commerce, bolsters national identity, is informed
by and in turn shapes global diplomacy and international relations,
and celebrates the competitive (and often commodified) body. It
provides drama and excitement for billions of the world's people.
The atlas traces the emergence of sport in its modern forms, and
features all established Olympic sports and sports recognized by
the International Olympic Committee (IOC) but not included in the
Olympic programme, as well as sports with their own cultural and
organizational base and commercial momentum. The profile and
popularity of the selected sports are mapped, showing patterns of
player recruitment and migration; financial flows; political uses
and abuses of sport; media audiences and fan bases; and including
colourful case-studies of the sportsmen and women who have emerged
in the modern period as global celebrities and superstars.
In a change from the ubiquitous cup cakes and traditional cake
books, The Global Bakery has gathered together over 60 recipes of
cakes from all around the world in one volume. The amateur baker is
taken on a journey across continents to Cote d'Ivoire (Soft Cake
with Pineapple and Coconut), Libya (Semolina and Date Cake),
Finland (Sour Cream Cake), Hungary (Chocolate Mousse Cake),
Cambodia (Persimmon Cake), USA (Red Velvet Cake) and Hawaii (Guava
Chiffon Cake) to name just a few. The recipes have been tested in a
domestic kitchen by a highly enthusiastic cake baker and are
presented in one beautifully photographed book. Accessible by even
the most inexperienced cooks, this book also gives the opportunity
for experienced cake bakers to learn new techniques while adding to
their repertoire. The emphasis is on creating delicious cakes that
are prepared using different combinations of flavours and
ingredients. It includes recipes that are gluten free, as well as
recipes for vegan and dairy-free cakes. All tastes are catered for
- from quick and easy cakes that children will have fun creating
and eating, to the more challenging but ultimately impressive cakes
for a centrepiece or special occasion.
Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that
grounds queer civil rights in etiology -- that is, in the cause of
homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment," or biology. Reading
etiology as a narrative form, political strategy, and hermeneutic
method in American and British literature and popular culture, it
argues that today's gay arguments for biological determinism accept
their opponents' paranoia about what Rohy calls "homosexual
reproduction"-that is, nonsexual forms of queer increase-preventing
more complex ways of considering sexuality and causality. This
study combines literary texts and psychoanalytic theory--two
salient sources of etiological narratives in themselves -- to
reconsider phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction: contagion in
Borrowed Time, bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma
in The Night Watch, choice of identity in James Weldon Johnson's
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and dangerous knowledge in The
Well of Loneliness. These readings draw on Lacan's notion of
retroactive causality to convert the question of what causes
homosexuality into a question of what homosexuality causes as the
constitutive outside of a heteronormative symbolic order.
Ultimately, this study shows, queer communities and queer theory
must embrace formerly shaming terms -- why should the increase of
homosexuality be unthinkable? -- while retaining the critical sense
of queerness as a non-identity, a permanent negativity.
Music- and style-centred youth cultures are now a familiar aspect
of everyday life in countries as far apart around the globe as
Nepal and Jamaica, Hong Kong and Israel, Denmark and Australia.
This lucid and original text provides a lively and wide-ranging
account of the relationship between popular music and youth culture
within the context of debates about the spatial dimensions of
identity. It begins with a clear and comprehensive survey, and
critical evaluation, of the existing body of literature on youth
culture and popular music developed by sociologists and cultural
and media theorists. It then develops a fresh perspective on the
ways in which popular music is appropriated as a cultural resource
by young people, using as a springboard a series of original
ethnographic studies of dance music, rap, bhangra and rock.
Bennett's original research material is carefully contextualised
within a wider international literature on youth styles, local
spaces and popular music but it serves to illustrate graphically
how styles of music and their attendant stylistic innovations are
appropriated and `lived out' by young people in particular social
spaces. Music, Bennett argues, is produced and consumed by young
people in ways that both inform their sense of self and also serve
to construct the social world in which their identities operate.
With its comprehensive coverage of youth and music studies and its
important new insights, Popular Music and Youth Culture is
essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in
sociology, cultural studies, media studies and popular music
studies. Dr ANDY BENNETT is lecturer in Sociology at the University
of Kent at Canterbury. He has published articles on aspects of
youth culture, popular music, local identity and music and
ethnicity in a number of journals, including Sociological Review,
Media Culture and Society and Popular Music. He is currently
co-editing a book on guitar cultures.
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