Placing struggles for communication rights within the broader context of human rights struggles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this broad-based collection offers a rich range of illustrations of national, regional and global struggles to define communication rights as essential to human needs and happiness.

The concept of "care" defines our humanity. Covering topics as diverse as familial care, medical care, artistic care, scientific care, and various other permutations of the term, this book examines the word and concept of "care" from a cultural perspective, tracing its use throughout literature and history.

Through a wide spectrum of horror sub-genres, this book examines how the current state of horror reflects the anxieties in Western culture. Horror films bring them to a mass audience and offer new figures for the nameless faceless 'antagonist' that plagues us and provides material with which to build a different understanding of ourselves.

Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature and Culture is a transdisciplinary study of social invisibility and diasporas which theorizes the differential in/visibility of diasporas through the prism of cultural productions (literature and the visual arts, including media studies) by both established artists and emerging ones.

While tracing the historical emergence of the cafe as a social institution and noting its multiple faces and functions in the modernity of the occident, three themes run like threads of varying texture through the chapters: the social connectivity and inclusion of cafes, cafe as surrogate office, and cafe as site of exchange for news and views.

Mulholland offers a scholarly, yet wholly accessible, critical engagement with young people's negotiation with the pornification of culture. This work foregrounds the affective dynamics in young people's institutional and everyday sexual peer cultures.

From Mean Girl to BFF, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood explores female sociality in postfeminist popular culture. Focusing on a range of media forms, Alison Winch reveals how women are increasingly encouraged to strategically bond by controlling each other's body image through 'the girlfriend gaze'.

The 2001 yearbook aims to fill a gap that has become more and more conspicuous among the wealth of scholarly periodicals in the field of Jewish Studies. It covers Jewish Culture in its broadest sense, i.e. encompassing various academic disciplines - literature, languages and linguistics, philosophy, art, sociology, politics and history - and reflects binary oppositions such as religious and secular, high and low, written and oral, male and female culture.

Christian churches across the world such as the Lutheran church in Madagascar have long been engaged in what we would today term "development". The church has been deeply involved in humanitarian assistance and development work, especially in the areas of education and health. Restoring Dignity in Rural and Urban Madagascar analyzes this phenomenon and presents stories of human dignity in the lives of the people in this society, a society that survives in a context of vulnerability, both social and economic. The stories show how everyday life is lived despite unfulfilled needs and when decent living conditions are but a dream. The book is primarily concerned with a commitment to Christianity in a changing society and focuses on church members' experiences of the development work of the Lutheran church in their everyday lives. Christian faith and Christian values such as human dignity, ethics, and belonging represent added values to these people and express value systems that are tied to ethical reflection and moral action. For those who choose to participate in the church's development work and spiritual activity, therefore, new ethical standards and norms are created. This approach challenges the traditional emphasis on cultural continuity thinking to explain the sudden change in values that people say that they have experienced. The book will be essential assigned reading in university courses in development studies, anthropology, and missiology.

Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust. Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists. Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe-from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted by marrying outcasts to each other in the town cemetery-Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority.

This book explores the material and everyday intersections between popular culture and new media. Using a range of interdisciplinary resources the chapters open up various hidden dimensions, including objects and infrastructures, archives, algorithms, data play and the body that force us to rethink our understanding of culture as it is today.

Central-Eastern Europe, in the mid-20th century, was a scene of Holocaust, mass killings, war, deportations and forced resettlements under the competing totalitarian invasions and afterwards. It was also the area where churches, politicians and citizens were engaged in reconciliation between antagonized religions and nations. This book presents several attempts to heal relations between Poles, Jews, Germans, Czechs, Ukrainians, Russians and Latvians as well as between Catholics, Protestants and Mariavites. Re-conciliatory practices of John Paul II and other Catholic leaders as well as Protestant churches are analysed in the first part of the book. Most of the remaining studies are focused on particular localities in Upper Silesia, Cieszyn Silesia, former Polish Livland and on the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. These detailed contributions combine sociological methods with anthropological insight and historical context. The authors are sociologists, psychologists and theologians and this leads to a fully interdisciplinary approach in the assessment of the recent state of inter-group relations in the region as well as in the proposed theory of peacebuilding and reconciliation.

Addressing cultural representations of women's participation in the political violence and terrorism of the Italian anni di piombo ('years of lead', c. 1969-83), this book conceptualizes Italy's experience of political violence during those years as a form of cultural and collective trauma.

This book explores the politics borne of consumption through the case of coffee activism and ethical consumption. It analyses the agencies, structures, repertoires and technologies of promotion and participation in the politics of fair trade consumption through an exploration of the relationship between activism and consumption.

Drawing on ethnographic accounts of children's media-referenced play, this book explores children's engagement with media cultures and playground experiences, analyzing a range of issues such as learning, fantasy, communication and identity.

This book develops a new theory of instrumental whiteness and leisure. Empirical research is drawn upon to highlight whiteness across a comprehensive and internationally-grounded range of leisure practices. The book explores sports participation, sports media and sports fandom, informal leisure, outdoor leisure, music, popular culture and tourism.

Across the world, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the tempo of modern life. Described simply as the 'slow phenomenon', this volume explores this new brand of living that entails not simply slowing down but an embracing of alternative activities that promote meaning, thoughtfulness, engagement and authenticity.

This timely book examines austerity's conflicted meanings, from austerity chic and anti-austerity protest to economic and eco-austerity. Bramall's compelling text explores the presence and persuasiveness of the past, developing a new approach to the historical in contemporary cultural politics.

Drawing on children's narratives about their everyday life this book explores how children come to understand the process of socialization at home, at school and in the neighbourhood as an embodied and biographical experience.

What role does race, geography, religion, orthography and nationalism play in the crafting of identities? What are the origins of Singlish? This book offers a thorough investigation of old and new identities in Asia's most global city, examined through the lens of language.

Analyzing action at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, this first ethnography of the site offers a fresh approach to studying the memorial and memory work as potential civic engagement of visitors with themselves and others rather than with history itself.

A provocative feminist analysis of the moral panics of sexuality, this interdisciplinary edited collection showcases the range of historical and contemporary crises we too often suppress, including vagina dentata, vampires, cannibalism, age appropriateness, breast cancer, menstrual panics, and sex education.