Throughout its existence, the Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC) has asserted its commitment to the need for humans to come together to speak about the scientific, the political, and the artistic in order to live together in an enlightened fashion. In 2004, ACTC's Tenth Annual Conference convened to re-affirm and re-examine the value of serious reading and discussion focused through core texts. Participants articulated the various ways by which core text education in the liberal arts constructs and supports different expressions of community on college campuses around the world. Presenters asked whether it is better to contemplate the arts simply as expressions of cultures and traditions or to cultivate them, taking the risk that what is valued in artistic expressions might be changed by the inventions of teachers and the students they encourage. The essays collected here reflect the responses of the diverse group of ACTC's members, all of whom support the idea of liberal core text education with the self-conscious awareness of the challenges facing liberal education in the modern academy.

2003 Susan Koppelman Award given by the Joint Women's Caucus of the Popular Culture/American Culture. Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. "Reload" offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures. The book brings together women's cyberfiction--fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies--and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on women's lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. The writers challenge the conceptual and institutional rifts between high and low culture, which are embedded in the texts and artifacts of cyberculture.

In a delectable collection of stories that move sequentially through the ages of woman, dramatic twists and surprises unnerve the reader. From childhood violence to romantic ruin in a retirement home, mayhem and magic are never far away in this deliciously conceived, highly flavored, and subtly blended feast for lovers of literature.

Celia Pippet, founder of a feminist magazine, impulsively steals a bizarre artifact from the British Museum. Joined by her friend Martin, a filmmaker, and American academic Tamara, she flees to Bez in southern France to escape detection and to pursue the trail of the beguiling Adele. Fifty years before, Adele had been rescued from Bez by Dr. Jonas Sylvester. He brought her to Paris where she captured the city's attention with her alluring beauty and air of secrecy. When Sylvester brings over sister Blanche to look after Adele, he is not prepared for the love between them nor their escape from him. He takes his revenge. Moving between Blanche's life with Adele and Celia's search for clues into that life, the stories converge in Bez where the three friends discover Blanche's existence and Adele's true, if unbelievable, identity. The effects of the revelation are shattering--Adele's erotic power extends beyond the grave, melding past and present into a single reality. A provocative and original novel by an accomplished literary writer who steps beyond the boundaries of what we know as male and female.

An examination of subversive games-games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique. For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games-games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry-and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of "playing house" include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims. She looks at artists' alternative computer-based games and explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns-including worldwide poverty and AIDS-can be incorporated into game design. Arguing that this kind of conscious practice-which now constitutes the avant-garde of the computer game medium-can inspire new working methods for designers, Flanagan offers a model for designing that will encourage the subversion of popular gaming tropes through new styles of game making, and proposes a theory of alternate game design that focuses on the reworking of contemporary popular game practices.

A theoretical and practical guide to integrating human values into the conception and design of digital games. All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. "Big ideas" such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation-as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed-may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games. After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book's chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.