Why are the arts and humanities under attack? And how can they fight back? Historically these fields have suffered from a lack of prestige due to the utilitarian perspective of the "developed" world. While such utilitarian views have not been entirely fair on this branch of knowledge, the humanities themselves are partly to blame for this crisis, often not keeping pace with an increasingly changing society. It is therefore imperative that the humanities once and for all prove themselves relevant, leaving behind "departmentalized" approaches to academic knowledge and embracing the social mission that once epitomized humanistic study. Guided by such principles, this book features fourteen interdisciplinary studies that explore exciting intersections between different areas of academic research. These studies centre around three broad topics, which function as this volume's structural axes: identity, gender, and space and mobility (whether voluntary, as in tourism, or imposed, as in the case of migrations and persecutions). Altogether, the volume demonstrates that the humanities, far from being artificially detached from society, can actually study the enormously complex context that is contemporary Europe and crucially point the way to a better, more equitable world.

Cultural Politics in Harry Potter: Life, Death and the Politics of Fear is the first book-length analysis of topics, such as death, fear and biopolitics in J.K. Rowling's work from controversial and interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection brings together recent theoretical and applied cultural studies and focuses on three key areas of inquiry: (1) wizarding biopolitics and intersected discourses; (2) anxiety, death, resilience and trauma; and (3) the politics of fear and postmodern transformations. As such, this book: provides a comprehensive overview of national and gender discourses, as well as the transiting bodies in-between, in relation to the Harry Potter books series and related multimedia franchise; situates the transformative power of death within the fandom, transmedia and film depictions of the Potterverse and critically deconstructs the processes of subjectivation and legitimation of death and fear; examines the strategies and mechanisms through which cultural and political processes are managed, as well as reminding us how fiction and reality intersect at junctions, such as terrorism, homonationalism, materialism, capitalism, posthumanism and technology. Exploring precisely what is cultural about wizarding politics, and what is political about culture, this book is key reading for students of contemporary literature, media and culture, as well as anyone with an interest in the fictional universe and wizarding world of Harry Potter.

Cultural Politics in Harry Potter: Life, Death and the Politics of Fear is the first book-length analysis of topics, such as death, fear and biopolitics in J.K. Rowling's work from controversial and interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection brings together recent theoretical and applied cultural studies and focuses on three key areas of inquiry: (1) wizarding biopolitics and intersected discourses; (2) anxiety, death, resilience and trauma; and (3) the politics of fear and postmodern transformations. As such, this book: provides a comprehensive overview of national and gender discourses, as well as the transiting bodies in-between, in relation to the Harry Potter books series and related multimedia franchise; situates the transformative power of death within the fandom, transmedia and film depictions of the Potterverse and critically deconstructs the processes of subjectivation and legitimation of death and fear; examines the strategies and mechanisms through which cultural and political processes are managed, as well as reminding us how fiction and reality intersect at junctions, such as terrorism, homonationalism, materialism, capitalism, posthumanism and technology. Exploring precisely what is cultural about wizarding politics, and what is political about culture, this book is key reading for students of contemporary literature, media and culture, as well as anyone with an interest in the fictional universe and wizarding world of Harry Potter.

The notion of "freedom" has long been associated with a number of perceptions deemed fundamental to an understanding of Scotland and the Scots. Thus Scottish history is viewed, resistance to the Roman Empire, to the Wars of Independence against England, to the eighteenth-century Jacobite uprisings, to the birth of the Labour and Trade Union movements. Key Scottish texts have the concept of liberty at their core: the Declaration of Arbroath, Barbour's Brus, Blind Hary's Wallace, the poems of Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid and the novels of Janice Galloway and Irvine Welsh. Scottish thinkers have written extensively on the philosophies of freedom, be it individual, economic, or religious. These essays examine the question of "freedom", its representations and its interpretations within the literatures of Scotland.