Erich Hörl's Sacred Channels is an original take on the history of communication theory and the cultural imaginary of communication understood through the notions of the sacred and the primitive. Hörl offers insight into the shared ground of anthropology and media theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and presents an archeology of the philosophy of technology that underpins contemporary culture. This singular and unique project focuses on the ethnological disciplines and their phantasmatic imaginations of a prealphabetical realm of the sacred and the primitive but reads them in the context of media cultural questions as epistemic unconscious and as projections of the emerging postalphabetical condition. Drawing inspiration from work by the likes of Friedrich Kittler, Hörl's understanding of cybernetics in the post-World War II interdisciplinary field informs a rich analysis that is of interest to media scholars and to anyone seeking to understand the historical and theoretical underpinnings of the humanities in the age of technical media.

*Sacred Sisters* focuses on five saints: the four female Irish saints who have extant medieval biographies (Darerca, Brigid, Íte, and Samthann), and Patrick, whose writings -- fifth-century Ireland’s sole surviving texts -- attest to the centrality of women in Irish Christianity’s development. Women served as leaders and teachers, perhaps even as bishops and priests, and men and women worked together in a variety of arrangements as well as independently. Previous studies of gender in medieval Ireland have emphasized sexism and sex-segregated celibacy, dismissing abundant evidence of alternative approaches throughout the sources, including in the Lives of Ireland’s female saints. Sacred Sisters places these generally marginalized texts at its center, exploring their portraits of empowered, authoritative, compassionate women who exemplified an accepting and affirming ethics of gender and sexuality that would be unusual in many mainstream Christian movements in the present day, let alone in the Middle Ages.

After the discovery of the ergotism epidemics (poisoning caused by ingesting the fungal toxin of rye) and its etiology, eighteenth-century physicians interpreted medieval chronicles in their medical texts in order to recognize the occurrences of ergotic diseases through retrospective diagnosis. They assumed that St. Anthony's fire and ignis sacer ("sacred fire") recorded in medieval texts represented the same disease, ergotism. This interpretative method, lacking a textual basis in the sources, has been incorrectly followed by historians till now. This book examines this historical prejudice through textual analysis, comparing diverse medieval and early modern sources. A striking semantic complexity emerges that changes the concept of St. Anthony's fire and modifies our understanding of diseases in general. This research illuminates aspects of the history of medicine, society, and hospitals.

Bodily suffering and patient, Christlike attitudes towards that suffering were among the key characteristics of sainthood throughout the medieval period. Drawing on new work in medieval dis/ability studies, this book analyses the meanings given to putative saints' bodily infirmities in late medieval canonization hearings. How was an individual saint's bodily ailment investigated in the inquests, and how did the witnesses (re)construct the saintly candidates' ailments? What meanings were given to infirmity when providing proofs for holiness? This study depicts holy infirmity as an aspect of sanctity that is largely defined within the community, in continual dialogue with devotees, people suffering from doubt, the holy person, and the cultural patterns ascribed to saintly life. Furthermore, it analyses how the meanings given to saints' infirmities influenced and reflected society's attitudes towards bodily ailments in general.

This volume investigates the state of same-sex relations in later medieval England, drawing on a remarkably rich array of primary sources from the period that include legal documents, artworks, theological treatises, and poetry. Tom Linkinen uses those sources to build a framework of medieval condemnations of same-sex intimacy and desire and then shows how same-sex sexuality reflected“and was inflected by“gender hierarchies, approaches to crime, and the conspicuous silence on the matter in the legal systems of the period.

The view that China has become increasingly assertive under President Xi Jinping is now a common trope in academic and media discourse. However, until the end of Xi Jinping’s first term in March 2018, China had been relatively restrained in its use of coercive economic measures. This is puzzling given the conventional belief among scholars and practitioners that sanctions are a middle ground between diplomatic and military/paramilitary action.
Using a wide range of methods and data – including in-depth interviews with 76 current and former politicians, policy-makers, diplomats, and commercial actors across 12 countries and 16 cities – Sanctions with Chinese Characteristics: Rhetoric and Restraint in China’s Diplomacy examines the ways in which China had employed economic sanctions to further its political objectives, and the factors explaining China’s behaviour. This book provides a systematic investigation into the ways in which Chinese decisionmakers approached sanctions both at the United Nations Security Council and unilaterally, and shows how China’s longstanding sanctions rhetoric has had a constraining effect on its behaviour, resulting in its inability to employ sanctions in complete alignment with its immediate interests.

For women at the early modern courts, clothing and jewellery were essential elements in their political arsenal, enabling them to signal their dynastic value, to promote loyalty to their marital court and to advance political agendas. This is the first collection of essays to examine how elite women in early modern Europe marshalled clothing and jewellery for political ends. With essays encompassing women who traversed courts in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Habsburg Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, the contributions cover a broad range of elite women from different courts and religious backgrounds as well as varying noble ranks.

*Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300.1550* is the first book to reclaim satire as a central component of Catholic altarpieces, devotional art, and veneration, moving beyond humor™'s relegation to the medieval margins or to the profane arts alone. The book challenges humor™'s perception as a mere teaching tool for the laity and the antithesis of ™'high™' veneration and theology, a divide perpetuated by Counter-Reformation thought and the inheritance of Mikhail Bakhtin (*Rabelais and His World*, 1965). It reveals how humor, laughter, and material culture played a critical role in establishing St. Joseph as an exemplar in western Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Its goal is to open a new line of interpretation in medieval and early modern cultural studies by revealing the functions of humor in sacred scenes, the role of laughter as veneration, and the importance of play for pre-Reformation religious experiences.

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, *Screen Genealogies* argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become increasingly decomposed into a distributed field of technologically interconnected surfaces and interfaces, we more readily recognize the deeper spatial and environmental interventions that have long been a property of screens. For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a camouflage. A genealogy stressing transformation and descent rather than origins and roots emphasizes a deeper set of intersecting and competing definitions of the screen, enabling new thinking about what the screen might yet become.

Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they move from the margins to the centre of contemporary media practice.Recent years have seen a marked scholarly interest in spatial dimensions and conceptions of moving image culture, with some theorists claiming that a 'spatial turn' has taken place in media studies and screen practices alike. Yet this is the first book-length study dedicated to on-screen spatiality as such.Spanning mainstream cinema, experimental film, video art, mobile screens, and stadium entertainment, the volume includes contributions from such acclaimed authors as Giuliana Bruno and Tom Gunning as well as a younger generation of scholars.

Unlike most studies of the relationship between cinema and art, which privilege questions of medium or institutional specificity and intermediality, Screening the Art World explores the ways in which artists and the art world more generally have been represented in cinema. Contributors address a rarely explored subject -art in cinema, rather than the art of cinema - by considering films across genres, historical periods and national cinemas in order to reflect on cinema’s fluctuating imaginary of ‘art’ and ‘the art world’. The book examines the intersection of art history with history in cinema, cinema’s simultaneous affirmation and denigration of the idea of art as ‘truth’ and what this means for cinema’s understanding of itself, the dominant, often contradictory ways in which artists have been represented on screen, and cinematic representations of the art world’s tenuous position between commercial good and cultural capital.

The persistent popularity of the detective narrative, new obsessions with psychological and supernatural disturbances, as well as the resurgence of older narratives of mystery or the Gothic all constitute a vast proportion of contemporary film and television productions. New ways of watching film and television have also seen a reinvigoration of this ‘most domestic of media’. But what does this ‘domesticity’ of genre and media look like ‘Down Under’ in the twenty.first century? This collection traces representations of the Gothic on both the small and large screens in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty.first century. It attends to the development and mutation of the Gothic in these post. or neo.colonial contexts, concentrating on the generic innovations of this temporal and geographical focus.

We live in an era of screens. No longer just the place where we view movies, or watch TV at night, screens are now ubiquitous, the source of the majority of information we consume daily, and a crucial component of our basic interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. This transformation has happened almost without us realizing it-and certainly without the full theoretical and intellectual analysis it deserves.Screens brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to analyse the growing presence and place of screens in our lives today. They tackle such topics as the archaeology of screens, film and media theories about our interactions with them, their use in contemporary art, and the new avenues they open up for showing films and other media in non-traditional venues.

Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position by influencing people’s conception of what justice was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These “scripts of justice” took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it. Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts, it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to socio-legal authority.

This book brings together a team of scholars representing a broad range of interests and new approaches in medieval studies to explore the interactions of secular power and sacral authority in central and southeastern Europe in the period. Contributors present new research on the region's political and legal history, nobility and government institutions, war and diplomacy, literature and literacy, sacred and secular art, archaeological research, heritage studies, and much more.

This remarkable study develops a theoretical critique of contemporary discourses on secularism and assimilation, arguing that the perspective of assimilating distinct religious minorities by incorporating them into a secular and supposedly neutral public sphere may be self-subverting. To flesh out this insight, Jansen draws on the paradoxes of assimilation as experienced by the French Jews in the late 19th century through a contextualised reading of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. She proposes a dynamic, critical multiculturalism as an alternative to discourses focusing on secularism, assimilation and integration.

This book explores what's happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life.

The city is a complex object. Some researchers look at its shape, others at its people, animals, ecology, policy, infrastructures, buildings, history, art, or technical networks. Some researchers analyse processes of in- or exclusion, gentrification, or social mobility; others biological evolution, traffic flows, or spatial development. Many combine these topics or add still more topics beyond this list. Some projects cross the boundaries of research and practice and engage in action research, while others pursue knowledge for the sake of curiosity. This volume embraces this variety of perspectives and provides an essential collection of methodologies for studying the city from multiple, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives. We start by recognizing that the complexity of the urban environment cannot be understood from a single vantage point. We therefore offer multiple methodologies in order to gather and analyse data about the city, and provide ways to connect and integrate these approaches.

The contributors form a talented network of urban scholars and practitioners at the forefront of their fields. They offer hands-on methodological techniques and skills for data collection and analysis. Furthermore, they reveal honest and insightful reflections from behind the scenes. All methodologies are illustrated with examples drawn from the authors own research applying them in the city of Amsterdam. In this way, the volume also offers a rich collection of Amsterdam-based research and outcomes that may inform local urban practitioners and policy makers.

Altogether, the volume offers indispensable tools for and aims to educate a new generation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary-minded urban scholars and practitioners.

When the Second World War ended, Europe was in ruins. Yet, politically and socially, the years between 1943 and 1947 were a time of dramatic reconfigurations, which proved to be foundational for the making of today's Europe. This volume hones in on the crucial period from the beginning of the end of Nazi rule in Europe to the advent of the Cold War. Through a series of interrelated case studies that span the entire continent, it demonstrates how the everyday experiences of Europeans during these five years shaped the transition of their societies from war to peace. The authors explore these reconfigurations on different scales and levels -the local and regional, the ethnic and national, and the international - with the purpose of enhancing our understanding of how wars end.

Dutch Golden Age poet Constantijn Huygens (1596—1687) was a remarkable figure: in addition to writing poetry, he composed music; was secretary to two Princes of Orange, Frederick Henry and William II; and became a friend to John Donne, Rembrandt, Descartes, and many other notable people of his time. In this book, Peter Davidson and Adriaan van der Weel offer a broad selection of Huygens’s poems and provide excellent translations for those written in Dutch, Latin, and a number of other languages“revealing both Huygens’s literary talent and his remarkable linguistic range.

Giles Knox examines how El Greco, Velaìzquez, and Rembrandt, though a disparate group of artists, were connected by a new self-consciousness with respect to artistic tradition. In particular, Knox considers the relationship of these artists to the art of Renaissance Italy, and sets aside nationalist art histories in order to see the period as one of fruitful exchange. Across Europe during the seventeenth century, artists read Italian-inspired writings on art and these texts informed how they contemplated their practice. Knox demonstrates how these three artists engaged dynamically with these writings, incorporating or rejecting the theoretical premises to which they were exposed. Additionally, this study significantly expands our understanding of how paintings can activate the sense of touch. Knox discusses how Velaìzquez and Rembrandt, though in quite different ways, sought to conjure for viewers thoughts about touching that resonated directly with the subject matter they depicted.

One of the iconic figures of the twentieth-century cinema, Sergei Eisenstein is best known as the director of The Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevskii and Ivan the Terrible. His craft as director and film editor left a distinct mark on such key figures of the Western cinema as Nicolas Roeg, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah and Akiro Kurosawa.This comprehensive volume of Eisenstein’s writings is the first-ever English-language edition of his newly discovered notes for a general history of the cinema, a project he undertook in 1946-47 before his death in 1948. In his writings, Eisenstein presents the main coordinates of a history of the cinema without mentioning specific directors or films: what we find instead is a vast genealogy of all the media and of all the art forms that have preceded cinema’s birth and accompanied the first decades of its history, exploring the same expressive possibilities that cinema has explored and responding to the same, deeply rooted, “urges” cinema has responded to. Cinema appears here as the heir of a very long tradition that includes death masks, ritual processions, wax museums, diorama and panorama, and as a medium in constant transformation, that far from being locked in a stable form continues to redefine itself.The texts by Eisenstein are accompanied by a series of critical essays written by some of the world’s most qualified Eisenstein scholars.

Though Ingmar Bergman became famous as a filmmaker, his roots-and, to some extent, his heart-were in the theater. He directed more than one hundred plays in his career, and The Serious Game takes a close look at fourteen productions he staged at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Looking closely at the relationship between the verbal and the visual, this book gives even longtime Bergman fans a new understanding of his sensitivity to nuance, his versatility, and his dedication to craftsmanship.**INCLUDES DVD WITH FOURTEEN VIDEO RECORDINGS, ALL IN COLOUR**

Binge drinking and illicit sex were just as common in the Dutch Golden Age as they are today, if not more so. Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll in the Dutch Golden Age is a compelling narrative about the generation of young men that came of age in the Dutch Republic during the economic boom of the early seventeenth century. Contrary to their parents' wishes, the younger generation grew up in luxury and wore extravagant clothing, grew their hair long, and squandered their time drinking and smoking. They created a new youth culture with many excesses; one that we today associate with the counterculture generation of the 1960s.With his engaging storytelling style and humorous anecdotes, Roberts convincingly reveals that deviant male youth behavior is common to all times, especially periods when youngsters have too much money and too much free time on their hands.

As LGBTQ movements in Western Europe, North America, and other regions of the world are becoming increasingly successful at awarding LGBTQ people rights, especially institutional recognition for same-sex couples and their families, what becomes of the deeper social transformation that these movements initially aimed to achieve? The United States is in many ways a paradigmatic model for LGBTQ movements in other countries. Sexuality, Subjectivity, and LGBTQ Militancy in the United States focuses on the transformations of the US LGBTQ movement since the 1980s, highlighting the relationship between its institutionalization and the disappearance of sexuality from its most visible claims, so that its growing visibility and legitimation since the 1990s have paradoxically led to a decrease in grassroots militancy. The book examines the issue from the bottom up, identifying the links between the varying importance of sexuality as a movement theme and actors’ mobilization, and enhances the import of subjectivity in militancy. It draws attention to cultural, sometimes infrapolitical, forms of militancy that perpetuate the role of sexuality in LGBTQ militancy.

Who were the shadow agents of Renaissance war? In this pioneering collection of essays scholars use new archival evidence and other sources, including literature, artworks, and other non-textual material, to uncover those men, women, children and other animals who sustained war by means of their preparatory, auxiliary, infrastructural, or supplementary labour. These shadow agents worked in the zone between visibility and invisibility, often moving between civilians and soldiers, and their labour was frequently forced. This volume engages with a range of important debates including: the relationship between war and state formation; the ‘military revolution’ or transformation of early modern military force; the nature of human and non-human agency; gender and war; civilian protection and expulsion; and espionage and diplomacy. The focus of the volume is on Italy, but it includes studies of France and England, and the editors place these themes in a broader European context with the aim of supporting and stimulating research in this field.

Long before China promulgated the official One Belt One Road initiatives, vast networks of cross-border exchanges already existed across Asia and Eurasia. The dynamics of such trade and resource flows have largely been outside state control, and are pushed to the realm of the shadow economy. The official initiative is a state-driven attempt to enhance the orderly flow of resources across countries along the Belt and Road, hence extending the reach of the states to the shadow economies. This volume offers a bottom-up view of the transborder informal exchanges across Asia and Eurasia, and analyses its clash and mesh with the state-orchestrated Belt and Road cooperation. By undertaking a comparative study of country cases along the new silk roads, the book underlines the intended and unintended consequences of such competing routes of connectivity on the socio-economic conditions of local communities.

Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare’s writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare’s works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life.

For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge.

This book draws on a wide range of methods-including approaches from literary studies, cultural studies, and urban sociology-to analyse the transformation of Shanghai through rapid growth and widespread urban renewal. Lena Scheen explores the literary imaginings of the city, its past, present, and future, in order to understand the effects of that urban transformation on both the psychological state of Shanghai's citizens and their perception of the spaces they inhabit.

Representations of shapeshifters are prominent in medieval culture and they are particularly abundant in the vernacular literatures of the societies around the North Sea. Some of the figures in these stories remain well known in later folklore and often even in modern media, such as werewolves, dragons, berserkir and bird-maidens. Incorporating studies about Old English, Norse, Latin, Irish, and Welsh literature, this collection of essays marks an important new contribution to the study of medieval shapeshifters.Each essay highlights how shapeshifting cannot be studied in isolation, but intersects with many other topics, such as the supernatural, monstrosity, animality, gender and identity. Contributors to Shapeshifters in Medieval North Atlantic Literature come from different intellectual traditions, embracing a multidisciplinary approach combining influences from literary criticism, history, philology, and anthropology.

An in-depth exploration of digital culture and its dissemination, Sharing offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy. Instead, Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. Concentrating not only on the cultural enrichment caused by widely shared digital media, Sharing also discusses new financing models that would allow works to be shared freely by individuals without aim at profit. Aigrain carefully balances the needs to support and reward creative activity with a suitable respect for the cultural common good and proposes a new interpretation of the digital landscape.

This book charts the unsettled media cultures and deep time of shellac, retracing its journey from the visual to the sonic, and back again. Each chapter unveils a situated moment in the long history of shellac – travelling from its early visual culture to Emile Berliner’s discovery of its auditory properties through to its recycling in contemporary art and design practices. Unforeseen correspondences between artefacts as diverse as mirrors, seals, gramophone discs and bombs are revealed. With its combinatory approach and commitment to material thinking, Shellac in Visual and Sonic Culture insists on moments of contact, encounter, and transformation. The book notably addresses the colonial unconscious underpinning the early transnational recording industry, highlighting the multiple gestures and forms of labour entombed within the production of the 78rpm disc. Roy explores shellac as a concrete substance, as well as the malleable stuff of which stories, histories and modern imaginings were made – and unmade.

Traditional scholarship on post-Roman western culture has tended to examine the ethnic identities of Goths, Franks, and similar groups while neglecting the Romans themselves, in part because modern scholars have viewed the concept of being Roman as one denoting primarily a cultural or legal affiliation. As this book demonstrates, however, early medieval 'Romanness' also encompassed a sense of belonging to an ethnic group, which allowed Romans in Iberia and Gaul to adopt Gothic or Frankish identities in a more nuanced manner than has been previously acknowledged in the literature.

Maritime trade is the backbone of the world’s economy. Around ninety percent of all goods are transported by ship, and since World War II, shipbuilding has undergone major changes in response to new commercial pressures and opportunities. Early British dominance, for example, was later undermined in the 1950s by competition from the Japanese, who have since been overtaken by South Korea and, most recently, China. The case studies in this volume trace these and other important developments in the shipbuilding and ship repair industries, as well as workers’ responses to these historic transformations.

Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects—physically or virtually—ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, they are presented as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with ‘hauntographs’ of five Age of ‘Discovery’ shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny.

In this study, the appearance and location of shops in Amsterdam during the early modern period is linked to major changes in the urban economy, the size and socio-spatial distribution of its population, and the structure of the urban grid. Not only is there ample attention for the spatial distribution of shops across the urban landscape, but for the first time it is also accurately charted what the exterior and interior of Amsterdam shops looked like and how they changed in the course of the centuries. Partly as a result of this, it has proved possible to give an impression of the ways in which retailers and customers interacted.

Teylers Museum was founded in 1784 and soon thereafter became one of the most important centres of Dutch science. The Museum’s first director, Martinus van Marum, famously had the world’s largest electrostatic generator built and set up in Haarlem. This subsequently became the most prominent item in the Museum’s world-class, publicly accessible, and constantly growing collections. These comprised scientific instruments, mineralogical and palaeontological specimens, prints, drawings, paintings, and coins. Van Marum’s successors continued to uphold the institution’s prestige and use the collections for research purposes, while it was increasingly perceived as an art museum by the public. In the early twentieth century, the Nobel Prize laureate Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was appointed head of the scientific instrument collection and conducted experiments on the Museum’s premises. Showcasing Science: A History of Teylers Museum in the Nineteenth Century charts the history of Teylers Museum from its inception until Lorentz’ tenure. From the vantage point of the Museum’s scientific instrument collection, this book gives an analysis of the changing public role of Teylers Museum over the course of the nineteenth century.

This richly illustrated study is the first consider the manifold functions and meanings of Hals’s distinctive handling of paint. Atkins explores the uniqueness of Hals’s approach to painting and the relationship of his manner to seventeenth-century aesthetics. He also investigates the economic motivations and advantages of his methods, the operation of the style as a personal and workshop brand, and the apparent modernity of the artist’s style. The book seeks to understand the multiple levels on which Hals’s consciously cultivated manner of painting operated for himself, his pupils and assistants, his clients, and succeeding generations of viewers. As a result, the book offers a wholly new understanding of one of the leading artists of the Dutch Golden Age, and one of the most formative painters in the history of art in the Western tradition. It also provides a much needed interrogation of the interrelationships of subjectivity, style, authorship, methods of artistic and commercial production, economic consumption, and art theory in early modernity.

Violent incidents that took place in 2004 and 2005 in the Netherlands and the UK respectively prompted people to claim that multiculturalism had failed. This claim requires an assessment of the effect of the policies that were drafted based on this political philosophy. In this study, the author analyses two sets of policies developed from multiculturalism: policies of anti-discrimination of minorities and their labour market participation. The effect of these policies is assessed by studying the policy objectives and their results.Based on this review, the author concludes that while there is still much to achieve in the fields of anti-discrimination and labour market participation, multiculturalism did not fail in the UK. On the contrary, it created a positive public perception of diversity and a high participation of minorities in the labour market. This contrasts with results achieved in the Netherlands where policies have fluctuated in such a way that the public attitude towards diversity is ambivalent and the participation of minorities in the labour market is much lower than that of their native counterpart.

Sino-American Relations brings together high-quality research articles in order to examine one aspect of the political mechanism of modern China, from empire to the PRC: political initiatives to root out corruption. Proceeding chronologically, the eleven chapters explore modern political history through a particular focus on the anti-corruption campaigns of early modern and modern China. Our interdisciplinary analysis draws on methodologies from several distinct fields, including political science, civil law, and mass media. Such an analysis reveals the unique characteristics of China’s urbanization, which have transformed not only the country, but also the CCP – from a rural-based totalitarian party to a city-centered authoritarian party, and from a party of the people to a party of powerful interest groups by 2002–2016.

The Hollandsche Schouwburg is a former theatre in Amsterdam where, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, tens of thousands of Jews were assembled before being deported to transit and concentration camps. Before the war, the theatre had been an example of Jewish integration in the Netherlands, and after the war it became a memorial for the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. This book is the first international publication to address all the historical aspects of the site, putting it in a broader European and historical context.

Taking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we explore the changing conditions and contours for living within such new and changing frameworks? How can, or should we, think and act within, but also in response to these conditions? This collection brings together various perspectives on the datafication and algorithmization of culture from debates and disciplines within the field of cultural inquiry, specifically (new) media studies, game studies, urban studies, screen studies, and gender and postcolonial studies. It proposes conceptual and methodological directions for exploring where, when, and how data and algorithms (re)shape cultural practices, create (in)justice, and (co)produce knowledge.

As urban development in Asia has accelerated, cities in the region have become central to skateboarding culture, livelihoods, and consumption. Asia's urban landscapes are desired for their endless supply of 'spots'. A spot is assemblage of objects, surfaces and obstacles holding the possibilities to perform skateboarding manoeuvres (tricks). Spots are not built for skateboarding; they are accidents of urban planning and commercial activity; glitches in the urban machine. Skateboarders and filmers chase these glitches searching for spots to make skate video, the currency of the industry and skateboarding's primary cultural artefact. Once captured, performances at Asia's spots circulate rapidly through digital platforms to millions of skateboarders, enrolling spots from Shenzhen, Dubai and Ramallah into an alternative cartography of the region. By focusing on this alternative way of desiring and consuming urban Asia, this book explores the ways skateboarding resets relational and comparative hierarchies of urban development within Asia and between Asia and the West.

This study contributes to the history of social changes in Iran during the Abbasid Caliphate (AH 132–656, AD 750–1258) by foregrounding the perspective of Persian language historians – from Abu Ali Bal'ami (AH 363, AD 974), the first known Persian historian, to Atamelak Joveyni (AH 623–681, AD 1226–1283), the great historian of the Mongol Era. By applying the insights of Anthony Giddens and the theory of structuration to address the interactions of social agents and structures, this book provides a coherent narrative of social transformation in medieval Iran.

This volume explores the final phase of the West Roman Empire, particularly the changing interactions between the imperial authority and external 'barbarian' groups in the northwest frontiers of the empire during the fourth and fifth centuries. The contributions present valuable overviews of recent archaeological research combined with innovative theoretical discussions. Key topics include the movement of precious metals, trajectories of imperial power, the archaeology of migration, and material culture in relation to debates about ethnicity.

This book focuses on the referendums against water privatization in Italy and explores how activists took to social media, ultimately convincing twenty-seven million citizens to vote. Investigating the relationship between social movements and internet-related activism during complex campaigns, this book examines how a technological evolution — the increased relevance of social media platforms — affected in very different ways organizations with divergent characteristics, promoting at the same time decentralized communication practices, and new ways of coordinating dispersed communities of people.Matteo Cernison combines and adapts a wide set of methods, from social network analysis to digital ethnography, in order to explore in detail how digital activism and face-to-face initiatives interact and overlap. He argues that the geographical scale of actions, the role played by external media professionals, and the activists’ perceptions of digital technologies are key elements that contribute in a significant way to shape the very different communication practices often described as online activism.

Social Movements and Solidarity Structures in Crisis-Ridden Greece explores the rich grassroots experience of social movements in Greece between 2008 and 2016. The harsh conditions of austerity triggered the rise of vibrant mobilizations that went hand-in-hand with the emergence of numerous solidarity structures, providing unofficial welfare services to the suffering population. Based on qualitative field research conducted in more than 50 social movement organizations in Greece’s two major cities, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the contentious mechanisms that led to the development of such solidarity initiatives. By analyzing the organizational structure, resources and identity of markets without middlemen, social and collective kitchens, organizations distributing food parcels, social clinics and self-managed cooperatives, this study explains the enlargement of boundaries of collective action in times of crisis.

It would have been hard to miss the pivotal role debt has played for contentious politics in the last decades. The North Atlantic Financial Crisis, Global Recession and European Debt Crisis - as well as the recent waves of protest that followed them - have catapulted debt politics into the limelight of public debates. Profiting from years of fieldwork and an extensive amount of empirical data, Christoph Sorg traces recent contestations of debt from North Africa to Europe and the US. In doing so, he identifies the emergence of new transnational movement networks against the injustice of current debt politics, which struggle for more social and democratic ways of organizing debt within and between societies.

At present, our knowledge of the current state of solidarity between parents and their adult children in Europe is limited. Insight into contemporary intergenerational solidarity is not only important for the well-being of individuals but is also of great interest to policy makers. Patterns of intergenerational solidarity are not only affected by social policies and services but also reveal a number of important social policy issues and dilemmas. Will encouraging labour force participation among women and older workers mean they have less time to care for their dependents? Should formal care services be further expanded to relieve the burden faced by family members with the risk that they start to replace informal care?

This report aims to contribute to this insight by providing a more differentiated picture of the strength, nature and direction of solidarity between parents and their adult children, its variation among European countries and its determinants. Our findings indicate that parent-child ties are quite strong. The majority of Europeans aged 50 and over live in close proximity and are in frequent contact with at least one of the children. Moreover, strong family care obligations still exist and a substantial amount of support is being exchanged between parents and their non-co resident children.

Interesting differences, however, emerge between individuals and countries. While fathers are more inclined to assist their children financially, mothers have more frequent contact and exchange more help in kind with their children. Being religious and having a large family have a positive impact on several dimensions of intergenerational solidarity. Parental divorce and a better socioeconomic position of parents and children, on the other hand, lead to a weakening of parent-child ties in many respects. Contrary to common belief, employed children show solidarity with their parents as much as those without a paid job. Differences in the nature of intergenerational solidarity between the European countries tend to follow the general division into an individualistic north and a familistic south.

Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetics. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic experience of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.

Our studies of aesthetics and knowledge have long tended to privilege the visual - at the expense, Wolfgang Ernst argues, of the aural. Sonic Time Machines aims to correct that, presenting a striking new approach to theorising sound that investigates its split existence: as a temporal effect in a techno-cultural context and as a source of knowledge and information. Ernst creates a new term for the concept at the heart of the book, "sonicity," a flexible and powerful term that allows him to consider sound with all its many physical, philosophical, and cultural valences.

The Sopwith Triplane was a British single seat fighter aircraft designed and manufactured by the Sopwith Aviation Company during the First World War. It has the distinction of being the first military triplane to see operational service.

Soul of the Documentary offers a groundbreaking new approach to documentary cinema. Ilona Hongisto stirs current thinking by suggesting that the work of documentary films is not reducible to representing what already exists. By close-reading a diverse body of films - from The Last Bolshevik to Grey Gardens - Hongisto shows how documentary cinema intervenes in the real by framing it and creatively contributes to its perpetual unfolding. The emphasis on framing brings new urgency to the documentary tradition and its objectives, and provokes significant novel possibilities for thinking about the documentary's ethical and political potentials in the contemporary world.

This book is the first ever systematic attempt to study film sound in the Indian subcontinent by artistic research. The book aims to fill the scholarly void on the issues of sound and listening in the Global Souths’ cultures. It develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound world of Indian film and audiovisual media through the examination of historical developments of sound from early optical recordings to contemporary digital audio technologies. The book is enriched with a practice-based methodology informed by the author’s own practice and based on extensive conversations with leading sound practitioners in the Indian subcontinent. The book locates an emerging social and spatial awareness in Indian film and media production aided by a creative practice of sound, occurring alongside the traditionally transcendental, oral, and pluriversal approach to listening. By tracing this confluence of tradition and modernity, the book makes valuable contributions to the fields of film history, sound, and media studies.

This book is an ethnographic account of education and migration from the perspective of three groups of South Koreans in contemporary China: migrant parents, children/students, and educational agents. The book reveals how these temporary migrants make choices, plan their trajectories and engage with the authorities, both in China and South Korea. Migrant subjectivities among these groups are driven by and respond to the education-migration regimes of both the sending and receiving countries. As ‘people in between’, they occupy flexible and multiple positionalities that are transnationally distributed. However, paradoxically, they experience a juxtaposition of privilege, integration and separation, which is indicative of the Chinese style of internationalisation. The book adds weight to the argument that China is a temporary destination for foreigners and not one for long-term settlement.

After the end of World War II when many Southeast Asian nations gained national independence, and up until the Asian Financial Crisis, film industries here had distinctive and colourful histories shaped by unique national and domestic conditions. Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998) addresses the similar themes, histories, trends, technologies and sociopolitical events that have moulded the art and industry of film in this region, identifying the unique characteristics that continue to shape cinema, spectatorship and Southeast Asian filmmaking in the present and the future. Bringing together scholars across the region, chapters explore the conditions that have given rise to today’s burgeoning Southeast Asian cinemas as well as the gaps that manifest as temporal belatedn

South Korea is home to one of the most vibrant film industries in the world today, producing movies for a strong domestic market that are also drawing the attention of audiences worldwide. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of some of the most well-known and incendiary South Korean films of the millennial decade from nine major directors. Building his analysis on contemporary film theory and philosophy, as well as interviews and other primary sources, Steve Choe makes a case that these often violent films pose urgent ethical dilemmas central to life in the age of neoliberal globalization.

This book is about virtue and statecraft in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Its overarching argument is that the fundamental foundation of Hobbes’s political philosophy in Leviathan is wise, generous, loving, sincere, just, and valiant—in sum, magnanimous—statecraft, whereby sovereigns aim to realize natural justice, manifest as eminent and other-regarding virtue. I argue that concerns over the virtues of the natural person bearing the office of the sovereign suffuse Hobbes’s political philosophy, defining both his theory of new foundations and his critiques of law and obligation. These aspects of Hobbes’s thought are new to Leviathan, as they respond to limitations in his early works in political theory, Elements and Cive—limitations made apparent by the civil wars and the regicide of Charles I. Though new, I argue that they tap into ancient political and philosophical ideas, foremostly the variously celebrated, mystified, and maligned figure of the orator founder.

Film has long been defined as a temporal art, most famously by André Bazin and Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet more fundamentally it has always been a spatial art, transporting its audiences imaginatively to spaces and places other than those they literally inhabit. In the digital era, this spatial illusion and paradox has been greatly expanded – by the predominance of domestic film viewing, along with new extra-terrestrial perspectives, and the promise of novel kinesthetic experiences with Virtual Reality and “immersion”. The international authors in this collection address the history and aesthetics of screen media as spatial transposition, in a range of exemplary analyses that run from the landscapes of John Ford’s westerns to Chantal Akerman’s claustrophobic domestic spaces, from the conventions of the English country house film to Patrick Keiller’s Robinson roaming a changed country, and from the experiences of Covid pandemic confinement to those of un-homed van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao’s award-winning NOMADLAND.

Semio-pragmatics, an approach to the study of film and audiovisual media first proposed by Roger Odin in the early 1980s, shifted the focus from textual analysis to the interaction of text and context and to the institutional modes of framing and reading which shape the viewer’s engagement with the film. A response to an impasse in post-1968 film semiotics and psychoanalytical approaches to film spectatorship, semio-pragmatics contributed significantly to the further development of film studies alongside Cultural Studies, neo-formalism, historical reception studies and the phenomenology of film. Spaces of Communication offers a concise introduction to semio-pragmatics and condenses the intellectual trajectory of one of the foundational figures of film studies into a relatively short and accessible volume. It is a book which testifies to the author’s deep and rich intellectual engagement with a vast array of objects ranging from the classics of

Spain, China and Japan in Manila, 1571—1644 offers a new perspective on the connected histories of Spain, China, and Japan as they emerged and developed following Manila’s foundation as the capital of the Spanish Philippines in 1571. Examining a wealth of multilingual primary sources, Birgit Tremml-Werner shows that crosscultural encounters not only shaped Manila’s development as a ŸEurasianŒ port city, but also had profound political, economic, and social ramifications for the three premodern states. Combining a systematic comparison with a focus on specific actors during this period, this book addresses many long-held misconceptions and offers a more balanced and multifaceted view of these nations’ histories.

The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521--with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan--and 1815--the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also China, Japan, and other parts of Asia that in the Spanish imagination were extensions of its Latin American colonies. This reader provides a selection of documents relevant to the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific between European, Spanish Americans, and Asians while highlighting the role of natives, mestizos, and women. A-first-of-its-kind, each of the documents in this collection was selected, translated into English, and edited by a different scholar in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies, who also provided commentary and bibliography.

In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a "techno-romantic" paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.

Since the very first days of cinema, audiences have marveled at the special effects imagery presented on movie screens. While long relegated to the margins of film studies, special effects have recently become the object of a burgeoning field of scholarship. With the emergence of a digital cinema, and the development of computerized visual effects, film theorists and historians have been reconsidering the traditional accounts of cinematic representation, recognising the important role of special effects. Understood as a constituent part of the cinema, special effects are a major technical but also aesthetic component of filmmaking and an important part of the experience for the audience. In this volume, new directions are charted for the exploration of this indispensable aspect of the cinematic experience. Each of the essays in this collection offers new insight into the theoretical and historical study of special effects. The contributors address the many aspects of special effects, from a variety of perspectives, considering them as a conceptual problem, recounting the history of specific special effects techniques, and analysing notable effects films.

This book explores the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key ideas from Western Marxism: Georg Lukács's concept of reification, in which social aspects of humanity are viewed in objectified terms, and Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, where the world is packaged and presented to consumers in uniquely mediated ways. Bringing the original, yet now often forgotten, theoretical contexts for these terms back to the fore, Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha offer a new look at the importance of Western Marxism from its early days to the present moment-and reveal why Marxist cultural critique must continue to play a vital role in any serious sociological analysis of contemporary society.

Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a corrective to this oversight by curating essays from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars in order to bring Star Wars and its transmedia narratives more fully into the fold of media and cultural studies. The collection places Star Wars at the center of those studies’ projects by examining video games, novels and novelizations, comics, advertising practices, television shows, franchising models, aesthetic and economic decisions, fandom and cultural responses, and other aspects of Star Wars and its world-building in their multiple contexts of production, distribution, and reception. In emphasizing that Star Wars is both a media franchise and a transmedia storyworld, Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling demonstrates the ways in which transmedia storytelling and the industrial logic of media franchising have developed in concert over the past four decades, as multinational corporations have become the central means for subsidizing, profiting from, and selling modes of immersive storyworlds to global audiences. By taking this dual approach, the book focuses on the interconnected nature of corporate production, fan consumption, and transmedia world-building. As such, this collection grapples with the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and political-economic implications of the relationship between media franchising and transmedia storytelling as they are seen at work in the world’s most profitable transmedia franchise.

This book, full of quantitative evidence and limited-circulation archives, details manufacturing and the beginnings of industrialisation in China from 1644 to 1911. It thoroughly examines the interior organisation of public craft production and the complementary activities of the private sector. It offers detailed knowledge of shipbuilding and printing. Moreover, it contributes to the research of labour history and the rise of capitalism in China through its examination of living conditions, working conditions, and wages.

In this his latest work, Gavan McCormack argues that Abe Shinzo’s efforts to re-engineer the Japanese state may fail, but his radicalism continues to shake the country and will have consequences not easy now to predict. The significance of this book will be widely recognized, particularly by those researching contemporary world politics, international relations and the history of modern Japan. McCormack here revisits and reassesses his previous formulations of Japan as construction state (doken kokka), client state (zokkoku), constitutional pacifist state, and colonial state (especially in its relationship to Okinawa). He adds a further chapter on what he calls the ‘rampant state’, that outlines the increasingly authoritarian or ikkyo (one strong) turn of the Abe government in the fifth year of its second term. And he critically addresses the Abe agenda for constitutional revision.

The Suharto (1966-98) government of Indonesia and the Mahathir (1981-2003) government of Malaysia both launched Islamisation programmes, upgrading and creating religious institutions. The author argues that, while generally ulamas, or religious teachers, had to support state ideologies, they sometimes succeeded in ŸcapturingŒ the state by influencing policies in their favour. The author builds his argument on strong fieldwork data, especially interviews, and he engages in critical discussion of comparative politics paradigms and the concept of capture.

This book places the discourse surrounding stigmata within the visual culture of the late medieval and early modern periods, with a particular focus on Italy and on female stigmatics. Echoing, and to a certain extent recreating, the wounds and pain inflicted on Christ during his passion, stigmata stimulated controversy. Related to this were issues that were deeply rooted in contemporary visual culture such as how stigmata were described and performed and whether, or how, it was legitimate to represent stigmata in visual art. Because of the contested nature of stigmata and because stigmata did not always manifest in the same form - sometimes invisible, sometimes visible only periodically, sometimes miraculous, and sometimes self-inflicted - they provoked complex questions and reflections relating to the nature and purpose of visual representation.

*Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy* centers on the still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge. Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations, these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists. The unique contribution of this groundbreaking study is that it identifies for the first time these intellectually rich concepts that arise from these fascinating still-life paintings, a genre considered as "low". Engaging with literary blockbusters and banned books, theatrical artifice and music, and staging a war among the arts, Baschenis and Bettera capture the latest social intrigues, political rivalries, intellectual challenges, and scientific innovations of their time. In doing so, they structure an unstable economy of social, aesthetic, and political values that questions the notion of absolute truth, while probing the distinctions between life and artifice, meaningless marks and meaningful signs.

Stories are perceived as central to modern life. Not only in narrative entertainment media, such as television, cinema, theater, but also in social media. Telling/having "a story" is widely deemed essential, in business as well as in social life. Does this mark an intensification of what has always been part of human cultures; or has the realm of "story" expanded to dominate twenty-first century discourse? Addressing stories is an obvious priority for the Key Debates series, and Volume 7, edited by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever, identifies new phenomena in this field — complex narration, puzzle films, transmedia storytelling — as well as new approaches to understanding these, within narratology and bio-cultural studies. Chapters on such extended television series as Twin Peaks, Game of Thrones and Dickensian explore distinctively new forms of screen storytelling in the digital age.With contributions by Vincent Amiel, Jan Baetens, Dominique Chateau, Ian Christie, John Ellis, Miklós Kiss, Eric de Kuyper, Sandra Laugier, Luke McKernan, José Moure, Roger Odin, Annie van den Oever, Melanie Schiller, Steven Willemsen, Robert Ziegler.

The ancient Persian storytelling tradition has survived until the present day among the Tajik villages in the Gissar mountains of Uzbekistan. This book explores the story of Barzu and demonstrates that the historical Transoxania, since the time of Alexander the Great, has always been a melting pot of diverse shared cultures. In the village of Pasurxi, near Boysun in the Surxandaryo region of contemporary Uzbekistan, a vivid oral tradition exists on the basis of stories from the Persian Book of Kings or Šohnoma (Shahnama), composed more than a thousand years ago by the poet Firdavsi (Ferdowsi). These stories deal with the hero Barzu who is presented in the stories from Boysun as the offspring of Suhrob, one of the most tragic heroes of the Šohnoma, and his father, the legendary champion Rustam, ruler of Sistan. The storytellers Jura Kamol and Mullo Ravšan composed two different versions of the story of Barzu in the Tajik as spoken in the Surxandaryo region. They used to tell their stories during evening gatherings in the village.

The past few years have seen an unexpected resurgence of street-level protest movements around the world, from the uprisings of the Arab Spring to the rise of the anti-austerity Indignados in Spain and Greece to the global spread of the Occupy movement. This collection is designed to offer a comparative analysis of these movements, setting them in international, socio-economic, and cross-cultural perspective in order to help us understand why movements emerge, what they do, how they spread, and how they fit into both local and worldwide historical contexts. As the most significant wave of mass protests in decades continues apace, this book offers an authoritative analysis that could not be more timely.

Are strikes going out of fashion or are they an inevitable feature of working life? This is a longstanding debate. The much-proclaimed ‘withering away of the strike’ in the 1950s was quickly overturned by the ‘resurgence of class conflict’ in the late 1960s and 1970s. The period since then has been characterized as one of ‘labor quiescence’. Commentators again predict the strike’s demise, at least in the former heartlands of capitalism.Patterns of employment are constantly changing and strike activity reflects this. The secular decline of manufacturing in mature industrialized economies is of major importance here (though the global relocation of manufacturing may lead to some ‘relocation’ of strikes). Simultaneously we see the growth of disputes in the service sector (the ‘tertiarization’ of strikes). This is evident particularly in public services, including health care, social care and education, and is accompanied by a ‘feminization’ of strikes, given the prevalence of women working there. This unique study draws on the experience of fifteen countries around the world – South Africa, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, United States, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Covering the high and low points of strike activity over the period 1968–2005, the study shows continuing evidence of the durability, adaptability and necessity of the strike.

The Alexiad, written in the twelfth century by a Byzantine princess, Anna Komnene, tells the story of the Byzantine Empire during the reign of her father, offering accounts of its political and military history, including its involvement with the First Crusade. Structure and Features of Anna Komnene’s Alexiad: Emergence of a Personal History introduces new methods of research for studying the Alexiad, aiming primarily at analysing Anna Komnene’s literary expression. The book’s approach focuses mainly on the author, the subject, the structure and the inner stylistic features, as well as the genre itself. The result is a substantially new outlook on the main Byzantine historiographical work of the twelfth century.

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier’s insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier’s intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator’s engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.