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Public Representations explores how popular screen stories represent, and interact with, politics, governance, and the public sphere. It analyses a selection of recent films and broadcast, cable, and streaming series from the US and the UK, as well as a multi-decade survey of comparable Canadian films and series. Drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship and popular media commentary, Public Representations considers questions of narrative representation, political agency, and conditions of screen story production as they intersect with race and gender.

Using a rich array of paratexts, including online and legacy media reviews, interviews, news reports and feature coverage, as well as metrics such as production budgets, box office figures, and awards, Public Representations traces the ways in which these screen stories function as frames of reference, and sites of contestation, for the most urgent issues within the contemporary public sphere.

In an era marked by polarization and social fracture, kindness and compassion are increasingly treated as liabilities rather than strengths. A Kinder World challenges this assumption, reminding us that human evolution and progress have been driven not by competition alone, but by collaboration, empathy, and care.

To build a healthy, resilient, and sustainable future, philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic argues that society must renew a shared ethos of kindness, both individually and collectively. Dispelling the myth that kindness signals weakness, Stefanovic critiques the “selfish gene” narrative and reconsiders the roles of aggression and competition in human development. The book demonstrates instead how moral integrity, social justice, basic civility, and human progress are reinforced through the practice of kindness. These values find expression not only in interpersonal relationships, but also in social and cultural norms, environmental ethics, and the design of our towns and cities.

Positioning kindness as a guiding principle for the good life, A Kinder World also offers practical pathways for cultivating it in an increasingly unkind world. Drawing on educational tools and behavioural strategies, the book shows that kindness is not naive or incidental, but a deliberate practice ? and the enduring foundation of human flourishing.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Collaboration, critical thinking and cultural competency are essential skills that shape young people’s futures. These key skills are often cultivated in the informal, creative spaces that society easily overlooks.

Drawing on the Australian Research Council and industry co-funded Vital Arts project, this book offers a bold and practical new vision: an inclusive, practice-based micro-credential system that recognises the competencies that young people build through creative cultural participation. Challenging prevailing policy narratives that pathologise young people, the book shows how partnerships between industry, cultural organisations and youth-led initiatives can reimagine education, diversify pathways into work and support genuine social mobility.

Offering fresh conceptual tools, compelling empirical insights and a transformative model for accrediting skills, this book repositions youth arts organisations and creative programmes as key actors in constructing more equitable and meaningful routes into employment.

This book responds to changing views of the disinformation crisis, seeking to complement data-based approaches with a concentrated focus on narrative and story.? Social media have given a new dimension to public involvement in these, but television and cinema lead the way. If lies and disinformation are the arsenal in a propaganda war, story and dramatization are the weaponry, and gaining advantage is all about the design and impact of the weapons. Twisted plot lines, arcs of suspense, motivated actors: these have so much more destructive power against human intelligence than specific falsehoods. The chapters focus on prominent narrative influences in the political arena, illustrating how the dynamics of public communication draw on traditions of fantasy, myth, plotting, performance and dramaturgy. Attention is paid to the ideologies and theoretical paradigms that underpin these imaginative constructions and drive them towards electoral goals. In the geopolitical maelstrom of the 21st century, we are citizens of the world in a new way, and our opinions, collectively, count. Sharper awareness of why and how we participate in the spread of imaginative manipulation is urgently needed.

This book offers a major rethinking of secularisation and a defining sociological account of religion in the digital age. Based on the author's ESRC-funded PhD and developed over two decades of research and theoretical refinement, the book argues that modernity does not eliminate religion but reorganises it. Rather than treating spirituality as a residue of tradition or a symptom of fragmentation, it demonstrates how religious meaning is reflexively reconstructed under conditions of globalisation, market rationality, institutional uncertainty, and digital mediation.

Advancing a new framework of reflexive realism, the book provides a flagship theoretical intervention in the sociology of religion. It introduces an original "origins-orientations" typology for analysing the diversity of New Religious and Spiritual Movements and integrates classical theory with contemporary social analysis. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, interviews, participant observation, and digital ethnography conducted across Britain, the United States, and online communities, it offers a sustained empirical foundation for its theoretical claims.

Through detailed case studies of ISKCON, Falun Gong, Scientology, UFO religions, therapeutic spiritualities, and platform-native digital movements, the book addresses key themes including digital religion, algorithmic authority, commodified spirituality, post-secular mythologies, and AI-mediated faith. It shows how platforms, metrics, and data infrastructures are reshaping charisma, authority, and spiritual experience, positioning NRSMs as reflexive mediators through which individuals reconstruct meaning, embodiment, and transcendence in late modern society.

By reinterpreting secularisation as transformation rather than decline, this book provides a comprehensive and conceptually ambitious account of religious change in the twenty-first century. It will be essential reading for scholars and advanced students in sociology of religion, religious studies, cultural sociology, anthropology, and media and communication studies.

In modern culture, the term “melodrama” has lost its original meaning. We use it in our everyday assessments of human behaviour; our understanding of melodramatic gestures and behavioural codes now extends far beyond the theatrical environment. Today, we see the melodramatic mode employed in contemporary political discourse, media texts, and militaristic propaganda. What is it about melodrama that attracts a person of the twenty-first century? What explains the genre’s remarkable resilience over time?

The essays in this volume examine these questions by focusing on Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet melodrama, applying modern theories of melodrama to the analysis of melodramatic discourse in Russian culture. Russian studies professors Marina Balina and Daisuke Adachi explore new directions in the study of melodramatic discourse and address emerging spheres of mass culture, such as the communicative space of the internet. This collection significantly expands the scope of research: alongside the traditional genres of the melodramatic mode ? literature, poetry, and film ? the contributors examine melodrama and its deconstructions in interviews, egodocuments, young adult literature, and television series.

The collection offers a historically multifaced but conceptually coherent analysis of melodrama, exposing the roots of its remarkable persistence in Russian culture.

What can art and science learn from each other? What happens when science meets arts? Drawing on concrete cases, this book explores the diverse forms of science-art interactions through an?interdisciplinary lens, highlighting insights and experiences.

This book originates from the Palettes research project at KU Leuven, an interdisciplinary initiative supported by Methusalem funding, one of Belgium’s most prestigious long-term research grants awarded to internationally recognized scholars. As the development of the chapters is coordinated within the project and supported by close collaboration across disciplines, the book maintains a clear and shared focus, namely: what makes these art- science interactions in their specific case contexts ‘meaningful’, and what others can learn from them. At the same time, it embraces an interdisciplinary perspective that reflects the diversity of approaches and perceptions within the project, allowing the individual cases to generate broader, transferable insights. Across the chapters, the leading question is what makes these interactions and collaborations both meaningful and challenging. It offers an in-depth understanding of integrating art in scientific research as a distinct way of knowing and engaging with the world, rather than as a mere instrument or tool, while providing guidance for navigating challenges.

Boundaries and Community is an essential guide for building bridges in a world marked by deep divisions. Across eleven concise chapters, this book offers practical tools and reflective insights for fostering meaningful connections within and across racially, ethnically, politically, and religiously divided communities. Rather than simply describing the problems that fracture our collective lives, it provides a hands-on toolkit for addressing them and empowers readers to move beyond ideological stalemates and take constructive action.

Each chapter tackles a critical challenge of collective life ? shared experience, collective responsibility, individual rights and communal belonging, social trust, and more ? offering a clear “rule” for action, real-life examples, and thought-provoking questions for group discussion. By modelling a forum for open, community-engaged dialogue, the book equips concerned citizens with strategies to address local issues without resorting to polarized formulas of the right or left.

Boundaries and Community serves as both diagnosis and roadmap, helping readers orient themselves in today’s polarized climate and inspiring them to forge new pathways for cooperation and understanding. Whether you are a community leader, organizer, or simply someone who cares about collective well-being, this book provides the tools and inspiration to act together ? even with those with whom you fundamentally disagree.

Digital Combat examines how contemporary warfare and historical traumas reshape the study and practice of film in Eastern Europe. Bringing together leading international scholars, the volume interrogates cultural canons, reframes national film histories, and situates recent Ukrainian cinema at the center of urgent debates about violence, testimony, and survival.

Structured in four parts, the collection moves from revisiting canonical questions to highlighting women’s voices, the ethics of documentary, and the role of new media. The chapters analyse diverse case studies, including the recovery of early Ukrainian cinema overlooked by Russian imperial narratives; portrayals of the Donbas as a “non-space” caught in perpetual conflict; female filmmakers’ reframing of war and gendered trauma; and the reflexive strategies of documentaries confronting displacement and atrocity. Further chapters explore how digital technologies, smartphones, and TikTok poetry videos transform both the aesthetics of wartime filmmaking and the preservation of cultural memory.

By combining close formal analysis with postcolonial and trauma theory, Digital Combat situates Eastern European cinema within a broader global discourse on war, exile, and the ethics of representation. It demonstrates how film and media not only record catastrophe but also create spaces of resilience, agency, and resistance. Timely and interdisciplinary, this book offers essential analyses for scholars of film studies, Slavic and East European studies, cultural memory, and conflict studies.

There are many books on the First World War, ranging from serious academic analyses to works aimed at a more general readership. There are also many books about rugby. But there are very few detailed academic analyses of the intersection between these two fields. This edited collection aims to address that gap, by presenting a range of analyses that explore how rugby was used and developed during and after the Great War. It presents these analyses in a specifically international and socio-political framework, and considers a number of aspects of the relationship between rugby and World War One, such as: how rugby was used to support the war, by being a tool for recruitment and for training; the significant role rugby played on the home front; the consequences of the war for the development and expansion of rugby in the post-war era; and the long-lasting social and political implications arising out of the role played by rugby during the war.

The second edition of Environment and Society: Concepts for a Just Transformation delivers a major, timely update to one of the field’s most respected concept?driven environmental social science texts. Fully revised and significantly re-oriented to highlight concepts informing social projects in just transformation, this edition reshapes the book around an enhanced set of contemporary concepts?adding new chapters, removing outdated material, and thoroughly updating those retained?to reflect the dramatic shifts in how scholars, policymakers, and communities understand society?environment relations. With contributions from an even more globally diverse group of authors, the book now brings stronger representation from the Global South and a wider array of disciplinary perspectives.

The book examines whether today’s dominant ideas and conceptual frameworks meaningfully support a “Just Transformation” in the face of deepening environmental and climatological crises. Across eleven concept?focused chapters?ranging from justice, colonialism, and intersectionality to futures, metabolism, collective action, commons, footprints, and more?contributors offer accessible syntheses, illustrative examples, and end?of?chapter discussion topics designed for classroom use.

This edition is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students across environmental studies, environmental sociology, geography, sustainability, and allied social sciences, as well as scholars seeking a clear, comparative resource on conceptual trends. It will also appeal to practitioners, NGO staff, and policy professionals who require a deeper understanding of the conceptual tools shaping environmental thinking today.

A rigorous philosophical examination of the ethical dimensions of art

The relationship between art and ethics remains one of the most contested areas in philosophical aesthetics. Art and Morality offers a sustained investigation of how artworks engage moral life?through the emotions they arouse, the beliefs they shape, and the evaluative frameworks we apply to them. Written by a leading philosopher of art, history, and ethics, the book presents arguments for and against the ethical significance of artistic experience with analytical precision.

Three chapters examine the ways art engenders emotions for both good and ill, analyzing competing positions on whether emotional responses carry genuine moral weight. A fourth chapter turns to cognition, investigating art's capacity to influence moral beliefs. The final two chapters engage directly with autonomism?the position that art should be appreciated solely for its own sake, independent of social practices including morality?presenting arguments both supporting and challenging this view.

Art and Morality serves undergraduate and graduate courses on the relation of art to morality and society. Written in an accessible style, it also addresses general readers drawn to philosophical questions raised by the arts, providing a structured framework for debates that have shaped aesthetics over two centuries.

This book offers the first in-depth account of Swedish techno-utopianism and its everyday practices. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it follows transhumanists, biohackers, cryonicists, and adjacent communities who believe that emerging technologies can address humanity’s greatest challenges and open radically transformed futures. Yet despite this expansive optimism, these groups often struggle to imagine futures that meaningfully diverge from the present, revealing a subtle tension between technological faith, everyday practice, and limited futural horizons.

Tracing the historical and cultural roots of Swedish techno-optimism?from welfare-state modernism to Silicon Valley transhumanism and global techno-utopian networks?the book examines how hopes for progress are enacted through bodily experimentation, mundane routines, and references to ancient narratives such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Offering rare empirical insight into an understudied Scandinavian context, it illuminates how technological imaginaries shape collective understandings of progress, possibility, politics, and the human future.

The first English-language anthology of Latin American communication theory

Latin American communication scholarship has shaped global debates on mediation, dependency, and mediatization, yet most foundational texts remain unavailable in English. Latin American Communication Theories: From the Origins to Contemporary Approaches, assembled by a team of communication scholars based at leading universities in Spain and Argentina, translates and contextualizes key writings from six decades of regional research for an international readership.

The volume maps intellectual trajectories from development and dependency theories through mediation, cultural industries, popular cultures, and mediatization. Introductory and section-level editorial texts guide readers through the historical, institutional, and theoretical evolution of the field. Classic contributions appear alongside emerging voices, creating a structured overview that connects Latin American debates with contemporary global discussions in media and communication studies.

Readers will also find:

• A curated selection of foundational Latin American texts published in English for the first time, spanning six decades of scholarship
• Editorial framing that contextualizes each section within the broader historical and institutional development of the communication field
• Critical engagement with hegemonic paradigms from the Global North, highlighting the originality of Latin American theoretical perspectives
• Coverage of key concepts including dependency theory, mediation, mediatization, cultural industries, and popular cultures across the region
• A structured intellectual map suitable for graduate coursework in global communication theory, media studies, and Latin American studies

Designed for graduate students, doctoral researchers, and faculty in communication theory, media studies, cultural studies, and Latin American studies, this anthology provides direct access to a scholarly tradition that has remained largely outside the English-language canon while offering structured pathways through its core debates and concepts.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Virtual Reality promises immersion for all, yet it is built around assumptions of able-bodied users that leave many disabled people behind.

Drawing on original research with users, care providers and developers, this book examines how mainstream Virtual Reality design encodes a narrow idea of the 'normal' body - and the real costs of that choice. It shows how decisions made at the design stage, often invisible to non-disabled users, create barriers around vision, movement and sensory experience.

Moving beyond critique, it argues for a fundamental rethinking of VR design centring diverse bodies and minds. In doing so, it not only reframes accessibility, but expands what VR can be, and who it is truly for.

This Open Access book investigates how to build a narrative for progressive social change. It asks a central question: What would it take to create a society that delivers flourishing lives for all? Drawing on extensive original research conducted in the UK and internationally, the book examines how, in a time of global “permacrisis,” no convincing plan has yet emerged to prevent a slide into dystopia or to create a positive vision for collective wellbeing. While governments around the world appear to have run out of ideas about how to build a good society, people and organisations across civil society are actively developing them. This book describes their efforts and outlines how their work can contribute to meaningful systems change.

Why do we keep returning to the Weimar Republic as a focal point for queer and trans histories, and why are images so crucial to our understanding of this period? This volume brings together research from disciplines including history, art history, literature, film, performance, and gender studies to explore the ongoing resonances of visual and narrative queer mythologies from Weimar Germany, often considered a “golden age” for queer culture and a period of relative rights and freedoms.

Chapters contribute new readings of classic Weimar art and film while significantly expanding the archive of queer Weimar by examining new or previously overlooked visual materials and relations: from occult practices to the vagaries of human-animal love, and from trans representations on film to the ambiguous tensions of forbidden intergenerational desire. Taken together, this volume generates a deep understanding of the twentieth-century emergence of queer and trans subjects through visual media; it develops methods that give prominence to the voices and perspectives of the historical subjects of sexual science; and it critically interrogates past practices of sexual knowledge production for understandings of LGBTQI lives today.

This book offers a groundbreaking exploration of how music represents enigma in film, shedding light on a subject that is both elusive and under-researched. Enigmatic phenomena, which are often inaccessible and hard to define, are regularly depicted in cinema.? With its intrinsic connection to emotion, music enhances the representation and interpretation of these mysteries, creating, intensifying, and addressing the inscrutable and providing emotional understanding where science and logic may fall short.

Music and Enigma in Film?categorizes enigmas into four main themes: religion, mythology, the paranormal, and the inexplicable, which serve as the structural foundation for the discussion. Through a musicological lens, chapters investigate how film music presents and invokes these enigmatic themes, analyzing the role of different music genres, sonic elements, and the relationship between sound and image. The book also explores the psychological mechanisms of musical perception?such as synaesthesia and Gestalt perception?that facilitate the comprehension of mysterious parameters in film music, inviting readers to consider the similarities between these mechanisms and specific musical attributes. Readers will also discover how music expresses ideological meaning by exploring the historical and cultural connotations that underpin the enigmatic undertones of film music.

Music and Enigma in Film?is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of film studies, musicology, and cultural studies, as well as filmmakers and composers fascinated by the mysterious interplay of sound and image in cinema

This second edition of the book examines the various phases of globalization and communication technology and their impact on cultural change in Thailand. Updated with new information and expanded analysis, this edition also includes additional chapters that further explore contemporary developments in Thai society, media, and Buddhism.

The book explores Theravada Buddhism, which underpins the core values of Thai society, through the lenses of ontology, epistemology, and practical application?particularly how Buddhists cope with suffering and maintain inner calm in an increasingly chaotic world. It also explains how Theravada Buddhism has been adapted, influenced, and hybridized into the distinctive form commonly recognized as Thai Buddhism.

In addition, the book investigates issues of social justice, ethics, changing values, sustainability, self-reliance, and modes of communication within the context of Thai Buddhist culture, together with other contributing factors to social development. Drawing on both first-hand fieldwork and documentary research, and employing quantitative as well as qualitative data, the study provides a broad overview of how Thai people engage with social and mass media. It then moves on to examine digital communication in greater depth, highlighting its effects on society and individuals within Thailand’s socio-political, economic, and religious contexts.

Founded in 1922, the BBC developed strong connections with Germany from the start, focused particularly on Berlin. The first Director-General of the BBC John Reith, wanted to broadcast ‘high’ culture to British radio audiences and often selected Berlin orchestral music for the early live performances of the BBC. The BBC in Berlin contributed to British attitudes towards the Third Reich. During the Second World War, the BBC developed its German Service aimed at listeners across German-speaking regions, but with much of the content derived from and focused on Berlin. And after 1945, the BBC set up in the occupied part of the city, becoming a key institution in the cultural politics of the Cold War, both westwards- facing, in transmitting news and features from West Berlin to British and world listeners (and later TV viewers); and also DDR-centred with the continuing activity of the BBC German service. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990 were hugely significant moment for the BBC.As one of the few international cultural institutions that remained in situ in the city throughout the Weimar years, the Third Reich, the era of divided Germany through to reunification and the return of the capital to the city, the BBC is a potentially revealing case-study of how British-German relations changed over time. This collection of essays will create a fuller understanding of how German culture has been presented to English-speaking audiences, and how, conversely, British national identity and memory has been formed by images and stereotypes of Germany.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Technologies are not created hostile, but they can become so. Through neglect, austerity or repurposing, the systems that shape our lives can cause profound harm to people, animals, and physical and social environments in ways their creators neither anticipated nor acknowledged.

Drawing on examples spanning border control, welfare systems, urban design and AI, this provocative collection introduces the concept of technological innocence: the obliviousness that allows bias and hostility to flourish unchallenged.

Moving beyond naive design ethics, it offers scholars, designers and policy makers a powerful new vocabulary for confronting the darker consequences of technological choice.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

What does it mean to become a father at a young age today?

This volume brings together research about the lived experiences of fathers aged 25 and under. Drawing on diverse contexts across the Global North and South, it explores how young fathers form identities and relationships within diverse social, welfare and policy environments.

Moving beyond deficit-based perspectives, the book highlights their social engagement, responsibilities and commitments to family life.

By combining insights from leading scholars within a shared conceptual framework, it provides a comprehensive international comparison of young fatherhood and offers valuable implications for policy, practice and future research.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

How do we position ourselves in relation to our digital cultural heritage when every software update threatens its very survival?

This book confronts the fragility of computer- and network-based art in an age of relentless technological obsolescence. Focusing on a seminal work by the pioneering artist duo JODI, this interdisciplinary study explores graphical user interfaces, executable files, hard-coded structures and the creative use of randomness. Through a model-assisted storytelling approach, it rethinks how programmed artworks can be remembered, analysed and reactivated once they cease to function.

A bold experiment in science communication, this volume is a must- read for scholars, practitioners and all who care about safeguarding our digital memory.