Computational media govern our experiences by externalizing our knowledge and memories, mining data from our behaviour to influence our decision-making, and creating emotionally rewarding and sensory pleasures. But does that mean human perception is becoming a product of human-machine symbiosis in this new media ecology?

This ground-breaking collection explores the ways in which digital information technologies form and influence human perception and experience. Examining the relationship between technological reductionism and the body, it takes on board discursive perspectives from the humanities and brings digital media, affect, and body studies into conversation with one another.

Written by pioneering authors in the field, this book expands our understanding of human perception, animation, technology, and the body.

The untold story of how breaking - one of the most widely practiced dance forms in the world today - began as a distinctly African American expression in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s.

Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world, with around one million participants in this dynamic, multifaceted artform - and, as of 2024, Olympic sport. Yet, despite its global reach and nearly 50-year history, stories of breaking's origins have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York.

The Birth of Breaking challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated studies of hip-hop's evolution, considering the influence breaking has had on hip-hop culture. Including previously unseen archival material, interviews, and detailed depictions of the dance at its outset, this book brings to life this buried history, with a particular focus on the early development of the dance, the institutional settings where hip-hop was conceived, and the movement's impact on sociocultural conditions in New York City throughout the 1970s.

By featuring the overlooked first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls alongside movement analysis informed by his embodied knowledge of the dance, Aprahamian reveals how indebted breaking is to African American culture, as well as the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure.

From healing, fertility, and religious rituals, through theatrical entertainment, to death ceremonies and ancestor worship, the updated and revised second edition of World Dance Cultures introduces an extraordinary variety of dance forms and their cultures, which are practiced around the world.

This highly illustrated textbook draws on wide-ranging historical documentation and first-hand accounts taking in India, Bali, Java, Cambodia, China, Japan, Hawai'i, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Africa, Tuerkiye, Spain, Native America, South America, and the Caribbean, with this second edition adding new chapters on the Pacific Islands, Southern Africa, France, and Cuba.

Each chapter covers a certain region's distinctive dances, pinpoints key issues and trends from the form's development to its modern iteration, and offers a wealth of study features including:

* Spotlights zooming in on key details of a dance form's cultural, historical, and religious contexts

* Explorations-first-hand descriptions by famous dancers and ethnographers, excerpts from anthropological fieldwork, or historical writings on the form

* Think About-provocations to encourage critical analysis of dance forms and the ways in which they're understood

* Discussion Questions-starting points for group work, classroom seminars, or individual study.

Offering a comprehensive overview of each dance form covered with over 100 full color photos, World Dance Cultures is an essential introductory resource for students and instructors alike.

How is capitalism represented in popular culture today? Are profits seen as a legitimate reward of entrepreneurship? Are thrift and effort still considered a cornerstone of a healthy society? Or is it that inequalities are eliciting scandal and reproach? How is the ecosystem portrayed, vis-a-vis profit seeking companies? Are they irreconcilable, or maybe not? Are there any established trends with respect to the presentation of entrepreneurship, and that complex legal artefact that is the modern limited liability company?

These are questions that will be at the core of this book. But they are not examined through the usual theoretical point of references, but looking at TV series produced in 2000-2020.

Each chapter of this book is a case studies, covering some of the most popular, successful and engaging TV shows of the last 20 years. And showing how deep economic ideas and biases lie, at the roots of some of our times' most successful entertainment products.

Haven't we all seen a Black Panther movie and listened to at least a few Harry Styles tunes? Who hasn't seen a Taylor Swift video? Or can't name an incident or two involving the Kardashians? Popular fascination with the rich and famous is an inescapable part of contemporary consumer culture. Celebrity Culture is a comprehensive yet accessible survey of the pervasive phenomenon. This new edition of the textbook is fully revised and updated, incorporating up-to-date examples, case studies and additional features, including a timeline and retrospections at the end of chapters.

Whilst recognizing that celebrities have existed for centuries, Cashmore argues that celebrity culture in the 21st century is a novel and unique phenomenon driven by rampant consumerism, advertising and the media. He describes the evolution of a new kind of fame, the growth of consumerism, the rise of the paparazzi, the fluctuating value of sex scandals, the transmutation of blackness, the metamorphosis of the British royal family, the emergence of influencers, the appeal of celebrity couples, the increased visibility of queer culture, the transformation of politics, the reconstruction of talent and the attempts of theories to grasp celebrity culture's magnetism.

Celebrity Culture will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience throughout the social sciences and humanities.

Videojournalism: Multimedia Storytelling for Online, Broadcast and Documentary Journalists is an essential guide for solo video storytellers-from "backpack" videojournalists to short-form documentary makers to do-it-all broadcast reporters.

Based on interviews with award-winning professionals sharing their unique experiences and knowledge, Videojournalism covers topics such as crafting and editing eye-catching short stories, recording high-quality sound, and understanding the laws and ethics of filming in public and private places. Other topics include:

* understanding the difference between a story and a report

* finding a theme and telling a story in a compact time frame

* learning to use different cameras and lenses-from smart phones to mirrorless and digital cinema cameras

* using light, both natural and artificial

* understanding color and exposure

The second edition of this best-selling text has been completely revised and updated. Heavily illustrated with more than 550 photographs, the book also includes more than 200 links to outstanding examples of short-form video stories. Anatomy of a News Story, a short documentary made for the book, follows a day in the life of a solo TV videojournalist on an assignment (with a surprise ending), and helps readers translate theory to practice.

This book is for anyone learning how to master the art and craft of telling real, short-form stories with words, sound, and pictures for the Web or television.

A supporting companion website links to documentaries and videos, and includes additional recommendations from the field's most prominent educators.

A 2024 CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

This book tells the story of German-language literature on film, beginning with pioneering motion picture adaptations of Faust in 1897 and early debates focused on high art as mass culture. It explores, analyzes and contextualizes the so-called 'golden age' of silent cinema in the 1920s, the impact of sound on adaptation practices, the abuse of literary heritage by Nazi filmmakers, and traces the role of German-language literature in exile and postwar films, across ideological boundaries in divided Germany, in New German Cinema, and in remakes and movies for cinema as well as television and streaming services in the 21st century. Having provided the narrative core to thousands of films since the late 19th century, many of German cinema's most influential masterpieces were inspired by canonical texts, popular plays, and even children's literature. Not being restricted to German adaptations, however, this book also traces the role of literature originally written in German in international film productions, which sheds light on the interrelation between cinema and key historical events. It outlines how processes of adaptation are shaped by global catastrophes and the emergence of nations, by materialist conditions, liberal economies and capitalist imperatives, political agendas, the mobility of individuals, and sometimes by the desire to create reflective surfaces and, perhaps, even art. Commercial cinema's adaptation practices have foregrounded economic interest, but numerous filmmakers throughout cinema history have turned to German-language literature not simply to entertain, but as a creative contribution to the public sphere, marking adaptation practice, at least potentially, as a form of active citizenship.

Remediating Sound studies the phenomena of remixing, mashup and recomposition: forms of reuse and sampling that have come to characterise much of YouTube's audiovisual content. Through collaborative composition, collage and cover songs to reaction videos and political activism , users from diverse backgrounds have embraced the democratised space of YouTube to open up new and innovative forms of sonic creativity and push the boundaries of audiovisual possibilities.

Observing the reciprocal flow of influence that runs between various online platforms, 12 chapters position YouTube as a central hub for the exploration of digital sound, music and the moving image. With special focus on aspects of networked creativity that remain overlooked in contemporary scholarship, including library music, memetic media, artificial intelligence, the sonic arts and music fandom, this volume offers interdisciplinary insight into contemporary audiovisual culture.

The Beatles and Black Music discusses the influence that Black music and culture has had over the Beatles throughout their collective and solo careers.

Tracing the history of Black musical and cultural influence on popular music from the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1795 to the nascent Mersey Beat scene in the early 1960s, this book is the first to explore the Beatles from this important cultural lens. The Beatles and Black Music discusses the influence that Black music and culture has had over the Beatles throughout their collective and solo careers. Richard Mills adopts a musicological and historiographic account to demonstrate the extent to which Liverpool's colonial history influenced the Beatles' music.

Beginning with the grand narrative of British colonial history pre-Beatles, it covers the influence of Black music and culture on the Beatles' teenage years in the 1950s, their association with Lord Woodbine, their love of American Rhythm and Blues in the mid-1960s, and extends to a discussion of post-colonial British identity and the lasting effect Black music has had on the Beatles' legacy and continues to have on the solo careers of Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney.

This book examines the con artist film as a genre, exploring its main features while also addressing variations within it.

The volume explores three diverse themes of the con artist film: edification, self-awareness, and liberation through con games; the femme fatale as con artist; and romantic love as a plot point. Analyzing movies such as Matchstick Men (2003), House of Games (1987), Body Heat (1981), The Last Seduction (1994), Birthday Girl (2001), and The Game (1997), the book also explores their psychological investigation of the con artist figure, the con artist's mark, and how the dynamic between these roles implicates us as the audience. It also addresses the con artist film genre's close association with neo-noir, especially through the femme fatale figure, investigating and updating the rich tradition of noir film.

Demonstrating the range and flexibility of this understudied genre, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, ethics, and those studying the representation of women in film.

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Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as 'the long 1960s'. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium?

Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.

Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media: From Annihilation to High Life and Beyond places posthumanism and feminist theory into dialogue with contemporary science fiction film and media. This essay collection is intimately invested in the debates around the posthuman and the critical posthumanities within a feminist critical-theoretical framework.

In this posthumanist light, science fiction as a genre allows for new imaginings of human-technological relations, while it can also be the site of a critique of human exceptionalism and essentialism. In this way, science fiction affords unique opportunities for the scholarly investigation of the relevance and relative applicability of specific posthumanist themes and questions in a particularly rich and wide-ranging popular cultural field of production. One of the reasons for this suitability is the genre's historically longstanding relationship with the critical investigation of gender, specifically the position and relative empowerment of women.

The original analyses presented here pay close attention to audiovisual style (including game mechanics), facilitating the critical interrogation of the issues and questions around posthumanism. Where typically the mention of SF in the posthumanist context calls to mind a whole set of (often cliched) tropes-the cyborg, technologically augmented bodies, AI subjectivities, etc.-this volume's thirteen chapters analyze specific examples of contemporary SF cinema that engage in meaningful ways with the burgeoning field of critical posthumanism, and that utilize such films to interrogate posthumanist and feminist as well as humanistic ideas.

The turn of the millennium has heralded an outgrowth of culture that demonstrates an awareness of the ephemeral nature of history and the complexity underpinning the relationship between location and the past. This has been especially apparent in the shifting relationship between landscape, memory and sound in film, television and other media. The result is growing interest in soundtracks, as part of audiovisual culture, as well as an interest in the spectral aspects of culture more generally.

This collection of essays focuses on audiovisual forms that foreground landscape, sound and memory. The scope of inquiry emphasises the ghostly qualities of a certain body of soundtracks, extending beyond merely the idea of 'scary films' or 'haunted houses.' Rather, the notion of sonic haunting is tied to ideas of trauma, anxiety or nostalgia associated with spatial and temporal dislocation in contemporary society. Touchstones for the approach are the concepts of psychogeography and hauntology, pervasive and established critical strategies that are interrogated and refined in relation to the reification of the spectral within the soundtracks under consideration here.

The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand the profound and complex changes shaping the 21st century. With trans-regional contributions from established and emerging scholars, this ground-breaking volume offers conceptual essays and in-depth chapters that present rich analyses grounded in historical and geopolitical contexts, as well as key theory and empirical research.

Rather than viewing the Middle East as a monolithic culture, this Handbook examines the diverse and multi-local characteristics of the region's knowledge production, dynamic media, and rich cultures. It addresses a wide range of topics, including the evolving mainstream and alternative media, competing histories in the region, and pressing socio-economic and media debates. Additionally, the Handbook explores the impact of regional and international politics on Middle Eastern cultures and media.

Designed to serve as a foundation for the next era of research in the field, The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East is essential reading for all academics, scholars, and media practitioners. Its comprehensive scope makes it an excellent primary or supplementary textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses in global studies, media and communication, journalism, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and history.

Popular Music in Spanish Cinema analyses the aesthetics and stylistic development of soundtracks from national productions, considering how political instability and cultural diversity in Spain determined the ways of making art and managing culture.

As a pioneering study in this field, the chronologically structured approach of this book provides readers with a complete overview of Spanish music and connects it to the complex historical events that conditioned Spanish culture throughout the 20th century to the present day, from the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil war, and the dictatorship through to democracy. The book enables an understanding of the relationships between the recording and film production industries, the construction of collective imagination, the formulation of new stereotypes, semiotic meanings within film music and the musical exchanges between national and international cinema.

This volume is an essential read for students and academics in the field of musicology, ethnomusicology and history as well as those interested in the study of diverse musical styles such as copla, zarzuela, flamenco, jazz, foxtrot, pop and rock and how they have been used in Spanish films throughout history.

This book examines the processes of transition from authoritarian rule in Tunisia and Egypt between 2011 and 2014, arguing that differences between the two countries can be explained by the conduct of their respective political parties.

Drawing on a new conceptualization of political parties' agency that considers their unique nature as intermediate and intermediary institutions, the book allows for the identification of those factors driving political parties' choices in processes of transition. Moreover, thanks to the employment of quantitative text analysis on the electoral manifestos of the parties involved, this work presents new data for the study of party systems in Tunisia and Egypt. Presenting a new toolkit for analysis, Tunisia and Egypt after the Arab Spring ultimately reveals how differing legacies of authoritarian repression across the two countries can help explain why the Tunisian transition culminated with the 2014 democratic constitution, and the Egyptian transition with the 2013 military coup.

Conceptually, the book will appeal to those working in comparative politics and those interested in processes of democratization and authoritarian resilience. Nonetheless, the focus on Tunisia and Egypt makes the book suitable reading for anyone interested in Arab politics and the MENA region generally.

The Routledge Handbook of Applied Climate Change Ethics is a powerful reference source for the identification and exploration of the underlying ethical issues in climate change law and policy. Bridging theory with practice, it takes ethical engagement out of the classroom and into the halls of governance.

The Handbook's 39 chapters--written by a diverse and inter-disciplinary team of experts from around the world--are case studies divided into five parts. Parts I-IV highlight the ethical issues that arise in climate change policy formation, from duties not to harm to duties to consider the views and voices of those who will be, or are being, harmed; from the role of human rights, justice, and democracy to how to identify and respond to disinformation and denialism. It also raises the ethics of various policy responses, such as cap-and-trade, carbon taxing, and geo-engineering. Part V offers a way forward, with strategies on how to expressly consider ethics in climate change policy formation, from negotiations to education, media, communication, and the power and potential of shaming.

The volume is essential reading for students, professors, and practitioners who wish to better engage with government and non-government organizations on climate policy, to better understand the practical application of the theory and philosophy of ethics, and how to more strongly draft and defend ethical action in negotiating, drafting, and defending climate change law and policy.

Indian Politics and Political Processes explores the key ideas, foundations, continuities, major shifts and challenges to the state and democracy in modern India. The book presents an in-depth analysis of recent issues and challenges confronting the Indian state and politics.

Presenting a comprehensive account of the major trajectories of Indian politics, this book introduces the readers to the existing literature and enables them to think critically about major issues and institutions of politics and democracy. The chapters engage critically with the historical antecedents, major debates, and recent developments. The book also elaborately deals with issues such as populism, religious movements, minority rights, health, and the environment, which are often ignored or side-lined in the available literature on Indian politics and political processes.

The book will be useful to the students, teachers and researchers pursuing courses in political science, South Asian Studies, and international/global politics and economics. It will also be an informative read for those interested in contemporary South Asian politics.

Although the phrase "the American Dream" dates from the 1930s, the concept or idea of the American Dream is as old as the country. The values proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and reaffirmed (and extended) in the Gettysburg Address have been continuously promoted by every American president. Moreover, they form the basis of our national collective narrative as expressed through both elite and popular culture. The American Dream is intrinsically tied to the American Creed and American Exceptionalism. It is the foundation of our national identity, the glue that holds together our individual aspirations. Yet until the mid-twentieth century, the American Dream excluded African Americans. We as a nation-as an imagined community-could not imagine an integrated, multiracial society with Blacks and Whites living together as equals.

By examining the lives of the only three African American Nobel Peace Prize winners, we can see how their lives were shaped by the American Dream, and how their success was used to deny the structural racism that prevented others from achieving the American Dream. Ralph Bunche as a role model of academic and technical expertise, Martin Luther King, Jr., as a model race leader, and Barack Obama as a political leader provide a window on the changing meaning of the American Dream.

In conclusion, Haiti is presented as a failed example of an attempt to export the American Dream in the form of American Exceptionalism, and racial reparations are reimagined as a radical democratic project aimed at true global integration and justice.

This book offers a portrait of early ethnographic work in the American Arctic, with a focus on understanding the mutual constitution of the Inuit and their early ethnographers. It draws mainly on a rich repository of written testimonies from the early twentieth century, the 'great ethnographic period' when new scholarly interest in the region took off. Supplementing the movements and observations of whalers, traders, and missionaries, the early chroniclers offered new knowledge of Inuit life. Although their descriptions of the Inuit bear the marks of their time, the texts have left a deep mark on later developments and contributed to a long-lasting view of human life in the Arctic. The chapters show the infiltration of lives and landscapes, of thoughts and materials, of Inuit and ethnographers. The book will be relevant to anthropologists as well as historians, geographers, and others with an interest the Arctic region and Indigenous studies.

This book explores the phenomenon of distortion of information through media via the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which relevant information distortion and virality have occurred in regard to the disease and its risks.

Positing that the interrelated processes of misinformation, disinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories are related forms of distortion of information through media (DIM) and can only be understood through a multilevel theoretical model that incorporates message-based, individual difference, social network-based, societal and geotechnical factors, Brian H. Spitzberg develops an integrative, well-argued, and well-evidenced framework within which these issues can and should be addressed.

This book offers a model for further research across such disciplines as communication, journalism/media studies, political science, sociology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, public health, big data analytics, social network analytics, computational linguistics and geographic information sciences, and will interest researchers and students in those areas.

The Disputed Freedoms of a Disrupted Press explores the origins, connections, and contradictions evident amongst divergent understandings of press freedom around the world.

Drawing on examples from various countries and cultures, this book distinguishes the universal right of free expression from the more complex and innately conditional liberties claimed by news media. It examines journalists' common goals and norms in light of polarized and disordered information channels, reckonings with identity and privilege, diminished public trust, and altered revenue streams. The author discusses emerging forms of accurate, contextualized news production and argues that journalistic autonomy can be sustained only through demonstrated accountability for providing factual information about public affairs according to self-regulated professional standards. The book concludes by proposing a principle-based framework for enhancing the case for press protections and opposing disinformation while minimizing harm. Adopting this approach would require many publishers and editors to consider paradigm shifts and structural changes.

This is a timely contribution to the body of literature on press freedom and will be a valued resource for advanced students and researchers seeking a contemporary understanding of journalistic practice and the evolving foundations of media law.

This book characterises the problematic status of motherhood in present-day Iranian society - that is, problem in the Foucauldian sense of an object of thought and a source of tension, not as a pathological issue - and explains the historical processes contributing to this problematisation.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the author draws on a cognitive anthropological perspective whilst incorporating ethnographic, historical, and evolutionary viewpoints. By applying this perspective to the current cultural model of motherhood, and considering specific social, political, and economic factors in Iran, the author provides an exhaustive, contextualised understanding of the motherhood problem and its multidirectional changes throughout time. The book follows a multi-method framework and combines qualitative ethnographic and auto-ethnographic data with historical evidence and comparative data. As such, it also contributes to the women's movement in Iran by fostering discussion on women's issues and demystifying women's understandings and experiences.

The book will appeal to those working in a range of disciplines, including gender studies, cognitive anthropology and Iranian history. Written in non-technical language, and providing insights into the problem of motherhood in comparable contexts, the book will also be of interest to general readers.