This book proposes that computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary landscape and offers a synthesis of art history, geography, game studies and play. Like paint on canvas, the game engine is taken as the underlying medium, and using the Valve Source Engine as the primary case study, it analyses landscapes according to the technical, economic and cultural features this medium affords. It presents the single-player first-person shooter (Half-Life 2) as a Promethean safari, examines how the economics of gambling and product placement shaped the eSports landscapes of Counter-Strike and reveals how sandboxes such as Garry's Mod visualise the radical landscape of Web 2.0. This book explores how our relationship to the environment is changing, how we express this through computer games and how we can move beyond examining artistic influences on games to examining how historical connections flow through games and the history of landscape images.

This book proposes a new Ethics of Political Commemoration adapted from the Just War tradition, reflecting that remembrance is often conducted with political - and even coercive - intent. With its Ius ad Memoriam (what to commemorate) and Ius in Memoria (how to commemorate) criteria, the framework looks to guide debates that are currently inchoate so that remembrance of the past can transform relationships in the present and build a shared future. Offering a moral argument with memorable illustrations, Gutbrod and Wood draw on experiences from Armenia, Georgia, Ireland, Lebanon, and Libya, while connecting to mainstream debates in Western Europe and the United States. Bringing together an ethical tradition with the practice of conflict transformation, the framework fuses two perspectives that enrich each other. The book, in providing a first systematic presentation of the ethics, seeks to engage citizens and scholars, and help those who work to transform conflicts.

This book reveals the history of the Vatican's ethnographic collections by exploring the imperial, scientific, technological, and religious agendas behind its collecting and curating practices in the early twentieth century. It focuses on two principal contributors: the academic, priest, and 'Pope's Curator', Father Wilhelm Schmidt, SVD, and the missionary and linguist, Father Franz Kirschbaum, SVD. Their narratives are embedded in a unique set of comparisons between the 'liberal humanist ideals' that underpinned the 1851 Great Exhibition, mid-nineteenth-century German museology, and the 1925 Pontifical Missionary Exhibition. It relates to the period of high colonialism and rampant missionary activity worldwide. It unravels the complicated political and ideological stance taken by the Catholic Church and its place within the science/religion debates of its time. Establishing an essential link between the secular and catholic practices of collecting and curating ethnographic objectsfrom non-Western traditions, the author proposes a broader framework for post-colonial approaches to scholarly studies of ethnographic collections, including those of the Catholic Church. This book appeals to students and scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history, art history, religion, politics, and cultural studies.

This book explores the historical interrelationships between mathematics, medicine and media, and offers a unique perspective on how video compression has shaped our relationship with moving images and the world. It situates compression in a network of technological, visual and epistemic practices spanning from late 18th-century computational methods to the standardization of electrical infrastructure and the development of neurology throughout the 1900s.

This book illuminates how science fiction studies can support diversity, equity, and inclusion in science and engineering. Shortly before science fiction got its name, a new paradigm connected whiteness and masculinity to the advancement of civilization. In order to show how science fiction authors supported the social construction of these gender and racial norms - and also challenged them - this study analyzes the impact of three major editors and the authors in their orbits: Hugo Gernsback; John W. Campbell, Jr.; and Judith Merril. Supported by a fresh look at archival sources and the author's experience teaching Science and Technology Studies at universities on three continents, this study demonstrates the interconnections among discourses of imperialism, masculinity, and innovation. Readers gain insights into fighting prejudice, the importance of the community of authors and readers, and ideas about how to challenge racism, sexism, and xenophobia in new creative work. This stimulating book demonstrates how education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) can be enhanced by adding the liberal arts, such as historical and literary studies, to create STEAM.

This handbook tackles the understudied relationship between music and comedy cinema by analysing the nature, perception, and function of music from fresh perspectives. Its approach is not only multidisciplinary, but also interdisciplinary in its close examination of how music and other cinematic devices interact in the creation of comedy. The volume addresses gender representation, national identities, stylistic strategies, and employs inputs from cultural studies, musicology, music theory, psychology, cognitivism, semiotics, formal and stylistic film analysis, and psychoanalysis. It is organised in four sections: general introductions, theoretical investigations, music and comedy within national cinemas, and exemplary case studies of films or authors.

This volume offers a cross-section of a good fifteen years of research in the sociology of technology and innovation at the Department of Sociology of Technology headed by Werner Rammert at the TU Berlin. All contributions in this volume were initiated or discussed there and thus bear in a certain sense a "Berlin signature" - not in the sense of a clearly delimited scientific school, but rather in the form of an open discussion group with different, but mutually related focal points. The Berlin Key, which gives it its title, imposes on all its users the program of action objectified in its mechanism: "User, if you want to take the key back to yourself after unlocking the door and go your way, you must lock the door again first. Unlike that Berlin key, the "Berlin Keys to the Sociology of Technology" presented here offer a set of keys to different but

interconnected conceptual and methodological approaches in social science research on technology and innovation.

This book has two main objectives. The first is to identify and adequately describe the phenomenon of empathy. This essentially means offering a strong, reasoned and accurate description of the phenomenon of empathy in order to capture the essence of the empathic phenomenon and clearly distinguish it from other similar emotional phenomena such as sympathy or compassion

The second part focuses on the role that this phenomenon can play on the ethical-moral level. The question is whether empathy is necessary or at least important for morality, and if so, to what extent, in what way and for what reasons.

This is an open access book.

This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary scholarship on children's everyday leisure from across the globe, addressing key questions around children's agency, rights, child-adult relations, and social change. It is positioned to inaugurate a new frontier of research within leisure studies.

Leisure theory has historically been adult-centric and based in the global north, and consequently, children's lived experiences of leisure have remained marginal to theory-building exercises within leisure studies since its inception. As the call for decolonizing leisure studies grows, this book champions a cross-cultural and social justice agenda that does not privilege global north childhoods but acknowledges the multiplicity of lived childhoods across the globe and their inter-connections.

This volume contains an Open Access chapter.

Recent decades have seen an unprecedented expansion and diversification of sports gambling markets. Enabled by widespread access to the internet, advances in smartphone technology and the liberalisation of gambling advertising, gambling companies have strategically invested in the alignment of this practise with culturally embedded sporting activities, leading some to characterise these developments as the 'gamblification' of sports. Bringing together leading scholars from across the world, Gambling and Sports in a Global Age provides a landmark sociological collection on sports gambling from global perspectives.

Anchored in a historical sociological context, chapters trace the global transformation of sports gambling amid wider processes of techno-capitalist expansion and the commercialisation of sport before exploring the differential factors that shape the relationship between sport and gambling in unique societal contexts. Contributors examine emerging issues in sports gambling, including the ethics of gambling sponsorship in sport, athlete rights, the risk of harms to youth and the future of sports fandom.

Gambling and Sports in a Global Age demonstrates the importance of sociology in understanding sports gambling in a global age, establishing a much-needed scholarly platform with which to generate theoretically informed interventions in research and policymaking. Through an integrated global approach, the contributors shed critical light on centrally relevant sociological themes, providing convenient access to a diverse array of contextual insights and generating new questions for an emerging generation of sociologists.

Based on novel ethnographic research conducted in New York City, this book explores through the lens of intersectionality how gender impacts men's experiences of full-time fatherhood, as well as how sexuality, race, class, faith, and so on result in unequal access to choices and opportunities as parents. Chapters analyze how perspectives on caregiving are complicated by varying cultural, gendered, and racialized stereotypes and representations that pull different fathers toward or push them away from particular models of fatherhood in an urban context. Additionally, the author interrogates how societal conceptions of men's bodies also play a role in how men understand their experiences of fatherhood.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students studying gender, masculinity, and fatherhood.

In societies around the globe, couples are increasingly opting to live together without going through the formal and legal complications of marriage. Given the tremendous diversity in cohabiting couples, as well as the increasing prominence of this form of intimate relationships, Cohabitation and the Evolving Nature of Intimate and Family Relationships provides a more thorough comprehension of the structures, effects, and intimate practice of cohabitation around the world.

As a richly edited collection, the chapters delve into a wide array of topics including transitions into cohabitation, parenting and parental roles, division of domestic labor among cohabitors, sharing of economic resources, elderly cohabitors, legal complications of cohabitation, intimate partner violence, interconnections between cohabitation and marriage, sex and sexuality, assortative mating among cohabiting partners, premarital cohabitation and its consequences, relationship dissolution, gender ideologies, changing patterns of cohabitation, cohabitation and remarriage, and parental cohabitation and child development, among others. This is compelling reading for scholars of family research for better comprehending the structural, affectional, and other characteristics of cohabitation around the world.

In a time of ongoing global instability and the emergence of new fault lines of social inequality generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the rights of children and young people have been thrown into sharp relief. From uncertain futures arising from the climate crisis to concerns about regressive and reactionary politics to widespread experiences of harassment, abuse and violence, young people and their advocates are mobilising for social change and making their voices heard.

Across a variety of topics that engage diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and their Advocates offers a rich exploration of the dynamics between children, youth, activism, and advocacy. The chapters investigate the forms of agency expressed by young people themselves, the hope embodied in social movements, and the centrality of activism and advocacy for creating more hopeful and just futures.

Considering the meanings of activism by and for children and young people in the twenty-first century, this edited collection is a valuable resource for scholars, educators and practitioners interested in the intersections of childhood and youth studies, activism and movements for social change.

Social Inequality in a Global Age provides a sociological framework for analyzing inequality within the United States in the context of global stratification and a rapidly changing world economy. With insightful analysis, and using examples drawn straight from today's headlines, Scott Sernau explores the multiple dimensions of inequality-class privilege, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, status and power-and how they intersect with each other. As it explores each dimension of inequality, the text analyzes the relationship between changing global power structures and growing inequalities within societies. Throughout, a focus on social action and community engagement encourages students to become involved, active learners in the classroom and engaged citizens in their communities.