This book brings together some of the most distinguished and influential scholars in philosophy and sociology to explore the continued relevance of Herbert Marcuse's critical theory in the twenty-first century. As one of the most influential thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse's work remains indispensable for understanding contemporary social, political, and economic struggles. The essays in this collection offer fresh perspectives on his thought, demonstrating its enduring importance in addressing authoritarianism, alienation, counterrevolution, and the radical possibilities of freedom and liberation. The contributors examine Marcuse's insights on psychoanalysis and aesthetics, elucidating his vision of freedom as an inherently political project that resists depoliticization and individualistic retreat, and argue that Marcuse's work provides essential tools for understanding the ideological roots of authoritarian politics and the resurgence of reactionary forces in the contemporary world. By bridging past and present, theory and praxis, this collection reaffirms Herbert Marcuse's enduring relevance and the necessity of critical theory for imagining and enacting a more just and emancipatory future. It will be of interest to academics, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in the humanities and social sciences, especially Critical Theory, political philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, and modern intellectual history.

This book presents a comprehensive scientific reconstruction of human evolution, offering an original and integrative explanation for the emergence of the traits that define our species. It explores the evolutionary roots of a remarkable range of human characteristics-from our hairless skin, nuanced facial expressions, and emotional vocalizations to male and female sexuality, language, creativity, consciousness, social norms, laughter, and sense of humor.

Rather than focusing on details of stone technologies and skull shapes, this theoretical study employs a rigorous evolutionary framework, grounded in explicitly stated principles, a coherent conceptual apparatus of psychological and social concepts, and a systematic methodology for evaluating evidence. Drawing on the extended evolutionary synthesis-including cultural drive, multilevel selection, and niche construction-the author weaves together insights from paleoscience, biology, psychology, and anthropology to trace the key forces and transitions that shaped our species.

The book introduces and synthesizes key concepts such as challenge-response dynamics, concerns-and-structures coevolution, trial-and-fixation mechanisms, self-domestication, operant conditioning, normativity, and internalization. It reconstructs the pivotal evolutionary phases of human development-from the "African springboard" to the transformative Upper Paleolithic revolution-highlighting how daily survival concerns, child-rearing, intergroup competition and alliance formation catalyzed evolutionary change.

Special attention is given to the role of group and sexual selection, the development of symbolic communication and social regulation, and the fixation of traits through genetic mechanisms. The book sheds light on often overlooked evolutionary phenomena, including the emergence of adolescence, life cycle formation, female mobility across groups, the difference between male and female eroticism, and the institutionalization of property and mating norms.

A concluding philosophical chapter portrays human nature as a paradoxical blend of the endless openness and deeply embedded ancestral legacies. The author offers speculative reflections on how the evolutionary past continues to shape contemporary challenges-religiosity, sexuality, ethnic conflict, organized violence, and even our capacity for laughter and humor.

This book explores three core themes centered on civilizations and their interactions. First, it addresses theoretical issues of "dialogue among civilizations," with Zhao Dingxin using "embeddedness" to examine key topics like dialogue subjects, contextual specifics, textual foundations, and voices of weaker civilizations. Wu Genyou outlines "civilized" narrative typologies and reinterprets Du Weiming's theory, proposing a shift from "dialogue among civilizations" to "dialogue with civilization."

The second theme focuses on religion, philosophy, and Sino-Western aesthetics through comparative philosophy, covering links between comparative philosophy and civilizational dialogue, religious similarities and differences (e.g., Chinese religions vs. Christianity), contributions of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Chinese rituals to Asian civilization, and concepts like "conceptual Asia" and "civilized Asia."

Third, it investigates "river and civilization"-a pivotal topic given rivers' role in human civilization origins-pioneered by Feng Tianyu, and includes Wu Genyou's dedicated discussions on Wang Fuzhi's "civilization" history.

This book is suitable for scholars and general readers interested in Chinese culture, civilizations, and cultural exchange.

This book examines how gendered life stories act as interventions that unsettle the boundaries between private experience and public life. From the testimonies of women whose accounts of gender violence have forced a reckoning with institutional silence, to the kiss-gate scandal in women's football that reframed debates on consent and national identity, to Shakira's widely circulated song about her public breakup, where questions of female authorship unfolded within the tightly managed economies of global pop celebrity, these stories reveal the shifting conditions under which lived experience acquires political force.

Set against Spain's volatile political landscape-marked by feminist mobilisation, reactionary backlash, and struggles over the meaning of public testimony-this book offers a framework for understanding how personal narratives travel, gather force, and become sites where political and cultural boundaries are redrawn. It speaks to readers concerned with the mediated life of testimony and the historical conditions under which private lives come to matter publicly, in Spain and beyond.

What would a theory of adaptation look like if it was constructed around literary games rather than novels on film? Bridging disciplinary gaps between adaptation studies, game scholarship, and literary theory, this book presents a framework for understanding adaptations as dynamic systems of experience whose meaning arises from the playful interactions between their formal and intertextual components. Such an approach not only reframes the disciplinary ghosts that haunt each field - the intractable concept of "fidelity criticism" in adaptation studies and games studies' perennial "ludology/narratology debate" - but also provides new tools with which to examine the under-theorized phenomenon of games based on literary works. Whether it is a Shakespearian choose-your-own-adventure book, a text-adventure version of The Hobbit, a Jane Austen roleplaying game, or an immersive first-person simulation of Thoreau's Walden, literary game adaptations are uniquely suited to teach us how to play with texts and culture in our hypermediated digital world.

The relationship between migration and media has become an essential topic of study due to its ethical and civil responsibility implications, particularly in today's digitalized global environment. The media's narrative on world and regional politics, local and global economy, religion, war, and civil conflicts affects the experience of migration and diaspora. In response, artistic representations and cultural interventions have become forms of activism, resistance, and confrontation against the narrative of power. Likewise, the digital space began to be used more intensely as a place of activism for migrants and civil society interested in their human rights. For instance, digital archives such as Humanizing Deportation and social media are used to do activism, the first one through digital storytelling, where migrants can express their deportation stories on video, and the second one uses digital circulation to create community and as a call for action. Artistic- Technological interventions such as Playas de Tijuana Mural (2019) use art and technology to protest the politics of migration by portraying family separation. Theater intermedial performances use virtual spaces to represent distance and the resistance to it. Cinema shows the social and political implications of their visual narrative. Finally, new practices, concepts, and models in AI, journalism, and internet freedom have created a rhetoric that could benefit migrants. Migration is usually seen through numbers, statistics, graphics, and quantitative data, which dehumanizes migrants. With this book, we aim to contribute to the knowledge of the phenomena through the lenses of a more humanistic approach to activism in digital media in the Hispanic world. We propose chapters that explore the activism of migrants and civil society committed to them from a critical perspective. This book, intended to be read by students, researchers, and the public interested in migration, presents interdisciplinary approaches to activist narratives, art, and digital. It explores diverse types of migrations and related phenomena, such as deportation, "voluntary" return, caravans, the Cuban diaspora, US childhood arrivals, and the particularities of the Southern U.S. border. These topics are analyzed in essays on race, politics, theater, film, music, painting, journalism, multimedia, digital archives, social media, storytelling, and artificial intelligence. In the abstracts, you will find diverse perspectives on how digital media act as platforms that allow horizontal activism, which is a direct response at the same level as the rhetoric of power. Likewise, the proposed essays enable us to reflect on the role of arts and media in favoring the expression of the migrant community and those who share a common feeling. Still, in the same way, we will see how digital media, if misused, can also harm vulnerable communities. Work by newer and established migration studies, digital culture scholars, and scholars from both sides of the US-Mexico border and other latitudes is incorporated, providing a comprehensive overview of the intersection between migration, media, and arts in Latin America. The book will consist of an Introduction and 13 chapters divided into three sections: 1. Media and Digital Media Artists?Activism; 2. Migrant Activists Online; and 3) Activism through New Constructive Practices. Editors: Rubria Rocha de Luna, Postdoctoral Researcher, Tecnologico de Monterrey Jacob Banuelos Capistran, Professor, Tecnologico de Monterrey

The witch has always been an object of fantasy; an adaptable symbol for the expression of society’s deepest anxieties and dreams. In the magical worlds of medieval-inspired fantasy role-play games, stories of witchcraft (and its persecution) uniquely blend the history, fantasy, and fairy-tale of the witch tradition with video game conventions and cultures. The witch operates as a familiar Other that is simultaneously both real and fantastical.
This book explores how the long tradition of fantasising the witch has been adapted through the popular medium of video games. As the first study of witchcraft representation to examine games, this analysis focuses on the genre where the witch is most prolific ? fantasy roleplay games ? and on three key franchises: The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, and Dragon Age.
Often seen as quintessentially medieval, the figure of the witch that we know today only coalesced at the end of the western Middle Ages, thriving throughout the Early Modern period alongside movements like the scientific revolutions. The ubiquity of the witch in medieval-inspired fantasy thus reveals less about history and more about our modern desire to relegate the perceived superstition and barbarity surrounding the witch to a comfortably distant past, even while reenacting it on our screens.

This book contributes to understandings of linguistic anthropology within the context of the wider Persianate world, covering Iranian language societies in both their homelands, and in the diaspora. It demarcates language ideologies - feelings, beliefs of language, and linguistic forms in their broad terms; semiotic processes - signs and their indexical meanings; affect - emotions, or what sensory perceptions do in society; language socialization and language development; discourse analyses; and literacy, secrecy and textuality. Bringing together linguists and anthropologists to chart the far-reaching diaspora of the Iranian community under the rubric of poetics and anthropology, it is a relevant collection for scholars in Near Eastern studies, in areas of languages and linguistics, literature, semiotics, cultural studies, social sciences, and diaspora studies.

New York City's downtown scene of the 1970s and 1980s is synonymous with underground film, video, and performance art. Many of the artists who would come to define this period also dabbled in the then-new technology of public access cable television, as host, producer, guest, or studio audience member. Drawing on archival research and personal interviews, this book-the first full-length study of this vibrant body of work-explores how poets, painters, and filmmakers produced talk shows and soap operas that warped the heteronormative conventions of primetime fare. Working outside the established art world, artists screened their shows in lofts and nightclubs, airing them live on Manhattan Cable and provoking frequent tabloid censure. Underground Networks affirms the importance of cable television to the downtown art scene and recovers an essential strand of avant-garde screen culture and a user-driven media ecology with uncanny contemporary resonance.

This book addresses a crucial and timely question: who will evaluate the ethical practices of increasingly intelligent AI systems, and what qualifications will they need to ensure those ethics are applied responsibly? As AI systems become more capable of fostering trust in human-machine interactions, developers and data scientists are becoming more aware of the importance of programming ethical and non-discriminatory algorithms. Simultaneously, laws may soon require companies to continuously assess the social and ethical impacts of their AI products. But who will oversee these evaluations, and how can we prevent ethics from being distorted or misused? Rather than focusing on how ethical principles should be applied to AI, this book takes a unique approach by exploring the role of the 'ethics officer'-the individual responsible for ensuring an AI system's ethical compliance. With AI regulation gaining momentum across the globe, ethics is becoming a critical component of international technology leadership, and this book provides insight into these critical questions, exploring how the role of the ethics officer might evolve as AI becomes more pervasive and regulated, and what it will take to ensure that AI serves society ethically and responsibly.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Poznan School of Archaeology, an original mode of archaeological thought that emerged in Poznan in the 1960s and 1970s. The book examines the significance of this original Polish archaeological thought in its broad academic context and places it in the realm of the social and intellectual framework of Europe. It is directed to the worldwide community of researchers interested in understanding the nature of the studies of the past and places this original and well-developed school of archaeological thought in its broad geographical and chronological perspective.

The Poznan School of Archaeology made explicit efforts to break off ties with the culture-history paradigm and rejected the simplified functional and rigid deductive-nomological explanations. Developed in the context of non-Marxist historical materialism, over decades it transformed itself into a distinct and multifaceted archaeological research school embedded in the tradition of cultural studies, philosophy, history, and the natural sciences. The book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate programmes in archaeology and archaeological theory.

This book contributes to metaphor and comics scholarship by bringing together established theories of metaphor and of depiction and applying the result to the analysis of narrative drawing. Miers synthesizes two strands in recent comics scholarship: the analysis of comics as drawn texts, informed by art history and aesthetic philosophy, and the use of contemporary metaphor theory as a lens to examine how meaning is produced in comics. It aims to enrich and substantiate claims about the metaphorical characteristics of pictorial representations, and develop our understanding of how metaphor use is guided by stylistic features of drawing that are characteristic of the comics form.

This book considers the ramifications of the term 'cultural democracy' from a variety of perspectives. In recent years, the concept of cultural democracy has gained traction in cultural policy and academic discourse, while manifesting itself on a practical level in cultural practice, but has not been uniformly defined. This book proposes that it is a system of production, participation, support and policy of the arts acknowledging the right for all citizens to produce, access, and experience culture.

The book goes on to elaborate on how the fields of cultural policy and cultural production could be aware of and relate to the cultural life-world of people. This is in opposition to the traditional top-down approach of cultural policy, distribution and cultural education systems, which depart from the canonical value of artworks and the institutional power of producers and venues.

Cultural Democracy advocates a fundamentally bottom-up approach towards organising, supporting and educating arts and culture. It elaborates on perspectives that theoretically enrich the concept, while at the same time presenting artistic practices that are, while often not labelled as such, culturally democratic.

This book uses cutting-edge research in media psychology to offer a practical guide for creating content that captures and maintains attention. The Digital Engagement Model (DEM) reimagines how content can better serve mobile-first users by depicting second-by-second relationships between users and content. The DEM shows why users' diverse needs and behaviors are more complex than traditional practices account for. A model combining new variables and structures can extend the value of good writing, multimedia, and interactivity to users overwhelmed by too much information. Importantly, the model communicates content for both scanners with limited time and interest, and readers who are motivated to consume more detailed information. Drawing from cognitive psychology, communication, education, human-computer interaction, and neuroscience, the book explores the cognitive processes underlying attention. It offers practical strategies to align content with users' incidental exposure and fragmented consumption. The final chapters assemble the model's variables into an innovative Smart Story Suite.

This book frames "theories" as tools for understanding and applying real-world phenomena, bridging classic scholarship with the unprecedented challenges and opportunities posed by machine intelligence, digital platforms, and shifting cultural dynamics. Structured in four sections-Foundational Media Theories, Interaction and Impact Theories, Critical Media Perspective Theories, and Advanced and Future-Facing Theories-the textbook progresses from essential theories like Marshall McLuhan's and Neil Postman's Media Ecology Theory to cutting-edge concepts like Ambient Media and Attention Economy Theories. With chapters addressing topics such as algorithmic influence, media ecology, participatory media, and posthuman digital embodiment, the book offers a holistic view of media's past, present, and evolving futures. The 12 future-focused media theories presented include the introduction of Quantum Media Theory and Gestalt Media Theory as an integrated, cross-disciplinary, approach to understanding media theory from a wholistic "whole is more than the sum of its parts" perspective.

This book provides a framework with which to critically hear multimedia. In the digital age, where streaming and social media are the consumable medias of choice, sound is an undeniably important part of modern multimedia. Over the last 30 years, film and television have undergone major technological transformations, not the least of which is the shift from analog to digital means of reproduction. This shift was not done in a vacuum, but part of global shift in the political landscape. Amassing technological advances in tandem with the growing rift between the working and ruling class launched us deep into late capitalism. This book uses the lens of late capitalism from 1990-2020 to contextualize sonic power dynamics present throughout mass multimedia in the United States. The book examines animated serials featuring women antagonists and their soundscapes as a means of deconstructing the oppressive sonic structures present in their respective multimedia(s). The book utilizes a phenomenological approach to view these power dynamics, using the Sonic Gaze as a framework to view and recognize oppressive sound structures against women, femmes, and non-binary confirming folx. By listening to portrayals of these women of power, the book hears them from a slant, allowing for an examination of power.

The CAA-GR 2024 Conference Proceedings capture the spirit and substance of the fifth national meeting on computer applications in archaeology and cultural heritage, held in Serres, Greece. Organized by the Athena Research Center and the International Hellenic University, the conference brought together a vibrant community of researchers, professionals, and practitioners exploring how digital technologies are reshaping our relationship and interaction with the past.

Under the theme "Transforming Heritage Research in a Transforming World," the volume reflects the urgent need for new approaches to the study and preservation of cultural heritage in the face of rapid technological advances, environmental challenges, and societal shifts. The chapters span a wide range of topics-from geophysical methods and risk management to 3D scanning, immersive visualization, digital tourism, and museum accessibility-highlighting the interdisciplinary and forward-thinking spirit that defines the field today.

Rich with innovative ideas, practical solutions, and theoretical reflections, this volume offers a compelling look at how computational tools are redefining the boundaries of archaeology and heritage studies. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in the digital transformation of the cultural sector and the future of heritage research.

This book explores violence in Latin America societies and its social representations in cinema. Just as mass media can legitimize and reproduce patterns and discourses of discrimination, they can also serve to raise awareness and change minds about social issues such as violence and thus enhance citizen participation in social change. This book explores how Latin American cinema portrays its diverse societies, offering theoretical perspectives and research methods for analysing film narratives within their social contexts. The book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the global logics of production and social reproduction of violence in a twentieth-century context, and it discusses issues of civilisation - barbarism and decolonisation in the Global South. It demonstrates that the visibility of violence and vulnerable groups on the screen can make an impact far beyond academia, shaping public opinion regarding these issues and influencing the audiences. It speaks to social sciences academics and researchers specialising in Latin American studies, media psychology, film studies, and cultural criminology.

This book explores contemporary cultural narratives across film, television, and literature to illuminate the way male mental illness is positioned. It argues that fundamentally, the male experience is shaped differently due to the impact of gender expectations. Alongside this, narratives containing suicide also often fail to address the experiential, focusing on the why instead. This results in a limited approach that upholds hegemonic ideals, and with it, a need to rationalize or explain mental health and suicide, rather than engage with it more empathetically.

People with a migration background are, according to numerous analyses, disproportionately portrayed in problematic contexts in German reporting. To change this, there are various initiatives such as awards for diversity-sensitive reporting or analyses of the media representation of migrants. However, the sensitization of journalists to cultural diversity is hardly addressed, even though it was demanded in the 2007 National Integration Plan. Moreover, most previous activities are based on the assumption of homogeneous (national) cultures. For example, many content analyses examine reporting about "the migrants" (especially "the Turks") but neglect various diversity categories (e.g., gender, age). Such homogenizations reinforce normative notions of difference. Therefore, this volume analyzes the contribution that critical ethnological perspectives on culture, diversity, and exclusion can make to the engagement with diversity in journalism. To this end, the journalistic handling of cultural diversity is examined (content analysis, focus group analysis). The results feed into the design of diversity training that can be used in journalistic education and training.