Kulturstudier og medievidenskab

Rap Music and the Youth in Malawi is one of the first book-length studies of Malawian hip hop. It studies the language and content of contemporary Malawian hip hop as a window onto the country's youth culture as Malawian young people negotiate what scholar Alcinda Honwana calls 'waithood,' or the condition, common among Malawian youth, of lacking opportunities to advance from a situation of dependence and being stuck in a state of relative childhood. The book argues that rap music made by Malawian youth music speaks of - and represents, through its very agency - their need to break out of this stagnant state. After situating Malawian hip hop with respect to both other musical genres in the country and to the nation's language in culture, Rap Music and the Youth in Malawi shows how Malawian youth use rap music to create a sense of community, which then becomes a foothold from which they can do activities that get them out of waithood and into the adult world, such as getting involved in the music industry, realizing electoral power, or participating in activism about issues such as violence against people with albinism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Hip hop has been a crucial tool for Malawian youth to build the skills, identity, and agency necessary to exercise their economic, cultural, and civic independence.

Examines how philosophical concepts like free will, personal identity, and goodness are given an artistic life in films and television programs.

This book examines various aspects of the business world from the perspective of communication. After all, no business is possible without communication. A statement that ought to be an axiom because communication is central to the interaction of people; hence, also interactions at the workplace, amongst business partners, and with customers. And when the people come from different cultures, then the role of culture assumes an important role as well. But instead of pursuing a typical management perspective, the authors in this book examine various business and work-related contexts from an intercultural, general communication, and linguistic perspective. A perspective that is often not in the focus of classic management literature ¿ probably because it is assumed that everyone can communicate. But what if the communicative efforts are ineffective? And what if the interactors are unaware of this? That is why communication needs to be considered and understood so as to be more effective and more productive. This book follows an interdisciplinary approach to communication and, thus, offers some useful insights to such interactions and contexts. The contributing authors provide literally a global perspective because they come from different parts of the world and from different scientific disciplines. The book is divided into six parts: The first five chapters offer a general introduction to culture and communication. This is followed by four chapters examining various aspects of worldview and perception. Next come six chapters dealing with a selection of topics revolving around the meaning of messages. The next five chapters take a closer look at communication at the workplace. This is followed by three chapters exploring politeness and emotion at work. The book ends with five chapters considering communication competence and cultural adaptation. The book, thus, offers some unique insights to the world of business from the perspective of culture and communication.

Teniendo en cuenta la frecuente invisibilidad del cine de mujeres y del cine queer en los manuales de historia del cine, el presente volumen se dedica a un estudio transnacional de cuestiones de construcción de género, cuerpo, mirada, queerness y deseo femenino en la cultura fílmica y televisiva de lenguas románicas desde un punto de vista estético, epistemológico, y transmedial. El volumen se entiende como una invitación a viajar por nuevas cartografías del deseo: siguiendo las huellas de una historiografía transnacional del cine y de la cultura audio-visual que ofrece figuras del pensamiento y del deseo nómadas y que huye voluntariamente de los conceptos binarios de una biopolítica normativa para proponer una cartografía alternativa del deseo femenino y queer.

The Covid-19 pandemic has ushered in an era of unprecedented change, fundamentally reshaping the fabric of our global society. This book, drawing from an international congress of scholars in Medical Humanities and Media Studies, explores the profound impact of the pandemic on Ibero-America, shedding light on the intricate web of historical antecedents, societal structures, and contemporary consequences. It delves into the pandemic¿s role as a crucible for social inequalities, revealing the unique challenges faced in Ibero-America, such as informal labor markets and healthcare access disparities. From politics to culture, this collection of essays examines the multifaceted responses to the pandemic, probing the intricate dance between state control, economic dynamics, and cultural creativity. It also offers a comparative lens on past health crises and their resonance in literature and media.

"It's safe to say everyone thinks about death--whether they want to or not. But have you ever wondered about what sort of keepsakes you can make with your remains, or given any thought to the most scandalous deathbed confessions throughout history? Well Madison Reyes and Spencer Henry have, and they've spent countless hours scouring the darkest corners of the internet, digging through newspaper archives, devouring documents, and picking the brains of death industry experts to bring you Obitchuary, a darkly funny and deeply poignant exploration of all things death. With chapters like 'Coffin Confessions,' 'Executions to Die For,' 'The Last Word,' and 'If These Dolls Could Speak,' Madison and Spencer guide us through surprisingly colorful history, traditions, and contemporary practices. They also demystify taboo topics with incredible and hilarious details, including FUNerals, as they call them, cremations and themed funerals, famous body snatchers, and so much more. Shocking, macabre, hilarious, and moving, Obitchuary digs deep into the physical aspects of death while also carefully exploring what death says about our humanity and the ways we choose to remember those we've lost. So go ahead, crack open the book--we know you're dying to read it"

Wahrnehmung und Einstellung der Bevölkerung zum Strafvollzug werden entscheidend von den ihr zur Verfügung stehenden Informationen geprägt. Fehleinschätzungen der Strafvollzugswirklichkeit sind das Ergebnis von wechselseitigen Kommunikationsprozessen, auf deren Ebenen, abhängig vom Strafvollzugszeitgeist, unterschiedliche Strafvollzugswirklichkeiten dargestellt werden. Aufgrund der spärlichen Informationsquellen der Bürger stellen die medialen Nachrichten mitunter die einzige Quelle dar, anhand derer die Rezipienten ihre Einstellung und Meinung zum Strafvollzug entwickeln. Ausgehend von diesen Überlegungen befasst sich die Dissertation mit der Frage, wie die lokale Presse über den Strafvollzug berichtet. Die Datengrundlage der Inhaltsanalyse bilden 1603 Presseartikel, die in der Meppener Tagespost erschienen sind.

In his inimitable style, gifted folklorist Kevin Danaher invites the reader to call on people of a former generation in their homes, to sit around the hearth, to listen to their tales and gossip and sample their food and drink, to marvel at their implements, to meet a water diviner, to join a faction fight, hurry to a wedding and bow down in remembrance of the dead. For over thirty years, this book has charmed, informed and surprised successive generations of readers, in Ireland and abroad.

This book discusses whether democracy and republicanism are identical, complementary, or contradicting ideas. The rediscovery of classic republicanism a few decades ago made it clear how profoundly modern notions of democracy had been shaped by the republican tradition. But defining these two concepts remains difficult, and the views diverge widely. The overarching aim of this book is to discuss the extent to which democracy and republicanism are identical, complementary or mutually contradicting ideals / ideas. Pursuing this open approach to the subject means calling into question a widely used formula according to which modern democracy is composed of liberal principles such as individualism, the rule of law and human rights, on the one hand, and of republican principles such as focusing on the common good and popular sovereignty, on the other. This book will appeal to students, researches, and scholars of political science interested in a better understanding of political theory and political history.

This book fills a gap in sociological theory surrounding how we engage with digital maps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMap (OSM). It explains how they feature in everyday life and with what social consequences. To do so, the book walks through examples of how digital maps shape social practices, from choosing which home to buy (landed capital acquisition), through to selecting routes between places. The book first provides a socio-technical background to digital maps and their development as progeny of the Internet and web rather than direct successors to paper-based ones. It then charts the evolution of theory about map use from its origin in academic cartography to contemporary thought, introducing concepts from systems-based communication models, semiotics, cognitive-behaviorism, critical cartography, and critical data and platform studies. With background concepts in place, the book moves on to develop a particular framework for analysing digital media use. Combining digital sociology and practice theory, the book works through empirical examples to cumulatively develop a new sociological theory on the social consequences of digital maps. The book argues that we defer to digital maps knowledgeably as rough guides, adopting a Bayesian logic - albeit with an awareness of their potential for error. As a result, decisions over choice of place and route - the mobility of people and things in space - become anchored within people¿s deferral to digital maps. By extension, so do senses of place, sense of security, and the performance of social positions.

This book presents an original study on how contemporary artists are exploring urban spaces through mapping. Despite a long history of representations of cities in maps, and the relationships that can be envisaged between art maps and cities in the contemporary world, little research is dedicated to investigating how artists intervene in the realm of urban cartography. The research examines a century-old history of art maps and draws on academic debates challenging traditional notions of maps as scientific artefacts produced through accurate measurement and surveying. The potential of art maps to construct personal narratives, through contestation, embodiment and play, is analysed in the city context, where spaces are shaped by urban planning and design, political ideologies and socio-economic forces. Adopting an exploratory and interpretative research approach that investigates the confluence of theories originated in different domains, this book conducts the reader to discover what artistic practices can bring into a more creative, while inquisitive, understanding of cities. A series of semi-structured interviews with visual artists, enquiring how they apprehend, process and re-create urban spaces in artworks, explores cartographic process and methods in visual art practices in the twenty first century, which incorporates digital technologies and critical thinking.

This book challenges the Western contemporary ¿praise for Nature¿. From food to body practices, from ecological discourses to the Covid-19 pandemic, contemporary imaginaries abound with representations of an ideal ¿pure Nature¿, essentially defined according to a logic of denial of any artificial, modified, manipulated ¿ in short, cultural ¿ aspect.How should we contextualise and understand such an opposition, especially in light of the rich semantic scope of the term ¿nature¿ and its variability over time? And how can we ¿ if we actually can ¿ envisage alternative models and approaches capable of better accounting for such richness and variability? The author addresses these fundamental issues, combining an initial theoretical problematisation of the concept of nature and its evolution ¿ from classical philosophy to the crucial changes occurred through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism and the modern era, finally considering recent insights in philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology and semiotics ¿ with the analysis of its discursivisation ¿ from the iconography of Mother Nature between the past and the present to the representation of catastrophic events in fictional and non-fictional texts, from clean eating and other popular food trends to the ambivalence of the naked body between its supposed natural ascription and its multiple cultural characterisations. Thus she introduces a critique of pure Nature, providing a systematic study of the way nature is attributed meaning and value in some of today¿s most relevant discourses and practices, and finally tracing a possible path towards an ¿internatural turn¿.

The Intermediality of Contemporary Visual Arts explores a range of topics within the field. The volume delves into the realm of intermediality within the visual arts. Each chapter explores a different aspect; from the evolution of Intermedial Studies over the past decades to the shifts in print typography and the emergence of ¿cut-ups¿ within a context of resistance against conventions, the concept of Visual Music and its relation to pioneering filmmaking, visual representations of intimacy as they evolve from painting to other visual formats like comics, film, and television, and finally the transmedial potential of cultural symbols in virtual reality, all of which involve greater multimodal and emotional elements that enhance audience immersion. The volume closes by highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to visual art education and pedagogical methods that foster creativity, emphasizing the intermedial aspects present in contemporary visual arts.

Ethnographic research, anthropological theory, and the understanding of the objects of inquiry, are co-created through figuration (using tropes and rhetorical figures) and techniques of persuasion. Delving into descriptive ethnography and theoretical texts spanning across classical monographs and recent texts in cultural anthropology, Culture Figures places rhetoric and rhetoricity as central to the discipline's self-understanding. It focuses on how understandings of 'culture' and social life are shaped and conveyed in cultural anthropology through textual rhetoric. The book demonstrates how processes of using tropes and modes of persuasion underlie the creation of meanings or misunderstandings in society.

In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living. Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.

Cleveland - whether you're new to town or born here, some things about this place make you scratch your head and wonder. Like, "Why is the only 90-degree turn in the U.S. Interstate Highway System right smack in our downtown?" This book tackles dozens of frequently asked questions with entertaining and thoughtful answers from a veteran journalist.

"Dark Horse Books and Marvel are proud to announce The Art of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, a beautiful 240-page tome featuring never-before-seen art of our favorite web-slinging heroes! Peter Parker and Miles Morales return when new dangers threaten New York City, though not all of them may be what they seem! When the symbiote invades, the two of them must work together to save friends and family. Swing into the adventure with Peter Parker and Miles Morales for a new adventure as they defeat enemies both new and old as they wreak havoc in The Art of Marvel's Spider-Man 2!"--

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales returns!Relive the adventure of the award-winning video game Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales with this gorgeous poster collection featuring key moments from the game! With perforated edges, these iconic images are easy to remove for display purposes.

This book provides qualitative analyses of intercultural sense making in a variety of institutional contexts. It relies on the assumption that in an increasingly culturally diverse world, individuals often enter contexts that have communal, historically determined and stable sets of values, norms and expected identities, with little cultural compass to find their bearings in them. The book goes beyond interpreting differences in people's ethnic or linguistic roots and discusses instead people's interpretive efforts to navigate different sociocultural situations. The contributors examine such situations in educational, organizational, medical and community settings and look at how participants with different levels of sociocultural competences (such as, migrant patients, migrant adult learners, children) try to cope with institutional constraints and expectations, how they understand symbols, practices and identities in institutional contexts, and how their creative adjustments come to light. This book provides insights from the fields of psychology, education, anthropology and linguistics, and is for a wide readership interested in cultural meaning-making.

The videogame series Mass Effect is a remarkable rarity not only for being an original science-fictional franchise of recent vintage that has risen to such prominent commercial and critical success in popular culture but also for pushing the canonical boundaries of how science fiction as a genre will be experienced and understood in the future. This book analyzes the significance of the game for an understanding of the evolving SF genre and articulates an explanatory framework to limn its landmark reception in videogame history. This book both synthesizes the burgeoning body of scholarship on Mass Effect for a readership unfamiliar with either the game or the critical conversation on its salient importance, while simultaneously, for readers already invested in the science-fiction and videogame scholarship, mounting an extended inquiry as to why Mass Effect has served as such a representative milestone in videogame and genre history. The book should appeal to veteran science-fiction and videogame scholars and students as well as a wide variety of fans, consumers, gamers, and general readers.

Eine breite Rezeption der Arbeiten Luc Boltanskis steht in literatursoziologischen Zusammenhängen aus. Der Band setzt an diesem Befund an und eruiert explorativ die Anschlussfähigkeit von Boltanskis Studien für die Generierung und Schärfung literatursoziologischer Fragestellungen und Analysen. Die Beiträge fragen erstens in theoretischer Hinsicht nach der Brauchbarkeit der Arbeiten Boltanskis für die literatursoziologische Begriffsbildung, Entwicklung von Fragerichtungen und Perspektivierung von Untersuchungsergebnissen. Zweitens erproben sie in konkreten Fallstudien die Tragweite der Konzepte Boltanskis für literatursoziologisches Arbeiten. Seinen Fluchtpunkt hat der Band in der Frage, inwiefern Boltanskis Ansatz zu dem beitragen kann, was man probehalber neopragmatische Literatursoziologie nennen könnte.

"The definitive history of the invention of D&D"--

This book presents a compilation of case studies from practitioners, educators, and researchers working in the area of digital violence, along with methodologies to prevent it using cyber security. The book contains three basic sections namely: the concept of digital violence in policy and practice; the impact of digital violence; and the implication of cyber security to curb such violence. The intention of this book is to equip researchers, practitioners, faculties, and students with critical, practical, and ethical resources to use cyber security and related technologies to help curb digital violence and to support victims. It brings about the needs of technological based education in order to combat gendered crimes like cyberbullying, body-shaming, and trolling that are a regular phenomenon on social media platforms. Topics include societal implications of cyber feminism; technology aided communication in education; cyber security and human rights; governance of cyber law throughinternational laws; and understanding digital violence.