How have traditional Chinese ways of thinking affected problem solving in this century? The traditional, imperial style of inquiry is associated with the belief that the universe is a coherent, internally structured unity understandable through the similarly structured human mind. It involves a reliance on antecedent and authoritarian models, coupled with an introspective focus in investigation…
Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also ex…
Tomiyama Taeko, a Japanese visual artist born in 1921, is changing the way World War II is remembered in Japan, Asia, and the world. Her work deals with complicated moral and emotional issues of empire and war responsibility that cannot be summed up in simple slogans, which makes it compelling for more than just its considerable beauty. Japanese today are still grappling with the effects of …
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and sil…
"Links" are among the most basic---and most unexamined---features of online life. Bringing together a prominent array of thinkers from industry and the academy, The Hyperlinked Society addresses a provocative series of questions about the ways in which hyperlinks organize behavior online. How do media producers' considerations of links change the way they approach their work, and how do these c…
Better known in his own times than later, Huan T’an (43 BCE–25 CE) was a scholar-official, independent in his thought and unafraid to criticize orthodox currents of his time. A practitioner of the Old Text exegesis of the Classics, he maintained a position on the court during a turbulent time of political crises, uprisings, and civil war, spanning the reigns of four emperors. His princip…
Over the past decade, the video camera has become a commonplace household technology. With falling prices on compact and easy-to-use cameras, as well as mobile phones and digital still cameras with video recording capabilities, access to moving image production technology is becoming virtually universal. Home Truths? represents one of the few academic research studies exploring this everyday, p…
Going to Court to Change Japan takes us inside movements dealing with causes as disparate as death by overwork, the rights of the deaf, access to prisoners on death row, consumer product safety, workers whose companies go bankrupt, and persons convicted of crimes they did not commit. Each of the six fascinating case studies stands on its own as a detailed account of how a social movement has pe…
In Finding Voice, Kim Berman demonstrates how she was able to use visual arts training in disenfranchised communities as a tool for political and social transformation in South Africa. Using her own fieldwork as a case study, Berman shows how hands-on work in the arts with learners of all ages and backgrounds can contribute to economic stability by developing new skills, as well as enhancing pu…
While following the probes of foreign individuals into various obscure parts of Southeast Asia over the centuries is a diverting and entertaining pastime, the purpose of this volume is to investigate this past with the mind, to question and postulate upon the historical patterns that have developed from earlier study of the area, and to bring concepts from other areas and disciplines to bear on…