Making Room for People elaborates on preferences in housing. It explores how users, occupants, and citizens can express their needs, searching for the enhancement of individual choice and control over their residential environment, and the predicted positive spin-off’s for urban collectives. The central question is: What are the conditions under which an increase of people’s choice and voic…
Witness to Marvels traces the development of a unique genre of Sufi-inspired Bengali romances called pir kathas, whose protagonists and plots are wholly fictive. For five centuries these fabulations have parodied indigenous and Hindu textual traditions. Both mimicking and mocking, these parodies adopted a subjunctive tone, exploring a magical world of ‘what-if’. They created an Islam-inflec…
This multidisciplinary collection of articles illuminates the ways in which the concept of female deviance is represented, appropriated, re-inscribed and refigured in a wide range of texts across time, cultures and genres. Such a choice of variety shows that representations of deviance accommodate meaning-making spaces and possibilities for resistance in different socio-cultural and literary co…
Democratising the museum is a collection of articles reflecting upon the problem of how participation, technologically mediated or not, can support the museum in the process of becoming more accessible. The open museum shares power with its visitors while negotiating professionalism and the role of the museum in a modern society. The book looks at the roles and struggles of audiences/visitors a…
News Literacy and Democracy invites readers to go beyond surface-level fact checking and to examine the structures, institutions, practices, and routines that comprise news media systems.This introductory text underscores the importance of news literacy to democratic life and advances an argument that critical contexts regarding news media structures and institutions should be central to news l…
This study of the design, manufacture and use of medieval floor tiles shows the long-lasting influence achieved in the north of England, especially by the Cistercian monasteries. It serves to demonstrate how these monastic houses made use of the resources and contacts available to them. The study focuses on one of the richest medieval floor tile assemblages in the world, with material from 118 …
This book seeks to advance knowledge of human settlement and adaptation in the world's largest desert, the sahara. Previous studies focussed on the prehistoric phases but this study takes a wider historical and geographical perspective. It sets out to combine the results of several field campaigns, their histories and methodologies. We look at fieldwork, fortifications, funerary structures, irr…
Actors and actresses play characters such as the embittered Medea, or the lovelorn Romeo, or the grieving and tearful Hecabe. The theatre audience holds its breath, and then sparks begin to fly. But what about the actor? Has he been affected by the emotions of the character he is playing? What's going on inside his mind? The styling of emotions in the theatre has been the subject of heated deba…
A response is needed to the numerous issues spurred by the expansion of the gig economy, where flexible patterns of employment prevail in contrast to permanent jobs. In this context of the exponential growth of the digital economy and underlying business models the largest nationwide study of its kind into the impact of the working conditions in the UK music industry ‘Can Music Make You Sick?…
A few months into the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2009/10, the promises of social media, including its ability to influence a participatory governance model, grassroots civic engagement, new social dynamics, inclusive societies and new opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs, became more evident than ever. Simultaneously, cartography received ne…