In the past fifty years, port cities around the world have experienced considerable changes to their morphologies and their identities. The increasing intensification of global networks and logistics, and the resulting pressure on human societies and earthly environments have been characteristic of the rise of a »planetary age«. This volume engages with contemporary artistic practices and cri…
Können Krisen Veränderungen gesellschaftlicher Ordnungsverhältnisse und die Etablierung neuer Diskurs-Akteure bewirken? Julia Fürwitt geht dieser Frage anhand multipler gesellschaftlicher Krisensituationen Spaniens seit 2010 nach. Basierend auf den Ansätzen Michel Foucaults und Bruno Latours erarbeitet sie einen neuen diskursanalytischen Ansatz, der angesichts gegenwärtiger gesellschaftsÃ…
How to do cultural studies in the twenty-first century? This essay collection is not a handbook, encyclopedia, or a »state of the field« compendium. Instead, it is a reflexive exercise in cultural studies, featuring fifteen accessible essays on a selection of critical key works published since 2000. The contributors aim to provide readers with a fresh and engaging look at recent criticism, ex…
In its constructive and speculative nature, design has the critical potential to reshape prevalent socio-material realities. At the same time, design is inevitably normative, if not often violent, as it stabilises the past, normalises the present, and precludes just and sustainable futures. The contributions rethink concepts of critique that influence the field of design, question inherent blin…
The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. In recent decades the video games industry has grown astronomically, quickly becoming a substantial part of our everyday lives. Alongside the rise of this technology, the media, academia and, in some cases, governments, have drawn correlations between video games and serio…
This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assemb…
This book presents essays exploring the ways in which popular culture reflects and engenders ongoing changes in Japan–Korea relations.Through a broad temporal coverage from the colonial period to the contemporary, the book’s chapters analyse the often contradictory roles that popular culture has played in either promoting or impeding nationalisms, regional conflict and reconciliations betwe…
Vidding is a well-established remix practice where fans edit an existing film, music video, TV show, or other performance and set it to music of their choosing. Vids emerged forty years ago as a complicated technological feat involving capturing footage from TV with a VCR and syncing with music—and their makers and consumers were almost exclusively women, many of them queer women. The technol…
Salt and State is an annotated translation of a treatise on salt from Song China. From its inception in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.), the salt monopoly was a key component in the Chinese government's financial toolkit. Salt, with its highly localized and large-scale production, was an ideal target for bureaucratic management.In the Song dynasty (960–1279), fiscal pressures on the gov…
An anthropologist's analysis of one of the world's most popular online world games