The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. Focusing on the small screens of Europe and North America, "Lesbians on Television" maps the contemporary shifts in lesbian visibility within popular media and, from this, extracts a figure of the new 'lesbian normal' that both help…
From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community’s protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies …
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 …
Between 1989 and 1991, excavations in the parish of Flixborough, North Lincolnshire, unearthed remains of an Anglo-Saxon settlement associated with one of the largest collections of artefacts and animal bones yet found on such a site. In an unprecedented occupation sequence from an Anglo-Saxon rural settlement, six main periods of occupation have been identified, dating from the seventh to the …
This book is an ethnographic study of the internal dynamics of a subcultural community that defines itself as a social movement. While the majority of scholarly studies on this movement focus on its official face, on its front stage, this book concerns itself with the ideological and practical paradoxes at work within the micro-social dynamics of the backstage, an area that has so far been negl…
The authors define the term presbycusis and discuss the prevalence of hearing loss in elderly people, its etiology, and methods of diagnostics (anamnesis, evaluation of the peripheral and central parts of the hearing system). The authors emphasize that central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) significantly impairs speech perception in elderly people and makes difficult the rehabilitation of …
Beyond the Black-and-White of Autism: How Cognitive Performance Varies with Context
A consideration of the perception of beauty immediately bridges the subjective and objective. To what extent is beauty residing in the object and to what extent is it a property of the subjectivity of the perceiver? Is beauty an objective feature of the object, like color, for example, which nonetheless needs to be perceived and therefore configured by the observer? Or is there some more comple…
This chapter analyses the role of the mass media in people’s perceptions of beauty. We summarize the research literature on the mass media, both traditional media and online social media, and how they appear to interact with psychological factors to impact appearance concerns and body image disturbances. There is a strong support for the idea that traditional forms of media (e.g. magazines an…
This chapter is a discussion and reflection of how beauty is perceived through the lens of four different athletes over four different decades. Two basketball players, a gymnast and a skater, reflect on the language of their sport and how beauty is perceived and manipulated through language and coaching techniques. The experiences affect athletes over a lifetime, both positively and negatively.