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Showing 1 - 20 of 804 items
By Lucy Nichol. 2023
'Sensitively and seriously explores mental health stereotypes' StylistThis is NOT a book of rules or statistics.It will NOT tell you…
what you can and can’t say to someone with a mental health problem – or to anyone for that matter.It WILL increase your understanding and empower you to stop stigma in its tracks.Take a deep-dive into some of the most harmful mental health stereotypes with mental health advocate and author Lucy Nichol.Lucy exposes 10 of the most harmful mental health stereotypes and explores the impact of social media, the power of the press and how mental health is represented in popular culture.With the help of experts and the voices of those affected by these harmful perspectives, Lucy makes a case for how we can dismantle stigma once and for all.Foreword by Sue Baker OBE. Contributors include: Natasha Devon MBE, Jonny Benjamin MBE, Hope Virgo, Cara Lisette and Dr Craig Malkin.By Lucy Nichol. 2023
'Sensitively and seriously explores mental health stereotypes' StylistThis is NOT a book of rules or statistics.It will NOT tell you…
what you can and can’t say to someone with a mental health problem – or to anyone for that matter.It WILL increase your understanding and empower you to stop stigma in its tracks.Take a deep-dive into some of the most harmful mental health stereotypes with mental health advocate and author Lucy Nichol.Lucy exposes 10 of the most harmful mental health stereotypes and explores the impact of social media, the power of the press and how mental health is represented in popular culture.With the help of experts and the voices of those affected by these harmful perspectives, Lucy makes a case for how we can dismantle stigma once and for all.Foreword by Sue Baker OBE. Contributors include: Natasha Devon MBE, Jonny Benjamin MBE, Hope Virgo, Cara Lisette and Dr Craig Malkin.By Sam Gilbert. 2021
AN FT BUSINESS BOOK OF THE MONTHThe book that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about data,…
privacy and the future of Big Tech. 'We are currently living in a moment of extreme pessimism about data. This book will change your mind.' Almost everything we do generates data.Digital technology is now so pervasive that it's very hard to escape its influence, and with that growth comes fear. But whatever the news has told you about data and technology, think again.Data expert and tech insider Sam Gilbert shows that, actually, this data revolution could be the best thing that ever happened to us.Good Data examines the incredible new ways this information explosion is already helping us – whether that's combating inequality, creating jobs, advancing the frontiers of knowledge or protecting us from coronavirus – and explains why the best is yet to come.Data touches everything, from our biggest hates (online advertising) to our greatest loves (our pets), and in this fascinating new book, Gilbert explores how, if we can embrace the revolution (even the ads), we could all live vastly improved lives.We are standing on the edge of greatness, we just need to know how to get there.By Arienne Ferchaud, Jennifer M. Proffitt. 2024
This volume addresses contemporary debates and trends regarding the production and distribution, content, and audience engagement with the television streaming…
industry. The book interrogates the economics and structure of the industry, questions the types and diversity of content perpetuated on streaming services, and addresses how audiences engage with content from US and global perspectives and within various research paradigms. Chapters address television streaming wars, including the debates and trends in terms of its production and competition, diversity and growth of programming, and audience consumption, focusing on multiple platforms, content, and users. This timely and creative volume will interest students and scholars working in television studies, media industry studies, popular culture studies, audience studies, media psychology, critical cultural studies and media economics.By Peter Watson. 2001
From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture…
to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.&“If you&’re inspired to explore the ways in which you can treat the planet and your body a little better,…
this little book will give you a comprehensive way to get started.&”—Forbes In an increasingly toxic world, the paths to environmental health and personal well-being run parallel. The journey begins with a few small steps. Is the damage we&’re doing to our planet literally leaving you sick, sore, and gasping for air? Want to take back our inalienable rights to clean air, clean water, and healthy food? In this quietly revolutionary book, environmental pioneer and founder of Greenopia, Gay Browne, shares a roadmap for making incremental changes that will not only transform your life, but heal the world we share. From the home to the office, from the foods we eat to the clothes we wear, here are actions you can take today that will improve your Personal Environmental Health, and help you stop feeling overwhelmed, reduce illness, improve sleep, mood, and focus, and start making a difference, including: *Make conscious choices when shopping, and support companies with good environmental stewardship and healthy products. *Test your water for harmful chemicals, install an affordable water filtration system, and reduce your water use by utilizing water more efficiently. *Work with your doctor to create a personal plan for detoxing your body. *Use only non-toxic and organic household products, and choose organic, eco-friendly fabrics made by sustainable and fair trade certified companies. *Choose the method of transportation that makes the lightest carbon footprint. With these and many other actions, Gay Browne&’s work has taught her that even the smallest change for the better, faithfully practiced, can have an immense positive impact on our minds, bodies, and spirits—not to mention the planet.In this ground-breaking study, Hongwei Bao analyses queer theatre and performance in contemporary China. This book documents various forms of…
queer performance – including music, film, theatre, and political activism – in the first two decades of the twenty first century. In doing so, Bao argues for the importance of performance for queer identity and community formation. This trailblazing work uses queer performance as an analytical lens to challenge heteronormative modes of social relations and hegemonic narratives of historiography. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies, gender and sexuality studies and Asian studies.Vegetarianism and Science Fiction: A History of Utopian Animal Ethics examines how vegetarian ideals promoted within science fiction and utopian…
literature have had a real-world impact on the awareness and spread of vegetarianism and animal advocacy, as well as how the genres' engagements have been altered to reflect changes in ethical and environmental philosophy. Author Joshua Bulleid examines the representation of vegetarianism in the works of major science fiction authors, including Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Marge Piercy, Octavia E. Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood within their evolving social contexts, tracing the development of vegetarian trends and their science fictional representations from the early-nineteenth century to the present day.To be comfortable stands as an aspiration of the times; to be comfortable defines what it means to live ‘the…
good life’. We talk about such things as maintaining a comfortable home, a comfortable lifestyle and a comfortable retirement. We seek out comforts in the relationships we sustain, the leisure practices we enact and the possessions we accumulate. We look for promises of comfort in the words of a close friend and our next pair of shoes. Furnished in the home, optionally outfitted in cars, scrutinised in holiday brochures and brushed up against in the clothes we wear, comfort is there, marking distinctions and framing decisions about what it means to live well. But by consuming comfort in the ways that we do, we do ourselves harm and limit our only planet of its capacity to provide for the requirements of life. This is a world that grows ever more uncomfortable because of comfort and when linked to consumption and excess, indulgence and apathy, it occurs that comfort carries effects that have existential consequence. Utilising analyses of popular culture and ethnographic accounts of everyday life, Comfort and Contemporary Culture works through case study accounts of comfort’s enactment to pose questions around what it means to live, now. Comfort and Contemporary Culture poses alternative renderings of the idea of comfort to return the concept to its earliest roots in notions of confortāre. The revisioning of what we take as comfort requires urgent attention, with the ecological, social and intrapersonal implications of comfort’s current excesses demonstrative of this need. This book will be relevant reading for students and scholars of cultural studies and sociology, cultural anthropology, social geography and studies of community.By Nathalie Olah. 2023
A timely critique of consumer culture which captures this image-obsessed moment in history, perfect for fans of Zadie Smith's Feel…
Free and Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror.This book is not a taste, nor an anti-taste, manual. This is an interrogation of the importance we place on seemingly objective ideas of taste in a culture that is saturated by imagery, and the dangerous impact this has on our identities, communities and politics. This book is dedicated to understanding the industries of taste. From the food we eat to the way we spend our free time, Olah exposes the shallow waters of 'good' and 'bad' taste and the rigid hierarchies that uphold this age-old dichotomy. -How did minimalism become a virtue, and who can afford to do it justice?When did blue-collar jackets become a fashion item?Who stands to gain from the distinction made between beauty, and sex?- Bold, original and provocative, Bad Taste is a revelatory exploration of the intersection between consumerism, class, desire and power, and a rousing call-to-arms to break free from the restrictive ways we see those around us.By Bay Garnett. 2023
'Completely riveting . . . an eclectic compendium of style, subversion and literary snippets . . . all about the…
magical meaning of clothes'CALENDAR MAGAZINEMaya Angelou imagined she'd feel like a movie star in a dress of lavender taffeta. Rachel Weisz loves the democracy of denim. Zadie Smith's look differs depending on whether she's in New York or London, while Joan Didion always packed the same clothes. Jarvis Cocker found inspiration at jumble sales, Bella Freud in Colette's novels and Harris Reed in the gender fluidity of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Oscar Wilde understood the importance of proportions, Stanley Tucci favours a narrow stripe and Chloë Sevigny delights in traditional, with a twist. For Bernardine Evaristo style is about a refusal to be stereotyped. Jilly Cooper and AJ Tracey appreciate retail therapy. Sienna Miller misses the freedom of a less self-conscious age. For Davina McCall, an outfit begins with underwear; for Sophie Dahl it's not complete without scent. Clothes allow Susie Cave to hide and Charlotte Tilbury to feel empowered.With over sixty pieces on everything from thrifting to modesty dressing, drag to vintage sportswear, Style and Substance is a gloriously eclectic celebration of self-expression.By Donald R. Prothero. 2020
“A breath of intellectual fresh air . . . [an] amusing look at how to dispel endemic pseudoscience and conspiracy…
theories through rational thinking.” —Publishers WeeklyAliens. Ley lines. Water dowsing. Conspiracies and myths captivate imaginations and promise mystery and magic. Whether it’s arguing about the moon landing hoax or a Frisbee-like Earth drifting through space, when held up to science and critical thinking, these ideas fall flat. In Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas About Our Planet, Donald R. Prothero demystifies these conspiracies and offers answers to some of humanity’s most outlandish questions. Applying his extensive scientific knowledge, Prothero corrects misinformation that con artists and quacks use to hoodwink others about geology—hollow earth, expanding earth, and bizarre earthquakes—and mystical and paranormal happenings—healing crystals, alien landings, and the gates of hell. By deconstructing wild claims such as prophesies of imminent natural disasters, Prothero provides a way for everyone to recognize dubious assertions. Prothero answers these claims with facts, offering historical and scientific context in a light-hearted manner that is accessible to everyone, no matter their background. With a careful layering of evidence in geology, archaeology, and biblical and historical records, Prothero’s Weird Earth examines each conspiracy and myth and leaves no question unanswered.Weird Earth is about the facts and the people who don’t believe them. Don Prothero describes the process of science—and the process of not accepting it. If you’re wondering if humans walked on the Moon, if you’ve wondered where the lost City of Atlantis went, or if you’re wondering what your cat will do before an earthquake, check out Weird Earth.” —Bill NyeBy Matthew R. Anderson. 2023
Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul might be imagined as brothers with wildly different characters but a strong family resemblance.…
Paul, the elder sibling, was awkward, abrasive, and zealous. Leonard, the successful younger brother, was a smooth-talking romantic, prone to addiction and depression. Paul died a martyr, not knowing his words would have any effect on the world. Leonard could see his canonization within his lifetime. Yet each became a prophet in his own time, and a poet for the ages.In Prophets of Love Matthew Anderson traces surprising connections between two Jewish thinkers separated by millennia. He explores Leonard's and Paul’s mysticism, their Judaism, their fascination with Jesus, their countercultural perspectives on sex, their ideas about love, and how they each embodied being men. Anderson considers their ambiguous relationships with women, on whom they depended and from whom they often profited, as well as how their legacies continue to evolve and be re-interpreted. This book emphasizes that Paul was first and foremost a Jew, and never rejected his Judaism. At the same time, it sheds new light on the biblical worldviews and language underlying and inspiring every line of Cohen’s poetry.Prophets of Love alters our views of both Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul, re-introducing us to two poetic prophets of divine and human love.By William J. Goode. 2023
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out…
and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.By Suzanna Danuta Walters. 2023
In the 1940s film Now, Voyager, Bette Davis plays a daughter struggling against her mother's stifling repression. Nearly fifty years…
later, in the Hollywood saga Postcards from the Edge, Shirley MacLaine, as a neglectful and bossy mother, inflicts untold psychological pain on her daughter, played by Meryl Streep. These dramas of conflict and the ambivalent struggle for separation have been central to popular images of mothers and daughters in the last half-century in the U.S. Walters boldly challenges these dichotomies and proposes an innovative and multilayered understanding of the cultural construction of the mother/daughter relationship.In a discussion of popular media ranging from themes of maternal martyrdom to maternal malevolence, Walters shows that since World War II, mainstream culture has generally represented the mother/daughter relationship as one of never-ending conflict and thus promoted an "ideology of separation" as necessary to the daughter's emancipation and maturity. This ideological move is placed in a social context of the anti-woman backlash of the early post-war period and the renewed anti-feminism of the Reagan and Bush years.Walters uses exceptions to mainstream imagery-films such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, television shows like "Maude," novels like The Joy Luck Club-to offer evidence of alternative traditions and paradigms. Timely and vividly argued, Lives Together/Worlds Apart makes a brilliant contribution to discussions of popular culture and feminism.By Joshua Gamson. 2023
Moving from People magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American…
celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today's heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of celebrity's transparency and commercialism.Gamson examines the contemporary "dream machine" that publicists, tabloid newspapers, journalists, and TV interviewers use to create semi-fictional icons. He finds that celebrity watchers, for whom spotting celebrities becomes a spectator sport akin to watching football or fireworks, glean their own rewards in a game that turns as often on playing with inauthenticity as on identifying with stars.Gamson also looks at the "celebritization" of politics and the complex questions it poses regarding image and reality. He makes clear that to understand American public culture, we must understand that strange, ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity.By Linda S. Kauffman. 2023
Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and…
performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us.Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.By Jason S. Sexton. 2024
An essential piece in California Studies, Redemptive Dreams: Engaging Kevin Starr’s California offers the first critical engagement with the vision…
of California’s most ambitious interpreter. While Starr’s multifaceted and polymathic vision of California offered a unique gaze—synthesizing central features, big themes, and incredible problems with the propitious golden dream—his eight-volume California Dream series, along with several other books and thousands of published articles and essays, often puzzled historians and other scholars. Historians in the contemporary school of critical historiography often found Starr’s narrative approach—seeking to tell the internal drama of the California story—to be less attuned to the most important work happening in the field. Such a perspective fails to acknowledge key developments in historical subfields like Black and African American Studies, Chicana/o/x Studies, Asian Studies, Native Studies, and others that draw from the narrative in their critical work and how this relates to Starr’s contribution. But it also neglects Starr as a theological interpreter. Along with being a major figure in California institutional life, with literary output spanning genres from journalism to critical cultural and political commentary, to history and memoir, Starr’s unique contribution to California Studies as a distinctly Catholic historian has yet to be adequately understood. Through his lived experience as a devout Catholic to the particular theological features of this faith tradition that animated his views, this critical sociological perspective sheds new light on his project. With contributions from sociology, history, and theology, akin to investigations appearing in Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture (Routledge), Redemptive Dreams offers interdisciplinary perspectives that highlight key features inherent in interdisciplinary theological reflection on place and illuminates these diverse disciplinary discourses as they appear in Starr’s articulation of the California Dream. Such a vision remains important for reckoning with California’s place in the world.By Olga Gershenson. 2024
Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. Then distinctly Israeli serial killers, zombies, vampires, and ghosts invaded local screens.…
The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception. She shows how these films challenge traditional representations of Israel and its people, while also appealing to audiences around the world. Gershenson introduces an innovative conceptual framework of adaptation, which explains how filmmakers adapt global genre tropes to local reality. It illuminates the ways in which Israeli horror borrows and diverges from its international models. New Israeli Horror offers an exciting and original contribution to our understanding of both Israeli cinema and the horror genre. A companion website to this book is available at https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/ (https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/) Book trailer: https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw (https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw)By Annekathrin Kohout. 2023
Das „K“ in „K-Pop“ steht nicht einfach für „koreanisch“. Es ist ein Branding, ein Corporate Design, ja ein globaler ästhetischer…
Trend. Neben K-Popmusik und K-Dramen formieren auch Food-, Mode- und Beauty-Produkte die sogenannte Hallyu („Koreanische Welle“). Wie es Hollywood nicht ohne das Kino gegeben hätte, ist K-Pop ohne Soziale Medien undenkbar. An die Stelle glamouröser Stars und kreischender Fans treten smarte, gut vernetzte Akteure. Doch in die Begeisterung mischen sich auch kritische Stimmen. Die dahinterstehende Industrie und die transportierten Rollenbilder provozieren zunehmend kontroverse interkulturelle Diskurse.