This book examines how German-language authors have intervened in contemporary debates on the obligation to extend hospitality to asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants; the terrorist threat post-9/11; globalisation and neo-liberalism; the opportunities and anxieties of intensified mobility across borders; and whether transnationalism necessarily implies the end of the nation state and the dawn of a new cosmopolitanism. The book proceeds through a series of close readings of key texts of the last twenty years, with an emphasis on the most recent works. Authors include Terézia Mora, Richard Wagner, Olga Grjasnowa, Marlene Streeruwitz, Vladimir Vertlib, Navid Kermani, Felicitas Hoppe, Daniel Kehlmann, Ilija Trojanow, Christian Kracht, and Christa Wolf, representing the diversity of contemporary German-language writing. Through a careful process of juxtaposition and differentiation, the individual chapters demonstrate that writers of both minority and nonminority backgrounds addresstransnationalism in ways that certainly vary but which also often overlap in surprising ways.
What does it mean to say Indian movies are melodramatic? How do film audiences engage with socio-political issues? What role has cinema played in the emergence of new economic forms, consumer cultures and digital technologies in a globalizing India? Ravi Vasudevan addresses these questions in a wide-ranging analysis of Indian cinema.
This book offers a long overdue, extensive study of one of the most beloved television shows: Friends. Why has this sitcom become the seminal success that it is? And how does it continue to engage viewers around the world a quarter century after its first broadcast? Featuring original interviews with key creative personnel (including co-creator Marta Kauffman and executive producer Kevin S. Bright), the book provides answers by identifying a strategy of intimacy that informs Friends' use of humour, performance, style and set design. The authors provide fascinating analyses of some of the most well-remembered scenes-the one where Ross can't get his leather pants back on, and Ross and Rachel's break-up, to name just a couple-and reflect on how and why A-list guest performances sometimes fell short of the standards set by the ensemble cast. Also considered are the iconic look of Monica's apartment as well as the programme's much discussed politics of representation and the critical backlash it has received in recent years. An exploration of Joey, the infamous spin-off, and several attempts to adapt Friends' successful formula across the globe, round out the discussion, with insights into mistranslated jokes and much more. For students, scholars, creative industry practitioners and fans alike, this is a compelling read that lets us glimpse behind the scenes of what has become a cultural phenomenon and semi-permanent fixture in many of our homes.
Arguing against a common sense view of bilingualism as the co-existence of two linguistic systems, this volume develops a critical perspective which approaches bilingualism as a wide variety of sets of sociolinguistic practices connected to the construction of social difference and of social inequality under specific historical conditions.
This book offers both marketing and sales professionals a rare combined insight into both worlds to continuously capture customer intelligence and create value, by blending detailed research with academic rigor and commercial experience of the authors in both Europe and North America. It has never been easier to produce great marketing content and sales collateral. And yet, 90% of the content that marketing produces is NEVER used by sales. Why not? Because it's not relevant to the audience or the prospect doesn't even know the content exists. Furthermore 58% of deals end up in "no decision" because Sales has not presented value effectively.
Companies are creating lots of noise but failing to resonate with the customers.
So what? The danger, aside from marketing wasting tens of millions of dollars on ineffective content and tools, is that customers will disengage. 94% of prospects say they have completely disengaged with vendors because of irrelevant content.
In order to grow fast, the authors argue, Sales and Marketing teams need to slow down. They need to work together to truly understand their customers' needs, wants, motivations and pain points so that they can offer customized "value". The book sets out how to establish a formal program to continuously capture customer intelligence and insights - the shiny gems of understanding that help prospects to connect the dots - so that value can be consistently articulated in marketing and sales conversations.
By integrating the best ideas and practice from commercial experience and academic research the authors show how to create value across the entire marketing and sales value chain - not only get a new customer, but to continue to create value for future purchases by creating "post-sales" value.
This edited book considers the need for the continued dismantling of conceptual and cultural hegemonies of `East' and `West' in the humanities and social sciences. Cutting across a wide range of literature, film and art from different contexts and ages, this collection seeks out the interpenetrating dynamic between both terms. Highlighting the inherent instability of East and West as oppositional categories, it focuses on the `crossings' between East and West and this nexus as a highly-charged arena of encounter and collision. Drawing from varied literary contexts ranging from Victorian literature to Chinese literature and modern European literature, the book covers a diverse range of subject matter, including material drawn from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and studies related to race, religion, diaspora, and gender, and investigates topical social and political issues -including terrorism, nationalism, citizenship, the refugee crisis, xenophobia and otherness. Offering a framework to consider the salient questions of cultural, ideological and geographical change in our societies, this book is a key read for those working within world literary studies.
This volume is the result of the 2012 International Economic Association's series of roundtables on the theme of Industrial Policy. The first, 'New Thinking on Industrial Policy,' was hosted by the World Bank in Washington, D.C, and the second, 'New Thinking on Industrial Policy: Implications for Africa,' was held in Pretoria, South Africa.
Respected film critic Gonzalo Aguilar offers a lucid and sophisticated analysis of Argentine films of the last decade. This is the most complete and up-to-date work in English to examine the 'new Argentine cinema' phenomenon. Aguilar looks at highly relevant films, including those by Lucrecia Martel and Sergio Rejtman.
Remaking Madrid is the first full-length study of Madrid's transformation from the dreary home of the Franco dictatorship into a modern and vibrant city. It argues that this remarkable transformation in the 1980s helped secure Spain's fragile transition to democracy and that the transformation itself was primarily a product of "regionalism"-even though the capital is typically associated with "Spanishness" and with "the nation." The official project to distance Madrid from its dictatorial past included urban renewal and administrative reform; but, above all, it involved greater cultural participation, which led the revival of the capital's public festivals and the development of a modern cultural outpouring known as the movida madrileña. The book also explains the ultimate failure of regionalism in the capital by the end of the 1980s and asks whether or not Madrid's inclusive form of "civic" identity might have served as a model for the country as a whole.
This original and panoramic book proposes that the underlying forces of demography and globalisation will shortly reverse three multi-decade global trends - it will raise inflation and interest rates, but lead to a pullback in inequality. "Whatever the future holds", the authors argue, "it will be nothing like the past". Deflationary headwinds over the last three decades have been primarily due to an enormous surge in the world's available labour supply, owing to very favourable demographic trends and the entry of China and Eastern Europe into the world's trading system. This book demonstrates how these demographic trends are on the point of reversing sharply, coinciding with a retreat from globalisation. The result? Ageing can be expected to raise inflation and interest rates, bringing a slew of problems for an over-indebted world economy, but is also anticipated to increase the share of labour, so that inequality falls. Covering many social and politicalfactors, as well as those that are more purely macroeconomic, the authors address topics including ageing, dementia, inequality, populism, retirement and debt finance, among others. This book will be of interest and understandable to anyone with an interest on where the world's economy may be going.
This open access book develops a deeper understanding of an increasingly applied term across policy cycles and academic discourses, `energy citizenship'. It provides the reader with five distinct chapters, with each in turn examining a specific aspect of the concept and how it has manifested in public discourses.
This book brings together two separate fields by combining a study of Shakespeare's original stage conditions with an exploration of his plays in performance across the globe. The book contributes new insights into how early-modern stage conditions shaped the writing, production, and reception of Shakespeare's plays, but takes the further step of examining how original stage conditions re-emerge, not only in Globe replicas like the London Globe, but in unexpected and sometimes unconscious reconfigurations in adaptations and productions from around the world: film versions of Othello from Mexico to India that take dancing cues and anxieties about dance from the play and centralize dance; Korean adaptations for the madang (or yard) that reimagine Shakespeare's theatrical spaces and their relationships to audiences; Noh re-imaginings on film and onstage that foreground the theatrical; a teen film remake of Othello that raises questions about how blackness is figured today and on Shakespeare's stage, among others. By studying original stage conditions and their global afterlives, the book illuminates how global productions negotiate historical and cultural differences and thereby, paradoxically, engage with the cultural specificities of the present.
This book provides an exposition on the professional and cultural life of Patrick Weston Joyce (1827-1914), more popularly known as P. W. Joyce, who lived and worked during the final phase of British rule in Ireland. The focus throughout is very much on how family, locale, and schooling influenced this significant Irish patriot, polymath, and pioneering pedagogue who worked across a range of disciplines, including education, language, history, and music. Moreover, attention is paid to how his achievements were possible only because of the variety of leading roles he played in the development of the Irish National School System between 1845 and 1893. Thus positioned, Joyce was in many ways a significant choreographer of a slow revolution in which education, in both formal and informal settings, was used to educate the Irish people regarding their cultural heritage.
This book offers an exercise in reception theory and investigates the key figures in the reception of Nietzsche's critique of Judeo-Christianity in the course of the twentieth century. It has often been remarked upon - but rarely, if ever, explained - why Nietzsche, the author of the famous parable in The Gay Science in which a madman announces the "death of God" and a self-proclaimed opponent of organised religion, should have been a figure of such profound interest to writers, thinkers and theologians who were of a Christian persuasion. In order better to understand the attractiveness of Nietzsche to practitioners of faith, this book undertakes an analytical study of the reception of Nietzsche by around a dozen writers and thinkers working within the discourse of twentieth-century theology in the European tradition (French, Italian, German, Polish, and Swiss).
This book explores the multifaceted dimensions of the Girmitya diaspora and post-memory. The intersections of dis/re-location and memory have always been a focus of scholarly interest and the volume envisages the roots of migration and culture, life stories, narratives, and personal anecdotes. It further accentuates Girmitiya struggles, politics of displacement, relationships with the homeland and host land, oral traditions, repercussions, and retention of the archival sites. The cross-examination of memories helps in building a framework to study the varied experiences of the Girmitiya community. In this volume, through a blend of historical and scholarly discourse, we embark on a journey to unearth the layers of meaning embedded within the Girmitya experience. The tales of Girmitya migration amplifies marginalized voices and illuminates the enduring resilience. By chronicling the experiences of the indentured migration, we pay homage to the pioneers, recognize the intricacy of their toils, and commemorate the continuing legacy.
This volume unpacks the phenomenon of skipped generation households-where children live with their grandparents and without their parents-as they become an increasingly common family dynamic in Nigeria and globally. The skipped generation household's emergence in sub-Saharan Africa has been driven by factors including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, labour-based migration, and ethno-religious conflicts. By examining the data from a national study on skipped generation households in Nigeria, contributions track benefits, opportunities, and effects associated with growing up in these households. Details including academic performance and career aspirations for grandchildren, as well as social-psychological and physical well-being of both them and their grandparents, are explored.
This book offers a contemporary perspective on trauma and resilience, presenting an overview of surrounding issues, and describing their history and in the context of recent scientific research. This book argues that the skills underlying resilience can be strengthened at any age, and that it is never too late to build resilience or embark on a path of healing and evolution. Resilience is intertwined with the ability to learn, develop relationships with others, motivate oneself in achieving goals, set aspirations and have determination in pursuing those goals. All of these aspects can be fostered through a psychotherapy, reprocessing the traumatic memory within a safe and empathic space.
The book is innovative because it provides an overview of theories that pertain to different fields of psychology: areas pertaining to psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, EMDR and many others are explored in depth while also highlighting the advances that science has made regarding these issues. This book will be a valuable contribution to the knowledge of students, mental health professionals, and it can also be a very interesting manuscript for those who want to broaden their knowledge about trauma and resilience.
Building on the notion of everyday(ness) as a conceptual tool and a study object in urban research, this book presents 10 case-studies describing and questioning how cities and urban spaces are lived, experienced, interpreted, (self-)produced and/or appropriated. The chapter authors (Raffael Beier & Soufiane Chinig; Patrícia Pereira; Frédéric Vidal, Elisa Lopes da Silva & Alexandre Vaz; Priscilla Santos; Graça Cordeiro & Giuseppe Formato; Andrzej Bukowski & Marta Smagacz-Poziemska; Ryanne Flock; Sophie Zviadadze; Rita Cachado; and Sonja Lakic) analyse the dynamic/interchangeable relationship between material and social dimensions of urban change through thought-provoking ethnographic narratives.
This book is the first in-depth study of the lived experiences of queer Christian clergy in an African context. Using a queer lived religion framing, it draws on ethnographic research to analyse how six LGBTQ clergy understand and practice their vocation in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA). Seemingly marginalised in a denomination which maintains that marriage is only between one man and one woman, this book explores why LGBTQ clergy are motivated to live out their calling in the Church and how they make sense of their positions within it. In doing so, it looks beyond an analysis of a Church based on its official and doctrinal institutional positions on queer people and sexualities and, instead, uncovers the taken-for-granted ways that gender and sex are inscribed in `the way we do things around here'. This book is relevant to students and researchers in gender and sexuality studies, African religious studies, and sociology of religion.
In this book, Thomas Svolos tests the claim that a practicing psychoanalyst is afforded a unique perspective on issues of politics, social and cultural affairs, trained, as they are, to look out for that which is not readily transparent to a patient. This might be something opaque, something bizarre even, something that is part of the experience of the patient that they are not conscious of, what Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan called, at different points in their work, desire, libido, or, jouissance. It argues that by taking account, in one way or another, of desire, libido and jouissance, we might find another dimension to political, social and cultural matters, a dimension that is present, but generally opaque, to those who deal with them.
In a series of original texts and edited dialogues, brought together for the first time, this lively and accessible work offers novel insights on topics ranging from race, climate change and partisan politics, to science fiction and Bruce Springsteen. It will appeal to students, scholars and those with a general interest in psychoanalysis, politics, cultural studies and critical theory.
This book is a collection of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars that maps out the current landscape of experimental cinema studies and sets agendas for future work in the field. Introducing new critical methodologies and calling overdue attention to neglected artists, regions, and topics, the contributions to this volume reassess and reassert experimental cinema as a site of formal exploration and interrogation as well as resistance to institutional, political, and social norms. This collection articulates what it means for experimental cinema to be these things in the contemporary moment, staking out new directions in thinking about the subject not only as a growing sub-field of cinema studies, but as an artistic and scholarly tradition in dialogue with art history, visual culture, philosophy, and the sciences. The contributions reflect a diversity of voices and perspectives, weaving together theoretical, poetic, and personal modes of writing and traversing questions of form, emotion, materiality, nationality, postcoloniality, the body, and ecology.
This book presents a philosophical and theological analysis of the concept of integrity. Using case studies, it offers a view of integrity which is focused in: identity (individual and corporate); responsibility (for critical reflection on identity and related ideas and feelings associated with worth, mutual and plural accountability, and shared responsibility for creating and creation); ongoing learning (individual and corporate). Simon Robinson brings together Aristotelian and existentialist perspectives, agapeic theology, and wider leadership and governance theory, and in doing so connects ecclesiology, Christian Ethics, pastoral theology, church leadership and governance. Robinson focuses on praxis, reflection on how the Christian church engages its members and the world, and how it can learn and develop peacebuilding. Critical to this the development of genuine dialogue, individual and shared narrative building, and the corporate framework of virtues and virtue development, which connects individual and corporate agency.
E-mobility is the future. Its development and consumer adoption are strongly contributing to several of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, playing a huge role in the shift from linear to circular economies. Providing extensive insight into this dynamic, the book reviews extant management and marketing research describing the E-mobility state-of-the-art literature from a twofold perspective; industries and consumers. Industries must consider the benefits and drawbacks related to E-mobility implementation in their business models and strategies, including the communication (online and offline) to stakeholders of such advancements. Meanwhile, consumers experience different perceptions and motivations including barriers related to the adoption of E-mobility, leading in turn to different behaviors across generational cohorts (e.g. Gen Z and Gen Alpha versus Millennials). Offering an empirical analysis based on a consumer survey, this book sheds light on all these aspects, thus giving useful insights to academics, marketers and policy makers into the challenges facing consumers in their E-mobility adoption.
This book presents cultural representations of Christ embedded in the imagination and the contested myths of Australian life. The essays attest to the variety and subtlety of neglected or unspoken representations of Christ in Australia. In a land that has often declared itself secular or post-Christian, this volume looks into the Australian imagination, in between the sacred and secular, to see Christ in Australia.
