What is the role of the unconscious in our visceral approaches to cinema? Embodied Encounters offers a unique collection of essays written by leading thinkers and writers in film studies, with a guiding principle that embodied and material existence can, and perhaps ought to, also allow for the unconscious. The contributors embrace work which has brought ‘the body’ back into film theory and question why psychoanalysis has been excluded from more recent interrogations. The chapters included here engage with Jung and Freud, Lacan and Bion, and Klein and Winnicott in their interrogations of contemporary cinema and the moving image. In three parts the book presents examinations of both classic and contemporary films including Black Swan, Zero Dark Thirty and The Dybbuk: Part 1 – The Desire, the Body and the Unconscious Part 2 – Psychoanalytical Theories and the Cinema Part 3 – Reflections and Destructions, Mirrors and Transgressions Embodied Encounters is an eclectic volume which presents in one book the voices of those who work with different psychoanalytical paradigms. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, scholars and students of film and culture studies and film makers.

Examining the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, Strange Encounters challenges the assumptions that the stranger is simply anybody we do not recognize and instead proposes that he or she is socially constructued as somebody we already know. Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colonial feminism. A diverse range of texts are analyzed which produce the figure of 'the stranger', showing that it has alternatively been expelled as the origin of danger - such as in neighbourhood watch, or celebrated as the origin of difference - as in multiculturalism. The author argues that both of these standpoints are problematic as they involve 'stranger fetishism'; they assume that the stranger 'has a life of its own'.

This topical and conceptually innovative book proposes new perspectives on the theme of materiality which, since the 1980s, has animated work across and within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The particular focus of the chapters in this volume is the materiality of knowledge produced through embodied encounters between people, places, and things in the Pacific Islands, New Guinea, Australia, and Myanmar. The authors consider how materiality mediates the ways in which knowledge is generated or acquired in encounters and becomes expressed through things and material forms of inscription – charts and maps; journals, letters, and reports; drawings; objects; human remains; legends, cartouches, captions, labels, marginalia, and notes; and published works of all kinds. The essays further address processes whereby materialized knowledge is archived, conserved, distributed, restricted, or dispersed – through serendipity, excess, loss, silence, absence, and suppression. This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in History, Anthropology and Oceania Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

Book Review

This interdisciplinary collection explores the role the body plays in constituting our sense of self, signalling the interplay between material embodiment, social meaning, and material and social conditions.

Pastors and other leaders feel trapped in systems and institutions where actions and decisions often seem to have little to do with the scripture they read or the theology they profess. They are swept into leadership norms that resemble business models more than mission. They see in others and (sometimes) recognize in themselves the disconnect between their own theology and their leadership. They feel unable to fully integrate their beliefs with their behavior. Many leaders—younger ones, especially—are frustrated and disillusioned by this disconnect. They see hypocrisy all around them, and in themselves. They see that our culture is at a critical juncture, which gives ministry a greater sense of urgency. But they want to do things differently, to be what they believe. They want to embody their Christian beliefs in every decision, every act of ministry leadership. The functional authority of scripture must be evident in the way church leaders lead, both within the congregation and in the public square. lead our churches. The way we church leaders lead proves the bible does—or does not—matter. In Embody, Karoline Lewis shows how to frame leadership in the church and public square theologically, and from the perspective of incarnation. She shows how leadership can be a direct line between what you believe and what you do. She incorporates examples of Jesus' leadership and the Paraclete in the Gospel of John, showing how leadership was achieved by walking beside. Embody offers practical things for the reader to consider and do, instruction and guidance for how to make the ‘integration steps’ necessary in order to become an embodied leader, and exploration of core components of embodied leadership.

Geographies of Embodiment provides a critical discussion of the literatures on the body and embodiment, and humanism and post-humanism, and develops arguments about "otherness" and "encounter" which have become key ideas in urban studies, and studies of the city. It situates these arguments in a wider political context, looking at power-relations through case studies at urban, national and transnational scales. These arguments are situated across disciplinary boundaries, at the borderline between between philosophy and social science that is associated to critical phenomenology, and reaches across Human Geography, Sociology, Philosophy, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Urban Studies.