Empty Meeting Grounds continues Dean MacCannell's search for the cultural subject that is about to emerge from the encounter of the ex-primitive and the post-modern. It contains fascinating chapters on `Cannibal Tours', `The Desire to be Postmodern', the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., the Statue of Liberty Restoration Project and the urbanization of Yosemite Park.

Continuous and rapid developments in global higher education today more than ever before present new questions, greater challenges, and vast new opportunities for institutions, policy makers, scholars and students alike. This book is a collection of studies and essays by many of the leading experts in international higher education who share their analysis of current trends and the implications they see for present and future policy and practice. The volume is organized into three sections that address, first, global, supranational concerns in internationalization and mobility; second, focus on specific cases in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, Africa, Asia, and Latin America; and third share profiles of individual institutions, practitioners and participants involved in uniquely shaping international education in their everyday practice. The intention of this book is to expand the scope of research in the field of Comparative and International Education, to facilitate theory development, to influence policy formation, and most of all to inform anyone fascinated by the evolving and dynamic processes related to educational internationalization and global mobility. This book will be a valuable information source for scholars, policy makers and students intent on understanding the wide scope of factors that today are shaping the fluid and changing global higher education landscape.

American things, American material culture, and American archaeology are the themes of this book. The authors use goods used or made in America to illuminate issues such as tenancy, racism, sexism, and regional bias. Contributors utilize data about everyday objects - from tin cans and bottles to namebrand items, from fish bones to machinery - to analyze the way American capitalism works. Their cogent analyses take us literally from broken dishes to the international economy. Especially notable chapters examine how an archaeologist formulates questions about exploitation under capitalism, and how the study of artifacts reveals African-American middle class culture and its response to racism.

Cold War histories are often told as stories of national leaders, state policies and the global confrontation that pitted a Communist Eastern Bloc against a Capitalist West. De-Centering the Cold War takes a new analytical approach to reveal unexpected complexities in the historical trajectory of the Cold War. This collaborative effort shapes a street-level history of the global Cold War era, one that uses the analysis of the 'local' to rethink and reframe the wider picture of the 'global', connecting the political negotiations of individuals and communities at the intersection of places and of meeting points between 'ordinary' people and political elites to the Cold War at large.

In a world characterized by an encroaching homogeneity induced by the growth of multi-national corporations and globalization, the causes of difference accrue new levels of importance. This is as true of tourism as in many other spheres of life – and one cause of differentiation for tourism promotion is the culture of Indigenous Peoples. This offers opportunities for cultural renaissance, income generation and enhanced political empowerment, but equally there are possible costs of creating commodities out of aspects of life that previously possessed spiritual meaning. This book examines these issues from many different perspectives; from those of product design and enhancement; of the aspirations of various minority groupings; and the patterns of displacements that occur – displacements that are not simply spatial but also social and cultural. How can these changes be managed? Case studies and analysis is offered, derived from many parts of the globe including North America, Asia and Australasia. The contributors themselves have, in many instances, worked closely with groups and organizations of Indigenous Peoples and attempt to give voice to their concerns. The book is divided into various themes, each with a separate introduction and commentary. The themes are Visitor Experiences, Who manages Indigenous Cultural Tourism Product, Events and Artifacts, Conceptualisation and Aspiration. In a short final section the silences are noted – each silence representing a potential challenge for future research to build upon the notions and lessons reported in the book. The book is edited by Professor Chris Ryan from New Zealand, and Michelle Aicken of Horwath Asia Pacific.

In Encounters across Difference, Natalia Bloch examines tourism encounters in the informal sector in India and their potential to empower subaltern communities. Drawing from ethnographic evidence in Hampi and Dharamshala, Bloch explores the potential of tourism to promote political engagement, volunteering, sponsorship, local entrepreneurship, and women’s empowerment. Contrary to the frequent criticism of tourism to the Global South as a colonial practice, Bloch argues that workers and small entrepreneurs in displaced communities see tourists as allies in their political struggles and, on a more individual level, as an opportunity to build better lives. For more information, check out A Conversation with Natalia Bloch, author of Encounters across Difference: Tourism and Overcoming Subalternity in India.

This groundbreaking collection focuses on what may be, for cultural studies, the most intriguing aspect of contemporary globalization—the ways in which the postnational restructuring of the world in an era of transnational capitalism has altered how we must think about cultural production. Mapping a "new world space" that is simultaneously more globalized and localized than before, these essays examine the dynamic between the movement of capital, images, and technologies without regard to national borders and the tendency toward fragmentation of the world into increasingly contentious enclaves of difference, ethnicity, and resistance. Ranging across issues involving film, literature, and theory, as well as history, politics, economics, sociology, and anthropology, these deeply interdisciplinary essays explore the interwoven forces of globalism and localism in a variety of cultural settings, with a particular emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. Powerful readings of the new image culture, transnational film genre, and the politics of spectacle are offered as is a critique of globalization as the latest guise of colonization. Articles that unravel the complex links between the global and local in terms of the unfolding narrative of capital are joined by work that illuminates phenomena as diverse as "yellow cab" interracial sex in Japan, machinic desire in Robocop movies, and the Pacific Rim city. An interview with Fredric Jameson by Paik Nak-Chung on globalization and Pacific Rim responses is also featured, as is a critical afterword by Paul Bové. Positioned at the crossroads of an altered global terrain, this volume, the first of its kind, analyzes the evolving transnational imaginary—the full scope of contemporary cultural production by which national identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone, and in which imagined communities are being reshaped at both the global and local levels of everyday existence.