The contributors in this edited collection scrutinize the changing dynamics of space and place in relation to current political, social, and environmental urgencies across the globe. The discussions provide a cohesive study for disclosing latent understandings of multiple phenomena characterizing the world in which we live.

Re-Imagining the City: Art, Globalization, and Urban Spaces examines how contemporary processes of globalization are transforming cultural experience and production in urban spaces. It maps how cultural productions in art, architecture, and communications media are contributing to the reimagining of place and identity through events, artifacts, and attitudes. This book recasts how we understand cities--how knowledge can be formed, framed, and transferred through cultural production and how that knowledge is mediated through the construction of aesthetic meaning and value.

Public space, both literally and figuratively, is foundationally important to political life. From Socratic lectures in the public forum, to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, public spaces have long played host to political discussion and protest. The book provides a direct assessment of the role that public space plays in political life.

Controversy in Science Museums focuses on exhibitions that approach sensitive or controversial topics. With a keen sense of past and current practices, Pedretti and Navas Iannini examine and re-imagine how museums and science centres can create exhibitions that embrace criticality and visitor agency. Drawing on international case studies and voices from visitors and museum professionals, as well as theoretical insights about scientific literacy and science communication, the authors explore the textured notion of controversy and the challenges and opportunities practitioners may encounter as they plan for and develop controversial science exhibitions. They assert that science museums can no longer serve as mere repositories for objects or sites for transmitting facts, but that they should also become spaces for conversations that are inclusive, critical, and socially responsible. Controversy in Science Museums provides an invaluable resource for museum professionals who are interested in creating and hosting controversial exhibitions, and for scholars and students working in the fields of museum studies, science communication, and social studies of science. Anyone wishing to engage in an examination and critique of the changing roles of science museums will find this book relevant, timely, and thought provoking.

This text challenges binary perceptions of space and explores the possibilities afforded by a hybrid learning space at the intersection of physical, virtual, formal and informal spaces. It examines how new technologies and modes of delivery, including media-enhanced learning and open education, present opportunities as well as challenges. Chapters are supported by a wealth of case studies which illustrate academic innovation in diverse learning spaces and demonstrate how it can be used to inspire learners and promote student engagement. Packed with practical guidance and questions for reflection and discussion, this thought-provoking and timely guide is an essential resource for anyone involved in improving the student learning experience.

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors

Imagining Spaces and Places seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history and literature studies and other fields of cultural analysis that work with the concepts of space, place and various “scapes”, such as cityscapes, bodyscapes, mindscapes and memoryscapes, as well as the more familiar landscapes. The volume was inspired by new lines of study that underline the experiential and multidimensional aspects of spaces. We explore how art, literature or urban spaces forge “scapes” by imposing or suggesting aesthetic, evaluative or ideological orderings and perceptual as well as emotive perspectives on the “raw material” or on previous ways of spatial worldmaking. We look at the role of cultural and artistic renderings of space in relation to everyday experiences of spaces. We examine how the experiences of places are mediated in various art forms and other cultural discourses or practices and how these discourses contribute to the understanding of particular places and also to understanding space in more general terms. Imagining Spaces and Places is addressed to scholars and teachers working at the intersection of cultural and spatial analyses, as well as to their undergraduate and postgraduate students.