'At a time when fluff and gossip reign supreme, Hanna Flint's work is consistently insightful, informative and engaging all at once. I always finish reading it feeling just a tad bit smarter.' Candice Frederick, Huffington Post 'One of the smartest pop culture commentators out there.' Toby Moses, Guardian The leading film critic of her generation offers an eloquent, insightful and humorous reflection on the screen's representation of women and ethnic minorities, revealing how cinema has been the key to understanding herself, her body image and her ambitions as well as the world we live in. A staunch feminist of mixed-race heritage, Hanna has succeeded in an industry not designed for people like her. She interweaves anecdotes from familial and personal experiences - from episodes of messy sex and introspection to the time when actor Vincent D'Onofrio tweeted that Hanna Flint sounded 'like a secret agent' - to offer a critical eye on the screen's representation of women and ethnic minorities. Divided into sections 'Origin Story', 'Coming of Age', 'Adult Material', 'Workplace Drama' and 'Strong Female Character', the book ponders how the creative industries could better reflect our multicultural society. Warm, funny and engaging and full of film-infused lessons, Strong Female Character will appeal to readers of all backgrounds and seeks to help us better see ourselves in our own eyes rather than letting others decide who and what we can be.

This collection compiles essays by medievalist scholars that examine the variety of ways authors have fictionalized the medieval period while meeting the challenge of creating engaging literature. More significantly, this project seeks to explore the importance of authenticity in these works of medievalism. The works discussed represent a variety of genres, including historical, young adult, Arthurian detective fiction, paranormal romance and fantasy, as well as adaptations of Beowulf and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Opening the collection are three essays by author-scholars who share their processes of creating an authentic medieval world appealing to a wide audience. The remaining seven essays by medievalist scholars examine a variety of medievalist texts, addressing the extent to which their authors adhere to the facts of the period, while at times necessarily filling in historical gaps in the process of creating these works. Each of the essays addresses the concept of authenticity in fiction about the Middle Ages; together, they become a lively conversation about authenticity in narratives of various genres.

With the popularity of comic adaptations on television and at the movies, these current topics can be a great way to engage students by bringing characters and stories they connect with into the classroom to help them build the skills that they need to be successful. Comic Connections: Reflecting on Women in Popular Culture is designed to help teachers from middle school through college find exciting new strategies that they can use right away as part of their curricular goals. Each chapter has three pieces: comic relevance, classroom connections, and concluding thoughts; this format allows a reader to pick-and-choose where to start. Some readers might want to delve into the history of a comic to better understand characters and their usefulness, while other readers might want to pick up an activity, presentation, or project that they can fold into that day’s lesson. This volume in Comic Connections series focuses on female characters—Wonder Woman, Peggy Carter, and Lois Lane, to name a few—with each chapter deconstructing a specific character to help students engage in meaningful conversations, writing projects, and other activities that will complement and enhance their literacy skills.

Alison Green used to be a superhero. With unlimited strength and invulnerability, she fought crime with a group of other teens under the alter ego Mega Girl. All that changed after an encounter with Menace, her mind-reading archenemy, who showed her evidence of a sinister conspiracy that made battling giant robots suddenly seem unimportant. Now, Alison is going to college in New York City, trying to find ways to actually help the world while making friends and getting to class on time. It's impossible to escape the past, however, and trouble comes in the form of mysterious murders, ex-teammates with grudges, robots with a strange sense of humor, an inconvenient crush, a cantankerous professor, and many different kinds of people who think they know the best way to be a hero. Author: Brennan Lee Mulligan. Illustrator: Molly Ostertag. © Molly Ostertag and Brennan Lee Mulligan.

Using a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, the contributing scholars to this collection analyze culturally specific and globally held attitudes about mothers and mothering, as represented in world cinema. Examining films from a range of countries including Afghanistan, India, Iran, Eastern Europe, Canada, and the United States, the various chapters contextualize the socio-cultural realities of motherhood as they are represented on screen, and explore the maternal figure as she has been glamorized and celebrated, while simultaneously subjected to public scrutiny. Collectively, this scholarly investigation provides insights into where women’s struggles converge, while also highlighting the dramatically different realities of women around the globe.

Leiji Matsumoto is one of Japan's most influential myth creators. Yet the huge scope of his work, spanning past, present and future in a constantly connecting multiverse, is largely unknown outside Japan. Matsumoto was the major creative force on Star Blazers, America's gateway drug for TV anime, and created Captain Harlock, a TV phenomenon in Europe. As well as space operas, he made manga on musicians from Bowie to Tchaikovsky, wrote the manga version of American cowboy show Laramie, and created dozens of girls' comics. He is a respected manga scholar, an expert on Japanese swords, a frustrated engineer and pilot who still wants to be a spaceman in his eighties. This collection of new essays--the first book on Matsumoto in English--covers his seven decades of comic creation, drawing on contemporary scholarship, artistic practice and fan studies to map Matsumoto's vast universe. The contributors--artists, creators, translators and scholars--mirror the range of his work and experience. From the bildungsroman to the importance of textual analysis for costume and performance, from early days in poverty to honors around the world, this volume offers previously unexplored biographical and bibliographic detail from a life story as thrilling as anything he created.

Storied Lives: Emancipatory Educational Inquiry—Experience, Narrative, & Pedagogy in the International Landscape of Diversity contains exemplary research practices, strategies, and findings gleaned from the contributions to the 15 issues of the Journal of Critical Inquiry Into Curriculum and Instruction (JCI~>CI). Founding Editor Tonya Huber initiated the JCI~>CI in 1997, as a refereed journal committed to publishing educational scholarship and research of professionals in graduate study. The journal was distinguished by its requirement that the scholarship be the result of the first author’s graduate research—according to Cabell’s Directory, the first journal to do so. Equally important, the third issue of each volume targeted wide representation of cultures and world regions. “Current thinking on ...” written by members of the JCI~>CI Editorial Advisory Board explores state-of-the-art topics related to curriculum inquiry. Illustrations, photography (e.g., Sebastião Salgado’s Workers in vol. 2), collage, student-generated art/artifacts, and full-color art enhance cutting-edge methodologies extending educational research through Aboriginal and Native oral traditions, arts-based analysis, found poetry, data poetry, narrative, and case study foci on liberatory pedagogy and social justice action research.