On dance and culture

Providing a guide to the ideas, arguments and history of the discipline, this volume discusses human social and cultural life in all its diversity and difference. Theory, ethnography and history are combined in over 230 entries on topics

In a progressive and systematic approach to communication, and always through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, this first volume presents culture as an intricate grid of sensible and intelligible sign systems in space and time, identifying the semiotic and interactive problems inherent in intercultural and subcultural communication according to verbal-nonverbal cultural fluency. The author lays out fascinating complexity of our direct and synesthesial sensory perception of people and artifactual and environmental elements; and its audible and visual manifestations through our speaking face , to then acknowledge the triple reality of discourse as verbal language-paralanguage-kinesics , which is applied through two realistic models: (a)for a verbal-nonverbal comprehensive transcription of interactive speech, and (b)for the implementation of nonverbal communication in foreign-language teaching. The author presents his exhaustive model of nonverbal categories for a detailed analysis of normal or pathological behaviors in any interactive or noninteractive manifestation; and, based on all the previous material, his equally exhaustive structural model for the study of conversational encounters, which suggests many applications in different fields, such as the intercultural and multisystem communication situation developed in simultaneous or consecutive interpretating. 956 literary quotations from 103 authors and 194 works illustrate all the points discussed.

This updated, new edition of Introducing Cultural Studies provides a systematic and comprehensible introduction to the concepts, debates and latest research in the field. Reinforcing the interdisciplinary nature of Cultural Studies, the authors first guide the reader through cultural theory before branching out to examine different dimensions of culture in detail – including globalisation, the body, geography, fashion, and politics. Incorporating new scholarship and international examples, this new edition includes: New and improved 'Defining Concepts', 'Key Influences', 'Example ', and 'Spotlight' features that probe deeper into the most significant ideas, theorists and examples, ensuring you obtain an in-depth understanding of the subject. A brand new companion website featuring a flashcard glossary, web links, discussion and essay questions to stimulate independent study. A new-look text design with over 60 pictures and tables draws all these elements together in an attractive, accessible design that makes navigating the book, and the subject, simple and logical. Introducing Cultural Studies will be core reading for Cultural Studies undergraduates and postgraduates, as well as an illuminating guide for those on Communication and Media Studies, English, Sociology, and Social Studies courses looking for a clear overview of the field.

Tactics of the Human returns to American fiction published during the 1990s, formative years for digital cultures, to reconsider these narratives’ comparative literary print methods of critically engaging with digital technologies and their now ubiquitous computation-based modes of circulation, scenes of writing, and social spaces. It finds that fiction by John Barth, Shelley Jackson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth L. Ozeki, and Jeffrey Eugenides, by creatively transposing digital writing, material formats, and spatiotemporal orientations into print, registers shifting relations to technologies at multiple sites and scales. Grappling with the digital practices catalyzed by post–World War II biological, information, and systems theory, these literary narratives tactically enlist, and enable speculative diagnoses of, emerging relations to digital technologies. Their experimental technics comparatively retrace emerging relations to the digital as these impact American nationalisms and their transnational economic networks; processes of gendering and racialization that remain crucial to differential discourses of the human; and as they enter, unnoticed, into micropractices of everyday life and lived space. In the midst of expanding technoscientific processes of digital de- and re-materialization that render multiple, charged boundaries of the human increasingly plastic, Tactics of the Human illustrates why it is ever more crucial to query and assess the divergent (re)understandings of the human now categorized, quite loosely, as posthumanisms with particular attention to women’s, subalterns’, and other knowledges already considered liminal to the human. It identifies here and pursues strains of systems thinking, informed by feminist, new materialist, queer, and subaltern understandings of material practices, revealing why these are so pivotal to ongoing efforts to assess current limits to digital technics and expand upon their biological, cultural, social, and poetic potentialities.

Containing Lea Vergine's insight on the 'golden age' of the Body Art movement and writings by the artists featured, this text focuses on the artistic endeavour that uses the body as expressive material.