'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The book presents a discussion about the process of artistic creation in the diversity of its manifestations: visual arts, literature, theater, cinema, etc. The proposed reflections are supported by research dedicated to the study of these creative paths, from the documents left by the artists, such as diaries, notes, sketches, drafts, mock-ups, projects, scripts and contacts. Dialogues were established between the observation of recurrent aspects in a great diversity of processes and the thought of Charles S. Peirce, generating a possible theory of creation. First, the Unfinished Gesture discusses the aesthetics of the creative movement from a semiotic perspective. In this theoretical context creation is described as a fallible process with tendencies, supported by the logic of uncertainty, encompassing the intervention of chance and opening space for the introduction of new ideas. A continuous course in which you can not determine either a starting point or an end point.. These uncertain and indeterminate tendencies direct the artist in his search for the construction of works that satisfy his great poetic project, which is also strongly influenced by communicative issues. The search of the artist finds its possible concreteness, in complex processes of constructions of works. In a second moment, the creative path is focused from five points of view, as: transforming action, translation movement, knowledge process, construction of artistic truths and experimentation course. In the Epilogue are presented the concepts of Peircean semiotics, which base the reflections on the artistic creation developed throughout the book. The Unfinished Gesture aims to offer a critical approach to the arts, from the point of view of its production processes.

This concise, precise, and inclusive dictionary contributes to a growing, transforming, and living research culture within both humanities scholarship and professional practices within the creative sectors. Its format of succinct starting definitions, demonstrations of possible routes of further development, and references to new and revisited concepts as “conceptual invitations” allows readers to quickly uptake and orient themselves within this exciting methodological field for didactic, scholarly and creative use, and as a starting point for further investigation for future contributions to the new canon of critical concepts. Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities is the first book to outline and define the specific and evolving field of the creative humanities and provides the field’s nascent bibliography.

An investigation of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s, with detailed case studies of “electrosexual music” by a wide range of creators. In Sex Sounds, Danielle Shlomit Sofer investigates the repeated focus on sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Debunking electronic music’s origin myth—that it emerged in France and Germany, invented by Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, respectively—Sofer defines electronic music more inclusively to mean any music with an electronic component, drawing connections between academic institutions, radio studios, experimental music practice, hip-hop production, and histories of independent and commercial popular music. Through a broad array of detailed case studies—examining music that ranges from Schaeffer’s musique concrète to a video workshop by Annie Sprinkle—Sofer offers a groundbreaking look at the social and cultural impact sex has had on audible creative practices. Sofer argues that “electrosexual music” has two central characteristics: the feminized voice and the “climax mechanism.” Sofer traces the historical fascination with electrified sex sounds, showing that works representing women’s presumed sexual experience operate according to masculinist heterosexual tropes, and presenting examples that typify the electroacoustic sexual canon. Noting electronic music history’s exclusion of works created by women, people of color, women of color, and, in particular Black artists, Sofer then analyzes musical examples that depart from and disrupt the electroacoustic norms, showing how even those that resist the norms sometimes reinforce them. These examples are drawn from categories of music that developed in parallel with conventional electroacoustic music, separated—segregated—from it. Sofer demonstrates that electrosexual music is far more representative than the typically presented electroacoustic canon.

This monograph presents analyses of filled and unfilled pauses, cut-offs, repair, discourse markers and other phenomena often referred to as disfluencies in the context of advanced language learners' PowerPoint presentations. It adopts a multimodal perspective to demonstrate the functions of these elements in interaction. Paired with gaze shifts, pointing gestures and posture shifts, they act as facilitators of joint visual orientation, mutual understanding, and accountable actions. Therefore, this volume suggests the name cofluency to reflect their potential functionality. Cofluencies are essential elements of multimodal chunks and multimodal patterns, and these are building blocks of a multimodal turn-taking mechanism for presentations. These concepts are illustrated and discussed based on excerpts from naturally occurring classroom data.

In Gestures of Concern Chris Ingraham shows that while gestures such as sending a “Get Well” card may not be instrumentally effective, they do exert an intrinsically affective force on a field of social relations. From liking, sharing, posting, or swiping to watching a TED Talk or wearing an “I Voted” sticker, such gestures operate as much through affective registers as they do through overt symbolic action. Ingraham demonstrates that gestures of concern are central to establishing the necessary conditions for larger social or political change because they give the everyday aesthetic and rhetorical practices of public life the capacity to attain some socially legible momentum. Rather than supporting the notion that vociferous public communication is the best means for political and social change, Ingraham advances the idea that concerned gestures can help to build the affective communities that orient us to one another with an imaginable future in mind. Ultimately, he shows how acts that many may consider trivial or banal are integral to establishing those background conditions capable of fostering more inclusive social or political change.

Smart mobile systems such as microsystems, smart textiles, smart implants, and sensor-controlled medical devices, together with their related networks, have become important enablers for telemedicine and ubiquitous pervasive health to become next-generation health services. This book presents the proceedings of pHealth 2020, held as a virtual conference from 14 – 16 September 2020. This is the 17th in a series of international conferences on wearable or implantable micro and nano technologies for personalized medicine, which bring together expertise from medical, technological, political, administrative, and social domains, and cover subjects including technological and biomedical facilities, legal, ethical, social, and organizational requirements and impacts, and the research necessary to enable future-proof care paradigms. The 2020 conference also covers AI and robots in healthcare; bio-data management and analytics for personalized health; security, privacy and safety challenges; integrated care; and the intelligent management of specific diseases including the Covid-19 pandemic. Communication and cooperation with national and regional health authorities and the challenges facing health systems in developing countries were also addressed. The book includes 1 keynote, 5 invited talks, 25 oral presentations, and 8 short poster presentations from 99 international authors. All submissions were carefully and critically reviewed by at least two independent experts and at least one member of the Scientific Program Committee; a highly selective review process resulting in a full-paper rejection rate of 36%. The book will be of interest to all those involved in the design and provision of healthcare and also to patients and citizen representatives.