The unusual marriage of Romantic ballet and artificial intelligence is an intriguing idea that led a team of interdisciplinary researchers to design iGiselle, a video game prototype. Scholars in the fields of literature, physical education, music, design, and computer science collaborated to revise the tragic narrative of the nineteenth-century ballet Giselle, allowing players to empower the heroine for possible ”feminine endings.” The eight interrelated chapters chronicle the origin, development, and fruition of the project. Dancers, gamers, and computer specialists will all find something original that will stimulate their respective interests. Contributors: Vadim Bulitko, Wayne DeFehr, Christina Gier, Pirkko Markula, Mark Morris, Sergio Poo Hernandez, Emilie St. Hilaire, Nora Foster Stovel, Laura Sydora

This book takes a sociocultural, developmental and dialogical perspective to explore the constructive and interconnected nature of remembering and imagining. Conceived as cognitive-affective processes, both emerge at the border of the person and his or her socio-cultural world. Memory is approached as a functional adaption to the environment using the resources of the past in preparation for action in the present. Imagination is tightly related to memory in that both aim to escape the confines of the concrete here-and-now situation; however, while memory is primarily oriented to the past, imagination looks to the future. Both are embedded in the exchanges with the social and cultural milieu, and thus theorizing them has relied on key ideas from Lev Vygotsky, Frederic Bartlett and Mikhail Bakhtin. Thus, this book aims to integrate theories of remembering and imagining, through rich empirical studies in diverse cultural settings and concerning the development of self and identity. These two groups of studies compose the subparts that organize the book.

Dance theatre has become a site of transformation in the Irish performance landscape. This book conducts a socio-political and cultural reading of dance theatre practice in Ireland from Yeats' dance plays at the start of the 20th century to Celtic-Tiger-era works of Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre and CoisCéim Dance Theatre at the start of the 21st.

Just as Russian dancers defected from the former Soviet Union in the 1970s, Cuban dancers are now fleeing Castro's regime in droves. Their unique style of ballet is galvanizing the world of dance. This beautifully illustrated book explores the history of Cuban ballet by focusing on the life and career of the indomitable Alicia Alonso. The author also spotlights many of the young dancers who are now part of the growing Cuban Diaspora and who are changing the face of ballet: Lorena Feijoo, Lorna Feijoo, Joan Boada, Taras Domitro, Jose Manuel Carreno, and Carlos Acosta to name but a few.

"Tells the story of how the marvelous discoveries of molecular and developmental biology are transforming our understanding of who we are and where we came from. Jacob scrutinizes the place of the scientist in society". -- Jacket.

This book represents the first extensive introduction to the emerging construct of Educational Self. The new concept describes a specific dimension of the Self, which is elaborated in the course of a person’s school life and is reactivated anytime the person is involved in an educational activity, whether as a student, teacher or parent. The Educational Self (ES) approach was created by the volume editors and is currently being developed at various universities in Europe and Latin America as a way of understanding and operating in educational contexts. The book presents the theoretical framework and the empirical developments of the construct, paving the way for further applications in education. The main locations of the empirical studies are Denmark, Italy, Brazil, Portugal and Colombia, but the research network is steadily expanding to other countries, so that the concept here can be generalized to different cultural contexts. The book addresses a range of contexts and moments in school life. The editors’ introduction presents the construct of ES, the opportunities for further theoretical and empirical developments of the concept, and its potential applications in educational practices. In the remainder of the volume, ES is explored for different age groups (from children to adolescents to higher education), different actors (peers, teachers, parents and their interactions), different contexts (formal education, special institutions, school-family relationships) and different phenomena (disruptive behavior, special needs, value orientation, school failure, etc.). All the studies share a qualitative idiographic approach, which is characteristic of the perspective of cultural psychology in which the ES construct was elaborated.

The history of the Swiss National Park, from its creation in the years before the Great War to the present, is told for the first time in this book. Unlike Yellowstone Park, which embodied close cooperation between state-supported conservation and public recreation, the Swiss park put in place an extraordinarily strong conservation program derived from a close alliance between the state and scientific research. This deliberate reinterpretation of the American idea of the national park was innovative and radical, but its consequences were not limited to Switzerland. The Swiss park became the prime example of a “scientific national park,” thereby influencing the course of national parks worldwide.