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Wrestling in Britain
At the intersection of sport, entertainment and performance, wrestling occupies a unique position in British popular culture. This is the first book to offer a detailed historical and cultural analysis of British professional wrestling, exploring the shifting popularity of the sport as well as its wider social significance. Arguing that the history of professional wrestling can help us understand key themes in sport, culture and performance that span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it addresses topics such as: attitudes towards violence, representations of masculinity, the media and celebrity culture, consumerism and globalisation. By drawing on a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, the book explores the role of power in the development of popular cultural forms, the ways in which history structures the present, and the manner in which audiences construct identity and meaning through sport. Wrestling in Britain: Sporting Entertainments, Celebrity and Audiences is fascinating reading for all students and researchers with an interest in media and cultural studies, histories and sociologies of sport, or performance studies.
Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games
Games can act as invaluable tools for the teaching of the Middle Ages. The learning potential of physical and digital games is increasingly undeniable at every level of historical study. These games can provide a foundation of information through their stories and worlds. They can foster understanding of complex systems through their mechanics and rules. Their very nature requires the player to learn to progress. The educational power of games is particularly potent within the study of the Middle Ages. These games act as the first or most substantial introduction to the period for many students and can strongly influence their understanding of the era. Within the classroom, they can be deplo...
Professional Historians in Public
The past decades public interest in history is booming. This creates new opportunities but also challenges for professional historians. This book asks how historians deal with changing public demands for history and how these affect their professional practices, values and identities. The volume offers a great variety of detailed studies of cases where historians have applied their expertise outside the academic sphere. With contributions focusing on Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe the book has a broad geographical scope. Subdivided in five sections, the book starts with a critical look back on some historians who broke with mainstream academic positions by combining thei...
Historia Ludens
This book aims to further a debate about aspects of "playing" and "gaming" in connection with history. Reaching out to academics, professionals and students alike, it pursues a dedicated interdisciplinary approach. Rather than only focusing on how professionals could learn from academics in history, the book also ponders the question of what academics can learn from gaming and playing for their own practice, such as gamification for teaching, or using "play" as a paradigm for novel approaches into historical scholarship. "Playing" and "gaming" are thus understood as a broad cultural phenomenon that cross-pollinates the theory and practice of history and gaming alike.
Fandom, the Next Generation
This collection is the first to offer a close study of fan generations, which are defined not only by fans’ ages, but by their entry point into a canon or their personal politics. The contributors further the conversation about how generational fandom is influenced by and, in turn, influences technologies, industry practices, and social and political changes. As reboot culture continues, as franchises continue expanding over time, and as new technologies enable easier access to older media, Fandom, the Next Generation offers a necessary investigation into transgenerational fandoms and intergenerational fan relationships. Contributors: Maria Alberto, University of Utah Mélanie Bourdaa, Uni...
Work That Body
Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture explores the recent rise in different types of men using digital media to sexualise their bodies. It argues that the male body has become a key site in contemporary culture where neoliberalism’s hegemony has been both secured and contested since 2008. It does this by looking at four different case studies: the celebrity male nude leak; the rise of young men sharing images of their muscular bodies on social media; RuPaul's Drag Race body transformational tutorial, and the rise of chemsex. It finds that on the one hand digital media has enabled men to transform their bodies into tools of value-creation in economic contexts where the historical means they have relied on to create value have diminished. On the other it has also allowed them to use their bodies to form intimate collective bonds during a moment when competitive individualism continued to be the privileged mode of being in the world. It therefore offers a unique contribution not only to the field of digital cultural studies but also to the growing cultural studies literature attempting to map the historical contradictions of the austerity moment.
Normalizing Mental Illness and Neurodiversity in Entertainment Media
This volume examines the shift toward positive and more accurate portrayals of mental illness in entertainment media, asking where these succeed and considering where more needs to be done. With studies that identify and analyze the characters, viewpoints, and experiences of mental illness across film and television, it considers the messages conveyed about mental illness and reflects on how the different texts reflect, reinforce, or challenge sociocultural notions regarding mental illness. Presenting chapters that explore a range of texts from film and television, covering a variety of mental health conditions, including autism, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and more, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, and mental health.
Fractured Fandoms
Being a fan helps people to discover their identities, find friends, develop a sense of belonging, express themselves creatively, and act as powerful creators and participants in a capitalistic system. At times, however, being a fan becomes problematic, especially when clashes with other fans occur both inside and outside of their fandoms and fan communities. As their communication becomes contentious, power imbalances destabilize collectives and fans experience fear, sadness, pain, and harassment. Such problematic situations can become “fractured fandoms.” Fractured Fandoms: Contentious Communication in Fan Communities observes the problems or fractures that occur within and between fandoms as fans and fan communities experience differences in interpretation, opinion, expectation, and behavior regarding the object at the center of their fandom. The book demonstrates the fractures through an examination of self-interviews, collected news stories, and previous research regarding these problems, ultimately providing an assessment of the causes and effects of such fractures and the larger social and cultural issues they reflect.
