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How can one write the history of disability, and what are the consequences for the disabled themselves? This is the key question that Pieter Verstraete addresses in this pioneering book that tries to rethink the possible bonds between disability, history and politics. Since the 1990’s the concept of disability has gained in prominence. Perhaps more than in other branches of historical enquiry, disability historians have attributed a crucial place to the notion ‘identity’. Re-cently, however, the suitability of identity for the realization of libera-ting and emancipatory politics for people with disabilities has been questioned. This book aims to incorporate some of the critical approaches towards identity and to suggest a complementary connection between history and political reform.
Performing the Matrix. Mediating Cultural Performances presents a collection of case studies and analyses dealing with performances of the matrix that take up questions of identities and social thinking, visualization and perception, the discursive power of texts and historiographic paradigms, and artistic strategies of political intervention. Since 1999 The Matrix has become a popular catchword through the homonymous Wachowski brothers’ movie. As both a traditional concept and a popular phenomenon, ‹matrix› can take on a new value when reconsidered in the light of performance studies. A behind-the-scenes look at theatre, performance, political activism and events may reveal a productive mediating structure that can metaphorically be described as a matrix. This mediating structure and its materializations are fundamentally reshaping modern culture. Accordingly ‹politics of visibility›, ‹media networking›,‹telepresence› and ‹liveness› are considered to be understood as performances of the matrix. If so, how does this understanding of cultural performances ‹as always already mediatized› influence contemporary concepts of performance and media?
Missionaries have been subject to academic and societal debate. Some scholars highlight their contribution to the spread of modernity and development among local societies, whereas others question their motives and emphasise their inseparable connection with colonialism. In this volume, fifteen authors – from both Europe and the Global South – address these often polemical positions by focusing on education, one of the most prominent fields in which missionaries have been active. They elaborate on Protestantism as well as Catholicism, work with cases from the 18th to the 21st century, and cover different colonial empires in Asia and Africa. The volume introduces new angles, such as gender, the agency of the local population, and the perspective of the child.
After the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in Turkey in 2002, the AKP grew into an authoritarian government as it politically and culturally oppressed citizens and institutions. In Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat, Burcu Yasemin Şeybenargues thattheatre was deliberately targeted because theatre institutions and companies embodied the cultural program of the statist and Kemalist cultural policy that has continually excluded Muslims and various religious and ethnic minorities. Although the AKP claimed to be replacing the top-down, discriminatory, and secular statist and Kemalist theatre system with a facilitative and inclusive one, the AKP gradually adapted a more authoritarian system, as evidenced by their efforts to close and defund theatres, ban plays, and force theatre artists to exile. Despite the AKP’s increasing oppression, Şeybenstudies contemporary Turkish theatre to establish that a few theatre institutions, companies, and artists have managed to survive and develop democratic cultural policies and strategies that will outlive the AKP government.
The act of life is a lived experience, common and unique, that ties each of us to every other lived experience. The fact of disability does not alter this fundamental truth. In this edition of Rethinking Disability: World Perspectives in Culture and Society, we are presented with a system of thinking that considers the values of disability, as a resource, as a creative source of culture that moves disability out of the realm of victimized people and insurmountable barriers, and provides opportunities to use the experience of disability to enter into networks that recognize strengths of differing abilities. The authors within will intrigue you, will move you, will charm you, but always will c...
The challenges of post-war recovery from social and political reform to architectural design In the months and years immediately following the First World War, the many (European) countries that had formed its battleground were confronted with daunting challenges. These challenges varied according to the countries' earlier role and degree of involvement in the war but were without exception enormous. The contributors to this book analyse how this was not only a matter of rebuilding ravaged cities and destroyed infrastructure, but also of repairing people’s damaged bodies and upended daily lives, and rethinking and reforming societal, economic and political structures. These processes took ...
The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance is the first volume in a series of books compiled by the Music Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. The series explores the widening of the meaning of the term “music theatre” to reflect new ways of thinking about this creative practice beyond the genres circumscribed by discourses of theatre studies and musicology. Specifically it interrogates the experience of music theatre and its performance energies for contemporary audiences who engage with the emergence of new expressive idioms, new performative paradigms, new technologies and new ways of thinking. The Legacy of Opera considers some of the ways in which opera’s influence has informed our understanding of and approach to the musical stage, from the multiple perspectives of the ideological, historical, corporeal and artistic. With contributions from international scholars in music theatre, its chapters explore both canonic and experimental examples of music theatre, spanning a period from the seventeenth century to the present day.
This collection discusses and illustrates how educational research is affected by the economic, institutional and physical contingencies of its time, and in our time even increasingly is driven by them. It is argued that the antidote to this is, however, not to aspire to ‘thought itself’, but instead to do justice to its own rootedness in the ‘material’, including textuality. From an historical point of view such an innovative approach can itself revamp the material scholarly culture and the way it is represented. The chapters address a variety of topics such as the cultural heritage of the school desk, the significance of images for research into long-term educational processes, the...
This book develops ways of discussing musical practices to articulate a new approach to understanding connections between recordings, singers, and singing. Centred around materials from the mid-twentieth century, this book focuses on a time when composers and performers were questioning the idea of authorship within their musical practice. Materials drawn upon include recordings, scores, archival content, visual art, interviews, and liner notes to develop a rich conception of practices of performance. Analysis of performances include recordings of singers such as Cathy Berberian, Linda Hirst, Loré Lixenberg, Angelika Luz, and Meredith Monk. Compositions by Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio, Jo...
Who were the actors involved in colonial and post-independence education in Africa? This book on the history of education in Africa gives a special attention to narratives of marginalized voices. With this original approach and cases from ten countries involving four colonial powers it constitutes a dynamic and rich contribution to the field. The authors have searched for narratives of education 'from below' through oral interviews, autobiographies, films and undiscovered archival sources. Throughout the book, educational settings are approached as social spaces where both contact and separtation between colonisers and colonised are constructed through social interaction, negotiations, and struggles. Contributors include Antónia Barreto, Lars Folke Berge, Clara Carvalho, Charlotte Courreye, Pierre-Éric Fageol, Frédéric Garan, Esther Ginestet, Pedro Goulart, Pierre Guidi, Lydia Hadj-Ahmed, Kalpana Hiralal, Mamaye Idriss, Mihary Jaofeno, Raoul Kahuma, Rehana Thembeka Odendaal, Roland Rakotovao, Maria da Luz Ramos, Ellen Vea Rosnes, Caterina Scalvedi, Eva Van de Velde, Pieter Verstraete.