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Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be posthuman. With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of "self", and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can dis...
This book explores how stretching stories through posthuman and autoethnographic perspectives can produce new stories that decolon(ial)ize traditional thinking and approaches to Early Childhood Education (ECE). It demonstrates how stories can provide a different way of knowing, and a way of knowing differently: a way of decolon(ial)izing current discourses of early childhood education within educational institutions. The book uses research and practice in ECE to act as a canvas, a context with which to explore how autoethnography can become other when viewed through a posthumanist lens. As a consequence the chapters and stories within allow for an interplay between the posthumanist and the autoethnographic, an interplay that allows for a very specific type of meaning to emerge; a meaning that traffics in numerous and disruptive possibilities rather than settled certainties. In so doing, authors rethink and perturb the notion of child-centered approaches to knowing, be(com)ing, and doing within the Early Childhood Education context.
Zombies have become an increasingly popular object of research in academic studies and, of course, in popular media. Over the past decade, they have been employed to explain mathematical equations, vortex phenomena in astrophysics, the need for improved laws, issues within higher education, and even the structure of human societies. Despite the surge of interest in the zombie as a critical metaphor, no coherent theoretical framework for studying the zombie actually exists. Addressing this current gap in the literature, Theorising the Contemporary Zombie defines zombiism as a means of theorising and examining various issues of society in any given era by immersing those social issues within the destabilising context of apocalyptic crisis; and applying this definition, the volume considers issues including gender, sexuality, family, literature, health, popular culture and extinction.
While it has traditionally been seen as a means of documenting an external reality or expressing an internal feeling, photography is now capable of actualizing never-existed pasts and never-lived experiences. Thanks to the latest photographic technologies, we can now take photos in computer games, interpolate them in extended reality platforms, or synthesize them via artificial intelligence. To account for the most recent shifts in conceptualizations of photography, this book proposes the term virtual photography as a binding theoretical framework, defined as a photography that retains the efficiency and function of real photography (made with or without a camera) while manifesting these in an unfamiliar or noncustomary form.
Incoherence is a term that is all too often associated with the public international law regime. To a great extent, its incoherence is arguably a natural consequence of the fragmented nature of both the development and overall scope of the discipline. Despite significant achievements since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), a coherent human rights regime that is properly integrated with other branches of public international law is still lacking. This book explores this incoherent approach to human rights, including specific challenges that arise as a result of the creation and regulation of legal relationships between parties (state and non-state) that sit outside of the huma...
Science fiction and horror television shows predict how the world might be different if zombies were real, or if artificial intelligence could develop consciousness. Pop culture critics reveal that these not-quite humans are often proxies for race, and the post-apocalyptic landscapes set the stage for reimagining social and political institutions. This book advances horror scholarship by placing those stories within a long tradition of mythologizing U.S. history. It demonstrates how Disney's Zombies reenacts the civil rights movement, how The Walking Dead fulfills Thoreau's fantasy against the backdrop of founding a new nation, and how Westworld permits visitors to experience the Old West while bearing witness to Indian Removal. Each of these narratives imagines a future that retells the past. The chapters within look at that tradition in order to understand the present.
While the Western was dying a slow death across the cultural landscape, it was blazing back to life as a video game in the early twenty-first century. Rockstar Games’ Red Dead franchise, beginning with Red Dead Revolver in 2004, has grown into one of the most critically acclaimed video game franchises of the twenty-first century. Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West offers a critical, interdisciplinary look at this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of game studies and American history. Drawing on game studies, western history, American studies, and cultural studies, the authors train a wide-ranging, deeply informed analytic perspective on the Red De...
Eighty prize-winning films of the 1930s are discussed in detail, with complete cast and technical credits, background notes, etc. Movies covered include "Gone With The Wind," "The Wizard of Oz," "Garden of Allah," "The Hurricane," "San Francisco," "In Old Chicago," "Lost Horizon," "It Happened One Night," "Sweethearts," "The Broadway Melody," "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Tabu," "Wings," "Stagecoach," "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" (both Fredric March and Spencer Tracy versions), "Cimarron," "Cleopatra," "Grand Hotel."
With the tomboy figure currently operating in a liminal space between extinction and resurgence, Reclaiming the Tomboy: The Body, Identity, and Representation is an unabashed celebration of her rebellious, independent, and pioneering spirit. This collection examines the tomboy as she appears throughout history, in the arts and in real-life. It also addresses how she has changed over the centuries, adapting to the world around her and breaking new boundaries in new ways (sometimes with a "simple" selfie). While this collection addresses the claim of the tomboy as being antiquated or even "problematic," it more vigorously offers examples of where she is thriving and benefiting from her tomboy identity. Ultimately, this book underscores the tomboy's legacy as well as why she is still relevant, if not needed, today.