Frequenting circuses in Paris and Berlin, Frank Wedekind, best known for Spring Awakening and the Lulu plays, learned that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers rely on different artificial reference points in space, in order to maintain their balance and orient themselves and to create their own sensorial and phenomenal worlds. This lesson in radical perspectivism and constructivism is a key to Wedekind s practice as a playwright, and it links the Munich dramatist s work to the thought of Schopenhauer, who first used the term Elastizitat in a philosophical sense; Darwin, who...

Postnational Feminisms: Postcolonial Identities and Cosmopolitanism in the Works of Kamala Markandaya, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Anita Desai offers a significant contribution to the field of postcolonial and Third World feminist studies. It reevaluates the ways in which Third World women writers interrogate the relationship between woman and nation in the postcolonial context. Hena Ahmad brings forth the concept of -postnational feminism-, which she deploys to show how these major writers challenge the role of women as signifiers of national cultures in their works. This...

Pedagogical Encounters demonstrates how learning spaces that are ethical, responsive, and transformable can enable students and teachers to open toward new ways of being in the world. Through collective biography, ethnography, and arts-based research, the authors educators with experience in diverse settings generate rich descriptions of classroom practices, and elaborate and clarify new theoretical concepts through their discussion in relation to specific sites of teaching and learning."

The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this...

Cross-Media Promotion is the first book-length study of a defining feature of contemporary media, the promotion by media of their allied media interests. The book explores the range of forms of cross-promotion including synergistic marketing of mega-brands such as Harry Potter; promotional plugs in news media; repurposing media content, stars and brands across other media and outlets; product placement, and the integration of media content and advertising.
Incorporating specialist literature, yet written in a clear, accessible style, the book combines three areas of study: media...

The twenty-four essays in Rewriting Texts Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives examine the complex relationships between original creative works and subsequent versions of these originals, from both theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. The process involves the rereading, reinterpretation, and rediscovery of literary texts, paintings, photographs, and films, as well as the consideration of issues pertaining to adaptation, intertextuality, transcodification, ekphrasis, parody, translation, and revision. The interdisciplinary analyses consider works from classical antiquity...

Vygotsky in Twenty-first Century Society is an ensemble of novel perspectives about the legacy of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria. The book illustrates how well the legacy of their work is being applied and continued in contemporary research, and how cultural historical theory has been constructed and re-constructed. Together, these collected essays inform a broader discussion of how a developmentally-oriented cultural paradigm can guide learning and teaching in social and educational policy and in group or individual counseling. Readers will find discussions of issues in human...

Real and Imagined Women in British Romanticism uses feminist ideology and deconstructive criticism to reconstruct the cultural context embedded in Romantic canonical texts. To achieve this end, the book undertakes a close textual study of these texts and places them in the intellectual context of Mary Wollstonecraft s critique of culture. As a result of intellectual contextualizing as well as theoretical applications, the Romantic imagination, as represented by William Wordsworth and John Keats, emerges as the place where gender division and gender certitude break down. This book...

This book examines how common e-learning technologies open up compelling, if limited, experiential spaces for users, similar to the imaginary worlds opened up by works of fiction. However, these experiential worlds are markedly different from the -real- world of physical objects and embodied relations. This book shows these differences to be of central importance for teaching and learning."

Hyper-accountability, corporatization, deficit ideology, and Ruby Payne's preparation of teachers to comply with these and other atrocities are not merely markers of philosophical shifts in education. They are manifestations of a neoliberal remaking of public schooling into a private and corporate enterprise. Collectively, these trends are seen not just as an imposition, but as an assault on quality pedagogy; an assault on democratic ideals of equity and social justice; and an assault on kids compelled to participate simply because they are public school students. This edited collection is a...