Trance Mediums and New Media

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Author :
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823253821
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

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Book Synopsis Trance Mediums and New Media by : Anja Dreschke

Download or read book Trance Mediums and New Media written by Anja Dreschke and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication. This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema, video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media? Why are certain technical media shunned in these contexts?

Trance Mediums and New Media

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780823253845
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (538 download)

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Book Synopsis Trance Mediums and New Media by : Heike Behrend

Download or read book Trance Mediums and New Media written by Heike Behrend and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ongoing debates about the 'return of religion' have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication. This innovative volume brings together a wide range of ethnographic studies on local spiritual and media practices. Recognizing that processes of globalization are shaped by mass mediation, the volume raises questions such as: How are media like photography, cinema, video, the telephone, or television integrated in seances and healing rituals? How do spirit mediums connect with these media?

Mediality on Trial

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110416468
Total Pages : 559 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Mediality on Trial by : Ehler Voss

Download or read book Mediality on Trial written by Ehler Voss and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses controversies connected to the testing of the capacities and potentials of mediums. Today we commonly associate the term "medium" with the technical communication between transmitters and receivers. Yet this term likewise applies to those who cooperate with agencies that exceed the presumed domain of the material world. Insofar as one presumes a division between distinctly opposed categories of religion and the secular, technical media tend to be associated with the secular and human (trance) mediums tend to be associated with religion after 1900. This volume concerns the ways in which the term medium still marks an overlapping of – and thus problematizes – the aforementioned division between religion and the secular, the personal and the technological. The term medium carries with it a seed of doubt that is itself inseparable from investment in the medium's power: insofar as they communicate with an "other" realm, mediums offer the hope and promise of new possibilities and improved efficiency, and thus of a better life; yet they have simultaneously been under suspicion of altering (or even inventing) the messages they communicate. It is due to this combination of promise and suspicion that "mediumism" has tended to evoke scientific, religious, and moral controversies. Thus, we can speak of a "mediumistic trial" – that is, a process in which a medium is put to the test concerning its potentials and trustworthiness. Around 1800, experts were asked if a modern secular institution would be capable of inspiring, domesticating or excluding trance mediumship. This question has stayed with us ever since, and the answers have remained inconclusive. That is why the past and present of mediumship may be asked to elucidate each other.

Mediality on Trial

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110416417
Total Pages : 668 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Mediality on Trial by : Ehler Voss

Download or read book Mediality on Trial written by Ehler Voss and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses controversies connected to the testing of the capacities and potentials of mediums. Today we commonly associate the term "medium" with the technical communication between transmitters and receivers. Yet this term likewise applies to those who cooperate with agencies that exceed the presumed domain of the material world. Insofar as one presumes a division between distinctly opposed categories of religion and the secular, technical media tend to be associated with the secular and human (trance) mediums tend to be associated with religion after 1900. This volume concerns the ways in which the term medium still marks an overlapping of – and thus problematizes – the aforementioned division between religion and the secular, the personal and the technological. The term medium carries with it a seed of doubt that is itself inseparable from investment in the medium's power: insofar as they communicate with an "other" realm, mediums offer the hope and promise of new possibilities and improved efficiency, and thus of a better life; yet they have simultaneously been under suspicion of altering (or even inventing) the messages they communicate. It is due to this combination of promise and suspicion that "mediumism" has tended to evoke scientific, religious, and moral controversies. Thus, we can speak of a "mediumistic trial" – that is, a process in which a medium is put to the test concerning its potentials and trustworthiness. Around 1800, experts were asked if a modern secular institution would be capable of inspiring, domesticating or excluding trance mediumship. This question has stayed with us ever since, and the answers have remained inconclusive. That is why the past and present of mediumship may be asked to elucidate each other.

Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501391488
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film by : Sophie Duvernoy

Download or read book Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film written by Sophie Duvernoy and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Germany as a national case study, this volume examines the historical genesis of precarity, its evolution from 19th-century industrial modernity to the present, and its reflections and reconfigurations in artistic production, in particular with relation to work, gender, and sexuality. “Precarity is everywhere now,” sociologist Pierre Bourdieu declared almost thirty years ago. Not only declining middle-class standards of living, but also debt, drug addiction, housing and food insecurity, depression, and “deaths of despair” are now being recognized as symptoms of the downward pull of social precarity. Although these and similar ills have been attributed to neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, and willful neglect of the common good, precarization has accompanied the booms and busts of industrial modernity from its beginnings. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film explores how German and Austrian literature, film, and social history have engaged with social precarity, from the period of Romanticism and early industrialization to the present. The chapters in this volume deal with precarity as both an objective phenomenon reflected in literary and filmic representations and as a subjective phenomenon that gives these representations their particular shape. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film opens new critical perspectives on diverse forms of lived precarity and their creative manifestations by reflecting on the history of capitalist modernity from the vantage points of weakness, vulnerability, marginality, impoverishment, and otherness.

Fiery Cinema

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Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452943680
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Fiery Cinema by : Weihong Bao

Download or read book Fiery Cinema written by Weihong Bao and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was cinema in modern China? It was, this book tells us, a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.

Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135016917X
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures by : Edward King

Download or read book Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures written by Edward King and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tale of twins being reunited after a long separation is a trope that has been endlessly repeated and reworked across different cultures and throughout history, with each moment adapting the twin plot to address its current cultural tensions. In this study, Edward King demonstrates how twins are a means of exploring the social implications of hyper-connectivity and the compromising relationship between humans and digital information, their environment and their genetics. As King demonstrates, twins tell us about the changing forms of connectivity and power in contemporary culture and what new conceptions of the human they present us with. Taking account of a broad range of literary, cultural and scientific practices, Entwined Being probes discussions surrounding twins such as: - The way in which they appear in behavioral genetics as a way of identifying inherited predispositions to social media - How their faces interrupt biometric interfaces such as facial recognition software and undermine advances in neo-liberal surveillance systems - How they represent the uncanny and the weird in the horror genre and how this questions ideologies of communications media and the connectivity it enables - Their association with telepathy and cybernetics in science fiction - Their construction as models for entangled being in ecological thought Drawing upon the literary and filmic works of Ken Follet, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bruce Chatwin, Shelley Jackson, Brian de Palma, Peter Greenway and David Cronenberg, as well as science fiction literature and the television series Orphan Black, King illuminates how twins are employed across a range of disciplines to envision a critical re-conception of the human in times of digital integration and ecological crisis.

Spirit Possession and Communication in Religious and Cultural Contexts

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000290115
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Spirit Possession and Communication in Religious and Cultural Contexts by : Caroline Blyth

Download or read book Spirit Possession and Communication in Religious and Cultural Contexts written by Caroline Blyth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirit Possession and Communication in Religious and Cultural Contexts explores the phenomenon of spirit possession, focusing on the religious and cultural functions it serves as a means of communication. Drawing on the multidisciplinary expertise of philosophers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, and scholars of religion and the Bible, the volume investigates the ways that spirit possession narratives, events, and rituals are often interwoven around communicative acts, both between spiritual and earthly realms and between members of a community. This book offers fresh insight into the enduring cultural and religious significance of spirit possession. It will be an important resource for scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, including religion, anthropology, history, linguistics, and philosophy.

Mattering the Invisible

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Author :
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1800730675
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Mattering the Invisible by : Diana Espírito Santo

Download or read book Mattering the Invisible written by Diana Espírito Santo and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring how technological apparatuses “capture” invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

Domestic Demons and the Intimate Uncanny

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 100076334X
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Domestic Demons and the Intimate Uncanny by : Thomas G. Kirsch

Download or read book Domestic Demons and the Intimate Uncanny written by Thomas G. Kirsch and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-21 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores local cultural discourses and practices relating to manifestations and experiences of the demonic, the spectral and the uncanny, probing into their effects on people’s domestic and intimate spheres of life. The chapters examine the uncanny in a cross-cultural manner, involving empirically rich case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Europe. They use an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to show how people are affected by their intimate interactions with spiritual beings. While several chapters focus on the tensions between public and private spheres that emerge in the context of spiritual encounters, others explore what kind of relationships between humans and demonic entities are imagined to exist and in what ways these imaginations can be interpreted as a commentary on people’s concerns and social realities. Offering a critical look at a form of spiritual experience that often lacks academic examination, this book will be of great use to scholars of Religious Studies who are interested in the occult and paranormal, as well as academics working in Anthropology, Sociology, African Studies, Latin American Studies, Gender Studies and Transcultural Psychology.

Spirited Histories

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000606384
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Spirited Histories by : Diana Espírito Santo

Download or read book Spirited Histories written by Diana Espírito Santo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirited Histories combines ethnography with critical theory to provide a sophisticated exploration of the intersection of haunting and the paranormal with technology, media, and history. Retrieving the past in places of trauma and death can take on many facets. One of these is an attention to hauntings, ghosts, and absences that go with the collective experience of loss and disappearance. People memorialize the dead and their stories in myriad ways. But what about the untold stories, or the forgotten, unnamed? This book explores the ways groups of Chilean paranormal investigators and ghost tour operators produce alternate histories using paranormal machinery, rather than simply theatricalizing pain. It offers a look at technologies, machines, and apparatuses – themselves imbued with a long history of supernatural and scientific expectations – and a social analysis of how certain groups of people marshal the voices of the dead to generate particular micro-histories. This fascinating volume will be of interest to a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, and scholars of technology and new media.

Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004323643
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond by :

Download or read book Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond explores ghost movies, one of the most popular film genres in East and Southeast Asia, by focusing on movie narratives, the cultural contexts of their origins and audience reception.

Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350087122
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts by : Louise Child

Download or read book Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts written by Louise Child and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from social theory and the anthropology of religion, this book explores popular media's fascination with dreams, vampires, demons, ghosts and spirits. Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts does so in the light of contemporary animist studies of societies in which other-than-human persons are not merely a source of entertainment, but a lived social reality. Films and television programs explored include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Truly Madly Deeply and the films of Hitchcock. Louise Child draws attention to how they both depict and challenge ideas and practices rooted in psychology, while quality television has also facilitated a wave of programming that can explore the interaction of characters in complex social worlds over time. In addition to drawing on theories of film from Freudian psychology and feminist theory, Dreams, Vampires and Ghosts uses approaches derived from a combination of Jungian film studies and anthropology that offer fresh insights for exploring film and television. This book draws attention to explicit and subtle ways in which cinematic narratives engage with myth and religion while at the same time exploring collective dimensions to social and personal life. It advances new developments in genre studies and gender as well as contributing to the growing field of implicit religion using in-depth analyses of communicative dreaming, the shadow, and mystical lovers in film and television.

Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030540960
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India by : Lalitha Gopalan

Download or read book Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India written by Lalitha Gopalan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles.

The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000890643
Total Pages : 778 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space by : Juan Francisco Salazar

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space written by Juan Francisco Salazar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space offers state-of-the-art overview of contemporary social and cultural research on outer space. International in scope, the thirty-eight contributions by over fifty leading researchers and artists across a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge, present a range of debates and pose key questions about the crafting of futures in relation to outer space. The Handbook is a call to attend more carefully to engagements with outer space, empirically, affectively, and theoretically, while characterizing current research practices and outlining future research agendas. This recalibration opens profound questions of intersectional politics, race, equity, and environmental justice around the contested topics of space exploration and life off-Earth. Among the many themes included in the volume are the various infrastructures, networks and systems that enable and sustain space exploration; space heritage; the ethics of outer space; social and environmental justice; fundamental debates about life in outer space as it pertains to both astrobiology and SETI; the study of scientific communities; the human body and consciousness; Indigenous astronomical systems of Knowledge; contemporary space art; and ongoing critical interventions to overcome the legacies of colonialism and dismantle hegemonic narratives of outer space.

The Shape of Utopia

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Author :
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452960968
Total Pages : 533 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis The Shape of Utopia by : Irene Cheng

Download or read book The Shape of Utopia written by Irene Cheng and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How nineteenth-century social reformers devised a new set of radical blueprints for society In the middle of the nineteenth century, a utopian impulse flourished in the United States through the circulation of architectural and urban plans predicated on geometrically distinct designs. Though the majority of such plans remained unrealized, The Shape of Utopia emphasizes the enduring importance of these radical propositions and their ability to visualize alternatives to what was then a newly emerging capitalist nation. Drawing diagrammatic plans for structures such as octagonal houses, a hexagonal anarchist city, and circular centers of equitable commerce, these various architectural utopians applied geometric forms to envision a more just and harmonious society. Highlighting the inherent political capacity of architecture, Irene Cheng showcases how these visionary planners used their blueprints as persuasive visual rhetoric that could mobilize others to share in their aspirations for a better world. Offering an extensive and uniquely focused view of mid-nineteenth-century America’s rapidly changing cultural landscape, this book examines these utopian plans within the context of significant economic and technological transformation, encompassing movements such as phrenology, anarchism, and spiritualism. Engaging equally with architectural history, visual culture studies, and U.S. history, The Shape of Utopia documents a pivotal moment in American history when ordinary people ardently believed in the potential to reshape society.

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Africa

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197608493
Total Pages : 585 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (976 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Africa by : R. Sooryamoorthy

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Africa written by R. Sooryamoorthy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Africa presents to a broad readership an accessible, comprehensive, up to date, and topical comparative analysis of sociological thinking in Africa. Sociological discourse about African societies has been challenging and difficult, due to a lack of both comprehensive analyses and holistic sociological evidence that covers Africa from past to present times. This Handbook brings together latest analyses of sociological phenomena from the best scholars working on numerous thematic areas. It provides contributions that locates African sociological thinking in historical context and takes a critical look at its current manifestations across the continent. This collection builds upon an existing body of literature which has demonstrated that while the analysis of African societies has long been an item on the agenda of sociologists worldwide, advances of the decolonial critique made notably by African scholars in Africa enhances the scholarship of the sociology of Africa. Thus, the collection is premised upon the understanding that in order to understand the sociology of Africa as significant intervention, the participation and representation of African ways of knowing and doing is a critical starting point. This Handbook comprises a series of scholarly and interdisciplinary perspectives on current debates over how best to unpack sociological imaginations in African context. The scholarly contributions, therefore, are based on both perspectives illustrating the importance of specificity in sociological phenomenon. The Handbook is arranged in seven parts: Context and Perspectives; Race, Ethnicity, and Religion; Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality; Medical Sociology: Political Economy and Development; Crime and Violence; and The Family and Education. Premised on the importance of African ways of knowing and doing, these chapters offer sociologists, researchers, and students an invaluable starting point for a fuller understanding of African sociology.