Louis J. Blume Library

Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture

This book is not about the future of video games. It is not an attempt to predict the moods of the market, the changing profile of gamers, the benevolence or malevolence of the medium. There are sufficient bodies dedicated to those predictions – and this book is about them. It is about the ways in which the past, present and future notion of games are narrated and negotiated by a small group of producers, journalists, and gamers, and about how invested these narrators are in telling the story of tomorrow.

The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist

At the dawn of the Cold War era, forty-one women working in American radio and television were placed on a media blacklist and forced from their industry. The ostensible reason: so-called Communist influence. But in truth these women--among them Dorothy Parker, Lena Horne, and Gypsy Rose Lee--were, by nature of their diversity and ambition, a threat to the traditional portrayal of the American family on the airwaves. This book describes what American radio and television lost when these women were blacklisted, documenting their aspirations and achievements. Through original archival research and access to FBI blacklist documents, 'The Broadcast 41' details the blacklisted women's attempts in the 1930s and 1940s to depict America as diverse, complicated, and inclusive.

Schools as Community Hubs: Building ‘More than a School’ for Community Benefit

This open access book brings together research on the planning, design, governance and management of schools as community hubs—places that support the development of better-connected, more highly integrated, and more resilient communities with education at the centre. It explores opportunities and difficulties associated with bringing schools and communities closer together, with a focus on the facilities needed to accommodate shared experiences that generate social capital and deliver reciprocal benefits. This book discusses the expanded roles of schools, and investigates how schools may offer more to their communities—historically, currently and into the future—with respect to the role of the built environment in situating community activities and services. Organised around four sections, it showcases important areas of development in the field via an interdisciplinary approach, which weaves together empirical research with theoretical insights and practical examples. This book not only highlights the challenges associated with the development of schools as community hubs but offers evidence-based insights into how to overcome such hurdles to develop community-facing schools into the future.

Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life

An examination of science fiction narratives and the light they shed on human life, the unknowable future, and the vagaries of unforeseeable change. With this book, Steven Shaviro offers a thought experiment. He discusses a number of science fiction narratives: three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. Shaviro not only analyzes these works in detail but also uses them to ask questions about human, and more generally, biological life: about its stubborn insistence and yet fragility; about the possibilities and perils of seeking to control it; about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman; and about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation. Shaviro pursues these questions through the medium of science fiction because this form of storytelling offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy and renders it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience, and respond to, the vagaries of unforeseeable change.

When Music Takes Over in Film

This   collection deals with musical moments in film as one of the most pivotal and compelling issues of current film music research. Musical moments as defined by Amy Herzog occur when a musical number inverts the normal relationship between the image track and the soundtrack in a film in such a way that what we see is determined by what we hear. As one potential approach, this definition provokes a variety of perspectives to investigate the disruptive potential of these moments and numbers as a creative device in the production of audiovisual narratives. In this sense, the book responds to a need for an anthology that introduces students as well as scholars of cinema, musicology, media studies and cultural studies more broadly, to recent discourses in film music scholarship.  The volume includes contributions by early career researchers as well as by established experts in the fields of musicology, film studies, media studies, and cultural studies, promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration in film music research.

Managing Infodemics in the 21st Century: Addressing New Public Health Challenges in the Information Ecosystem

This book on infodemic management reviews the current discussions about this evolving area of public health from a variety of perspectives. Infodemic management is an evidence-based practice underpinned by the science of infodemiology that offers guidance to better manage pandemic and epidemic risks and more quickly tackle new and resurgent health threats. Infodemic management has added much visibility and recognition for the importance of social-behavioural sciences, health communication, participatory and human-centered approaches, and digital health as complementary scientific and practical approaches that also must be strengthened in public health practice through a whole-of-society and whole information ecosystem approach. This volume makes a case that health of the information ecosystem in the digital age has emerged as the fourth ecosystem that public health is challenged by, along with the triad of environment-human-animal health. The book brings together scientists and practitioners across disciplines to offer insights on infodemic management. 

The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect

A collection of short, sharp essays exploring the value of shared and accessible public knowledge in the face of its erosion. The Death of Public Knowledge argues for the value and importance of shared, publicly accessible knowledge, and suggests that the erosion of its most visible forms, including public service broadcasting, education, and the network of public libraries, has worrying outcomes for democracy. With contributions from both activists and academics, this collection of short, sharp essays focuses on different aspects of public knowledge, from libraries and education to news media and public policy. Together, the contributors record the stresses and strains placed upon public knowledge by funding cuts and austerity, the new digital economy, quantification and target-setting, neoliberal politics, and inequality. These pressures, the authors contend, not only hinder democracies, but also undermine markets, economies, and social institutions and spaces everywhere.

Gender in Japanese Popular: Culture Rethinking Masculinities and Femininities

This collection brings together a range of viewpoints on gender from a diverse group of international scholars based in Finland, Belgium, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. The focus is, in particular, on gender performativity and non-binary or non-normative gender. The essays examine the ways in which gender can be depicted, perceived, and understood in Japanese popular culture. The work will be of interest to scholars working in gender studies, Asian studies, and popular culture. It will also act as a source text for higher education courses in Asia, Europe, and the United States.

New Digital Work: Digital Sovereignty at the Workplace

This open access book will give insights into global issues of work and work systems design from a wide range of perspectives. Topics like the impact of AI in the workplace as well as design for digital sovereignty at the workplace or foresight processes for digital work are covered. Practical cases, empirical results and theoretical considerations are not only taken from Germany and Europe, but also from Southeast Asia, South Africa, Middle America, and Australia. The book intends to expand the so far national view on the aspects of digital work (e.g. like in Ernst Hartmann’s immensely successful work “Zukunft der Arbeit in Industrie 4.0”) into an international context – thus showing not only common challenges, but also offering suggestions, best practice examples or thoughts from different global regions.

Shock Room

Click on the title or the graphic to view this video. In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram, in seeking to understand the Holocaust, ran a series of controversial experiments on obedience. An authority figure orders you to inflict pain on another person by activating electric shocks. Most of us will obey, claimed Milgram. But will we? And were Milgram's experiments as much art as science? Dramatising previously unfilmed versions of the world's most famous psychology experiment, Shock Room turns a light on the dark side of human behavior and forces us to ask ourselves: what would I do?

For more Stanley Milgram and his groundbreaking experiments, read The Man Who Shocked the World and Understanding Willing Participants: Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust

The World According to Sesame Street

Click on the title or the graphic to view this video. The World According To Sesame Street explores the drama, challenges, and rewarding outcome as dedicated Sesame producers and local producers bring to life the world’s most watched children’s television program in Bangladesh, Kosovo and South Africa. 

To read more about Sesame Street and Jim Henson, creator of the muppets, see: G is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street,   Sesame Street Revisited  and  Jim Henson and Philosophy: Imagination and the Magic of Mayhem.