Circuits of Culture

Circuits of Culture PDF Author: Jeffrey D. Himpele
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816639183
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Set against the background of Bolivia's prominent urban festival parades and the country's recent appearance on the front lines of antiglobalization movements, Circuits of Culture is the first social analysis of Bolivian film and television, their circulation through the social and national landscape, and the emergence of the country's indigenous video movement. At the heart of Jeff Himpele's examination is an ethnography of the popular television program, The Open Tribunal of the People. The indigenous and underrepresented majorities in La Paz have used the talk show to publicize their social problems and seek medical and legal assistance from the show's hosts and the political party they launched. Himpele studies the program in order to identify the possibilities of the mass media as a site for political discourse and as a means of social action. Charting as well the history of Bolivia's media culture, Himpele perceptively investigates cinematic media as sites for understanding the modernization of Bolivia, its social movements, and the formation of indigenous identities, and in doing so provides a new framework for exploring the circulation of culture as a way of creating publics, political movements, and producing media. Jeff D. Himpele is associate director for the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. He is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker; his films include the award-winning Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza and Taypi Kala: Six Visions of Tiwanaku.

The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software

The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software PDF Author: Benjamin Nicoll
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030250121
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as ‘cultural software’ that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of democratization to draw users into its ‘circuits of cultural software’. For scholars of media production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.

Circuits of Visibility

Circuits of Visibility PDF Author: Radha Sarma Hegde
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814744680
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This title explores transnational media environments as a way to understand the gendered constructions and contradictions that support globalization, with special emphasis on women and a global feminist perspective.

Digital China's Informal Circuits

Digital China's Informal Circuits PDF Author: Elaine Jing Zhao
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351701886
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
From open source cultures, piracy, to amateur media and on-demand labour, informal media activities are vibrant in circuits of cultural production, distribution, consumption and labour utilisation in China. They come in different sizes and shapes, involve multiple actors, often with transnational ties and tensions, and challenge polemic views. Why do these informal activities occur, and how do they evolve? What cultural and social consequences do they have? In what ways do they pose challenges to governance and provoke us to rethink the notion? This book engages with diverse forms of the informal and their equally diverse interactions with the formal in the broader context of the rise of digital platforms, the contingent and complicated state–market interactions, and evolving roles of users. The book provides a vivid and original account of how digital platforms navigate formal and informal boundaries at both operational and discursive levels; how enthusiastic fans, aspiring amateurs, 'ordinary' users and necessity-driven labourers become integral to the formal/informal interface; and how state and non-state actors intervene in governing the formal/informal dynamics. In doing so, the book opens up new insights into the ongoing digital transformation in China.

Representation

Representation PDF Author: Stuart Hall
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761954323
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language and discourse work as `systems of representation'. Individual chapters explore: representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites; the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized `Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas.

The Practice of Cultural Studies

The Practice of Cultural Studies PDF Author: Richard Johnson
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761961000
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Presenting students with a how-to guide to doing research in cultural studies, The Practice of Cultural Studies is an original introduction to the field.The book combines clear introductions to the core concepts of cultural studies with a very practical sense of how research in the field actually gets done.

Film Cultures

Film Cultures PDF Author: Janet Harbord
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1412932327
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
"Film Cultures is thought-provoking and challenging. By opening film theory up to the many simultaneous networks of relation (that is, the cultures) of film, it asks both viewer and student to take film more seriously." - Communication Research Trends "Film Cultures weaves together insights from cultural theory and film studies to provide a complex and absorbing theoretical account of contemporary film culture. Harbord writes with authority, imagination and wit and her delicate deployment of modernist and postmodernist cultural accounts makes rewarding reading." - Christine Geraghty, Professor of Film and Television, University of Glasgow Film Cultures argues that our tastes for film connect us to social, spatial and temporal networks of exchange and meaning. Whether we view film in the multiplex, arthouse or the gallery, as cinema premiere, video hire or from a cable channel, whether we approach film as a singular object or a hypertext linked to ancillary products, our relationship to film is inhabiting a culture. Shifting the focus of film analysis from the text to paths of circulation, Film Cultures questions how film connects us to social status, and national and global affiliations.

Techniques of Pleasure

Techniques of Pleasure PDF Author: Margot Weiss
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351595
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In this lively ethnography, Weiss studies the pansexual BDSM community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Weiss finds that BDSM practice is not as transgressive as the participants imagine, nor is it simply reinforcing of older forms of social domination. Instead she shows how fantasy play depends on pre-existing social hierarchies, even as it also participates in a commodification of desires.

Beautiful Circuits

Beautiful Circuits PDF Author: Mark Goble
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231518404
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Considering texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Agee, and William Carlos Williams, alongside film, painting, music, and popular culture, Mark Goble explores the development of American modernism as it was shaped by its response to technology and an attempt to change how literature itself could communicate. Goble's original readings reinterpret the aesthetics of modernism in the early twentieth century, when new modes of communication made the experience of technology an occasion for profound experimentation and reflection. He follows the assimilation of such "old" media technologies as the telegraph, telephone, and phonograph and their role in inspiring fantasies of connection, which informed a commitment to the materiality of artistic mediums. Describing how relationships made possible by technology became more powerfully experienced with technology, Goble explores a modernist fetish for media that shows no signs of abating. The "mediated life" puts technology into communication with a series of shifts in how Americans conceive the mechanics and meanings of their connections to one another, and therefore to the world and to their own modernity.

Culture, Mind, and Brain

Culture, Mind, and Brain PDF Author: Laurence J. Kirmayer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108580572
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 683

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Book Description
Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.