This anthology explores the current evolution of interactive storytelling across digital as well as physical spaces by examining how games digital narratives and participatory art can reshape creative expression and learning at fundamental levels.



The contributors propose that interactive fiction is best examined by combining social literary and technical analyses together. Used independently each modality provides an insufficient picture of the deeply merged social technical and artistic media environments we currently inhabit. We focus instead on the nature of the social interactions involved when engaging in digital storytelling emphasizing that an interactive narrative is perpetually constructed and reconstructed each time it is experienced.



The collection provides in depth analysis organized into three distinct sections the first two based on the key modalities of alternate realities and digital interactive fiction. The third section then provides an important political critique of gaming ideologies. Contributors with expertise and experience in each section topic provide diverse and timely analyses on how interactive narratives function in educational contexts community engagement and human-machine collaboration. The authors also investigate both theoretical frameworks and practical applications from live-action role-playing to AI-assisted writing while considering the significant social and political implications of gaming culture in general.



The collection's strength remains on its unique bringing together diverse perspectives from game designers educators artists and theorists to examine how new forms of storytelling emerge at the intersection of analog and digital realms with particular attention to the role of play and interactivity in contemporary learning environments.

Over the past decade Tiny Housing has become something of a viral sensation in the US. From Instagrammable enclaves for young professionals to vast municipality-supported schemes seeking to address homelessness tiny house sites are proliferating across the country.



This book takes a look at life inside the ‘Tiny House Nation’ shining an intimate light on a phenomenon widely celebrated in the mainstream media. The book presents textured narrative accounts from and striking images of Tiny Home residents their homes and communities while analysing the broader socio-economic structures shaping their lives. In so doing it paints a compelling and complex picture of a trend at the crossroads of several key social cultural and economic shifts at a pivotal moment for America’s housing future.

Fundamentally this is a book about paradoxes. The paradox of tiny housing offering freedom from the constraints of capitalism whilst at the same time remaining embedded within capitalist systems. The paradox of those who ‘go tiny’ both choosing an alternative lifestyle and those who are pushed into tiny housing as a consequence of limited choice. The paradox of Austin Texas as both a countercultural enclave and hyper-capitalist tech haven. And the paradox of tiny house ethoses in Austin as both centring community and shared assets and individualist libertarianism. These paradoxes do not necessarily sit in opposition to one another but are all bound up in the complexity of what tiny housing has to offer as an alternative way of living.

Despite its unattainability for all but the most privileged the American Dream - the home-owning society the suburban bliss the white picket fence - remains emblematic of the residential Good Life. But in the decades since the turn of the millennium the dream has been shrunk down expectations of a decent home literally reduced. Whilst for some this has led to forms of freedom and fulfilment it has also contributed to the normalisation of cities so outrageously expensive that all people can afford are miniature homes on the urban periphery. As this book shows both impacts of tiny housing are equally true and one does not cancel out the other. Tiny housing embodies an important societal crossroads. In some respects it offers an alternative to the prevailing housing status quo. In others it demonstrates what options have already been taken away from us.

from the Introduction



‘In the rest of this book we’ll lead you through our exploration of tiny housing in Texas. We’ll start in the next chapter by introducing some of the places and people we encountered on our travels to set the scene. Then the ‘pathways’ chapter examines the various conditions and journeys through which people end up living tiny. As you’ll see our attempt to produce a diagram of pathways to tiny living escalated into the production of a fully blown board game. We describe this diagrammatic board game to show the complex and nuanced personal and structural circumstances that lead people into tiny housing. From there we go into three empirical chapters focusing on economies of tiny living the materiality of tiny housing as domestic spaces and community culture. We then draw the book to a close and speculate about what tiny housing means for the future of domestic life especially in relation to the American Dream.



‘Throughout the book our descriptions are accompanied by photographs taken by Cian Oba-Smith who accompanied us on our first trip to Texas in 2022. The hype around tiny housing is undoubtedly driven in large part by the aesthetic cultures surrounding it. Tiny homes are the picturesque boutique upmarket cousin of mobile homes and trailers. They are distinguished from these other types of small housing as we’ll argue in this book specifically by their aesthetics. Anyone who ventures into the world of tiny housing for more than five minutes will see how thick this aesthetic culture is. From beautifully curated Instagram pages to countless coffee table books to Etsy shops dedicated to crafted tiny house merchandise a key part of living tiny is enjoying and embracing its aesthetics. By working with Cian we were able to focus (literally) on these aesthetic dimensions of tiny housing. However we were also able to capture some of what’s not presented in promotional tiny house materials; the constraints the challenges and the complexities that come along with the joy and the freedom. We’re positioning this book as something of a disrupted coffee table book. On an initial flick through it might not look too different to the photography books that valorise tiny living but you’ll already know if you’ve read this far that our approach is more nuanced. Our attempt has been to expose the ‘real’ Tiny House Nation. Not to attack it not to deny its beneficial impacts for a huge number of people but to inject some nuance into the debate so that we can take forward the positives of tiny living without normalising the negatives.’

Between 1989 and 2020 Jonathan Petherbridge worked as the Artistic Director of a community-based theatre company - London Bubble. This longer than average tenure allowed him time to forge a close working relationship with the community and develop new ways to involve people of all ages in theatre-making.



Out of a slew of projects emerged a particular methodology to make work that was researched curated and performed by citizens between the ages of 8 and 80. The process that emerged was called Foraging – a methodology carefully divided into five phases which attempts to bring the best out of both voluntary and specialist artists – making time and space for them to create theatre that has a striking beauty and an ingrained aesthetic of care. Vernacular Theatre describes the result – the aesthetic.



The case studies - based on work with citizens of London and Hiroshima - examine how this theatre has valued key moments of communal history contemporary issues and everyday institutions. The book suggests reasons and techniques for others to make similar work. Concluding with a reflection on the pre-classical Chorus of Greek Theatre where original work was produced to celebrate events with and for the community this book proposes a new genre – a social and intergenerational art form that invites people to gather and share their life experience concerns and creativity.

Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats materiality and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured transformed and redefined through changing social cultural and technological values.

Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film board games maps videogames cassette tapes transistor radios and Twitter amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context.



We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media culture and society.

If Colors Could Be Heard: Narratives About Racial Identity in Music Education is a platform of by and for People of Color who are music educators artists activists and students. For this book we asked authors to consider their race and ethnicity as an intimate and essential part of their music learning making and teaching.



The narratives in this collection include tales of being a music student stories of growing up and finding one’s place in musical worlds and accounts of teaching students about race ethnicity culture and identity. The chapters in this book are not research studies unless explicitly stated by the author.



Instead the chapters in tandem represent a stunning mosaic with shades of melanated skin that will serve as a scholarly picture that represents a portion of music education in the United States. Here you will find self-told stories by people from the Global Majority—a term used to describe Black African Asian Brown Latin Dual-heritage and Indigenous people.

The book aims to give prominence to the way the concept of communication has been deployed within philosophical debates. It shows how philosophers have adopted this concept in their discussions on the issues of intersubjectivity community and the ethics of dialogue.

Although mainstream philosophers do not as yet consider the philosophy of communication as a branch in its own right instead subsuming it within the philosophy of language as pragmatics the concept of communication is broader than that of language. This book aims to develop the relationship between communication and philosophy further.



Mangion hopes to encourage others to conduct further research by aligning communication with questions that are of a philosophical nature.

This book tells inspirational stories of women who have worked with and within communities to bring stories to life through screenwriting. As such the book evidences that women’s work is important; that ‘films can change lives’. The collection divides the chapters according to worlds in recognition of the fact that though we live on one planet the conditions of existence are vastly different between first and third worlds; between the wealthiest and the poorest.



Each chapter shows how attitudes have shifted policies have been rewritten and life experiences and horizons have been altered for specific communities through these instances of screenwriting. The themes touched upon include gender race disability culture war colonization labour relations political ideologies to name a few. The parallels found amongst these themes across national religious and cultural divides are also telling. The book is wide in its scope considering screenwriting a skill which can apply to games social media music videos virtual reality … in fact any of the burgeoning formats alive on our devices and through constantly evolving platforms. All are considered screenwriting.



The book is a celebration of the female writers who have told screen stories that educate and heal.



The book suits readers across disciplines including screenwriting filmmaking women’s studies history sociology and many other areas.

Describes the transformations we have witnessed due to the development of nuclear science and technology accelerating policies interdependent on energy and military procedures that have led us to make a provocative claim that in many respects planet Earth is getting closer to the embodiment of the project we call Nuclear Gaia.

The book examines media archives and online platforms that recover data and memory and shape community knowledge of nuclear events from the distant and nearer past. These are the pieces of evidence that we are on the eve of creating new forms of social justice carried out by open-source investigations (OSINT) groups independent researchers artists media makers activists local communities and civic groups.



Thus analysing nuclear processes and their social and environmental consequences is no longer the exclusive domain of experts scientists politicians and the military. The authors hope that such communities’ practices and decolonial discourses combined with the critiques within our methodology as postnuclear media studies can also change the fate of nuclear industry victims by creating media space to discuss and regain justice as socially sanctioned and shared rules for understanding and using nuclear energy both in past and the future.

How does whiteness sediment worlds? How does it format individuality in the name of a neurotypicality that polices how one bodies and how one comes to know? And how does a poetics of relation shift the very logic of this sedimentation?

Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation are bold in their call to “consent not to be a single being.” This transindividual consent born in the process of worlds crafting themselves in what he would call an “aesthetics of the earth” are felt in Fernand Deligny’s errant lines. These errant lines traced to move with the complex gestures of autistics over a period of several years in Monoblet France (1965-1970) offer an alternative to pathology and individual psychological assessment.



The Being of Relation brings these two projects into encounter exploring what else blackness can be at this non-pathological juncture where what is foregrounded is the very being of relation. On the way trails of whiteness are excavated and interrogated. The aim: to move toward parapedagogies of resistance in a logic of a poetics of relation a logic of neurodiversity minor sociality and the kind of difference without separability that refuses the binary that holds neurotypicality – as whiteness – in place.

Irony and the satirical impulse in cinema have gradually lost favor mockery increasingly more selective in its choice of targets. As Linda Hutcheon notes irony is becoming a problematic mode of expression in the 21st century.



The book examines selectively the work of eight film auteurs: Luis Bunuel RW Fassbinder Stanley Kubrick Robert Altman Paul Verhoeven Aki Kaurismaki Aleksei Balabanov and David Lynch much of whose work is not always regarded thus and the films examined are often more ironic than satirical.



The introduction examines the various categories of satire and the chapters then study the filmmakers individually through selected works offering interpretations of films and identifying a consistent approach. Since the work is often ambiguous the book speculates on each film’s purport engaging in textual interpretation of individual works to understand concerns underneath the most obvious. The Afterword tries to find common targets and strategies on the filmmakers’ part.