Browse Books

Narrative Interplay in the Digital Era
Generative AI, Alternate Reality Games, and the Future of Interactive Pedagogy
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.

The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood
Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity
This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self which far from being a stable marker of urban liberal millennial Indian identity has a schizophrenic quality one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion optimism and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book however belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.
The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies popular culture analyses and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star the urban space web series YouTube videos and social media content.

Nuclear Gaia
Media Archives of Planetary Harm
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.

New Queer Television
From Marginalization to Mainstreamification
Though queer critics and queer theory tend to frame queer identities as marginal this edited volume draws attention to a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences. Cementing a foundational understanding of queerness that is at odds with current shifts in media production contributors present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual shows and genres to reconsider the marginalization of queerness in the twenty-first century. Doing so challenges preexisting notions that such “mainstreamification” necessitates being subsumed by the cisheteropatriarchy. This project argues the opposite showing that heteronormative assumptions are outdated and that new queer representations lay the groundwork for filling gaps that queer criticism has left open.
Thomas Brassington is a researcher whose work explores intersections of queerness and the Gothic in contemporary popular culture. Debra Ferreday is a feminist cultural theorist whose research concerns gender feminist theory sexuality critical race theory queer theory and embodiment. Dany Girard is a queer researcher whose work primarily explores representations of gender asexualities and queer theory in television and film.

The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood
Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity
This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self which far from being a stable marker of urban liberal millennial Indian identity has a schizophrenic quality one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion optimism and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book however belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.
The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies popular culture analyses and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star the urban space web series YouTube videos and social media content.

The New Politics of Visibility
Spaces, Actors, Practices and Technologies in The Visible
Not only does visibility matter to politics but it is increasingly becoming an intrinsic constituent element and a crucial asset to it.
Accordingly the challenge to the social science becomes that of understanding how the new institutional urban and technological settings are reshaping the organisation of visible. This book brings together a team of distinguished scholars and researchers interested in employing exploring and critiquing the analytical category and the practical stakes of visibility.
Ranging from urban public space to the new media and social media platforms a vast terrain of inquiry is addressed here by joining together original theoretical elaboration and careful empirical studies. The result is a thoroughly interdisciplinary endeavour conducted with passion and insight.
The New Politics of Visibility includes nine original chapters specifically commissioned for this collection. Contributions are interdisciplinary and address an array of topical areas in the newly emerging modes of governance and the novel social formations coming into existence. The transformations of urban space and the working of the new media form a core concern recurring through many of the essays but is by no means the sole topic as other essays address the politics of visibility in crucial cultural spheres including gender relations and professional life.
Audience will be academics researchers graduate and postgraduate students

Nostalgia and Videogame Music
A Primer of Case Studies, Theories, and Analyses for the Player-Academic
This book the first multi-disciplinary study of nostalgia and videogame music allows readers to understand the relationships and memories they often form around games and music is central to this process. The quest into the past begins with this book a map that leads to the intersection between nostalgia and videogame music.
Informed by research on musicology and memory as well as practices of gaming culture the edited volume discusses different forms of nostalgia how video games display their relation to those and in what ways theoretically self-conscious positions can be found in games. The perspectives of the new discipline ludmusicology provide the broader framework for this project.
This significant new book focuses on an important topic that has not been sufficiently addressed in the field and is clear in its contribution to ludomusicology.
An important scholarly addition to the field of ludomusicology with potential appeal to undergraduate and graduate scholars in many related fields due to its inherent interdisciplinarity including musicology more broadly game studies and games design film studies as well as cultural and media studies. It could also appeal to practitioners particularly those nostalgic and self-reflexive artists who already engage in nostalgic practice (chiptune musicians for instance). Also to those researching and studying in the fields of memory studies and cultural studies.
Readership will include researchers educators practitioners undergraduate and graduate students fans and game players.

Narrating the City
Mediated Representations of Architecture, Urban Forms and Social Life
Analysing a variety of international films and ultimately placing them in dialogue with video art photographic narratives and emerging digital image-based technologies the contributions explore the expanding range of ‘mediated’ narratives of contemporary architecture and urban culture from both a media and a sociological standpoint. Each chapter presents an interesting critical approach to the diversity of topics with clear explanation of the contextual framework and methodology and a consistent depth of analysis.
In the three sections of the book authors underline the continual role of film and media in creating moving image narratives of the city identifying how it creates cinematic – and ever more frequently digital – topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture re-presenting familiar cities modes of seeing cultures and social questions in unfamiliar ways. This filmic emphasis is placed into dialogue with a more diverse range of related visual media which illustrates the overlaps between them and reveals how moving image technologies create unique visual topographies of contemporary urban culture and architecture.
In making this shift from the filmic to the new age of digital image making and alternative modes of image consumption the book not only reveals new techniques of representation mediation and the augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers; its emphasis on ‘narrative’ offers insights into critical societal issues. These include cultural identity diversity memory and spatial politics as they are both informed by and represented in various media.
The focus for the book is on how films can produce mediation of urban life and culture by connecting the notions of identity diversity and memory. Both the subject and the approach are gaining in popularity in recent years. This book's main feature is its dual perspective involving both practical and theoretical stances – and it is this approach that makes it a particularly relevant and original contribution.
Primary readership will be academics scholars undergraduate and postgraduate students and practitioners interested in architecture and media in general film moving images urban studies in particular. Also of relevance to sociologists and those interested in cultural theory. The inclusion of chapters on urban photography and art installations may also be of interest to students and designers in these areas.

New Patterns in Global Television Formats

National Conversations
Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe
Public service broadcasting is in the process of evolving into 'public service media' as a response to the challenges of digitalization intensive competition and financial vulnerability. While many commentators regard public service as being in transition a central dimension of its mission - to integrate and unify the nation while respecting and representing plurality - is being reemphasized and re-legitimated in a political climate where the politics of migration and cultural diversity loom large in public debate. Through a series of thematic chapters and in-depth national case studies National Conversations examines the reshaping of public service media and the concomitant development of new guiding discourses policies and program practices for addressing difference and lived multiculturalism in Europe.

The Ned Kelly Films
A Cultural History of Kelly History

Nanoart
The Immateriality of Art

Negotiating Spain and Catalonia
Competing Narratives of National Identity
What is Spanish identity? The stereotype conjures up images of 'temperament' 'passion' and 'difference' from the rest of Europe. But within Spain is there a single image all Spaniards identify with?
The two case studies included in this book (dealing with the Football World Cups of 1994 and 2002 and the general elections of 1996 and 2000) examine competing discourses of Spain Catalonia and their national identities as constructed in the Spanish press. The conservative discourse offers traditional and unified images of Spain close to the stereotype whereas more liberal visions of the country regard 'Europeanism' and 'reason' (not 'passive') as the values Spain should aspire to. From a peripheral perspective Catalan self-definition is of a people that is hardworking thoughtful truly European and different from the rest of the Spaniards.
However these differences between the discourses are not always so clear-cut. Central to Negotiating Spain and Catalonia is the idea of the constant renegotiation of Spanish and Catalan identities in order to adapt them to the political circumstance: both case studies show how radically different narratives of Spanishness and Catalanicity offered in the turbulent political past tend to merge into the more tranquil present.

Narrating the Catastrophe
An Artist’s Dialogue with Deleuze and Ricoeur
An extraordinary collaboration between contemporary art and critical discourse Narrating the Catastrophe guides readers through unfamiliar textual landscapes where “being” is defined as an act rather than a form. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s notion of intersubjective narrative identity as well as the catastrophe theory of Gilles Deleuze Jac Saorsa establishes an alternative perspective from which to interpret and engage with the world around us. A highly original—and visually appealing—take on a high-profile issue in contemporary critical debate this book will appeal to all those interested in visual arts and philosophy.

New Zealand Film and Television
Institution, Industry and Cultural Change
Despite challenges arising from a limited population and the difficulty of obtaining adequate funding both the film and television industries of New Zealand have been the source of significant achievements and profound cultural influence. Charting their emergence and subsequent development through five decades New Zealand Film and Television looks at these two increasingly vibrant cultural and creative industries. While there is a growing body of academic work on film and television in New Zealand relatively little exists that examines the specific cultural concerns local industries institutions and policies involved which this book addresses in full.

Neosentience
The Benevolence Engine
The study addressed in this 'book' puts forward a project that is twofold. Firstly it discusses the conceptual basis within which it would be possible for the construction of a 'neosentient' system a machine endowed with the capacity to perceive or feel things in the world as if manifesting a proto-form of (artificial) consciousness. Secondly it hypothesizes about the rising of benevolence through the interaction/intra-action between 'neosentient' machines and their environment which include us human beings as inhabitants. The manuscript tackles its task in a very particular manner as it interrelates a constellation of ideas in order to address key research agendas on the fields of language aesthetics philosophy biology physics science technology mind and consciousness to name some. The goal of the book is not to define the structure within which such an engine could be built it does not bring into light the blueprint of such an but it nails down key concepts from a broad range of topics mapping a path for future research reinforcing this way the sense of feasibility of its enterprise. In doing so the book illuminates trajectories ramifications or even non-directly correlated ideas that would pass unnoticed to the reader’s mind were not by the authors generously bringing into play sets of key scholars theories discoveries and even speculative ideas.

New Zealand Cinema
Interpreting the Past
New Zealand has produced one of the world’s most vibrant film cultures a reflection of the country’s evolving history and the energy and resourcefulness of its people. From early silent features like The Te Kooti Trail to recent films such as River Queen this book examines the role of the cinema of New Zealand in building a shared sense of national identity. The works of key directors including Peter Jackson Jane Campion and Vincent Ward are here introduced in a new light and select films are given in-depth coverage. Among the most informative accounts of New Zealand’s fascinating national cinema this will be a must for film scholars around the globe.

New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema
As part of a raft of neoliberal economic reforms in the early 1990s Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello and Argentine president Carlos Menem eliminated long-standing state financial support for cinema. National film production distribution and exhibition were deeply affected by the absence of the entire structure and legislation on which they had relied for decades. By the mid-1990s however new laws were passed reestablishing subsidies and credit lines—and allowing for a rebirth of national cinema in both countries.
This comprehensive and accessible volume surveys Brazilian and Argentine cinematic production from its subsequent dramatic rebirth to the present. It addresses not only the commercially successful films but also the effects of globalization and cultural policies on public incentives for filmmaking. An indispensable resource for students of film and cultural studies New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema is moreover an exciting glimpse into a momentous period in recent cinematic history.

New Irish Storytellers
Narrative Strategies in Film
With the success of such films as the Oscar winner Once Irish film has been getting well-deserved international attention recently. New Irish Storytellers examines storytelling techniques and narrative strategies in contemporary Irish film. Revealing defining patterns within recent Irish cinema this book explores connections between Irish cinematic storytellers and their British and American colleagues. Díóg O’Connell traces the creative output of Irish filmmakers today back to 1993 the year the Irish Film Board was reactivated reinvigorating film production after a hiatus of seven years. Reflecting on this key and distinctive era in Irish cinema this book explores how film gave expression to tensions and fissures in the new Ireland.
