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.

The book explore how dance practices can be embodied through relationships with the environment. The book begins with discussing somatic experiences of being in Place; including discussing a sense of belonging to the environment through responsive movement. The second part offers infrastructures (scores) for generative movement drawn from transdisciplinary workshops. The book presents text, poetic prose, and image.



Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore reveals the collaborative choreographic making process as a way of being in the world. In the book the authors story their experiences of working with scores as ways of noticing, sensing and bringing focus to moments within the assemblage of environments of which we are a part.

This book expands on theories of "theatricality" in French and critical studies, adopting a transdisciplinary approach that reaches beyond performance studies into poetry, media technology, translation, and psychoanalytic theory.



Building on Artaud’s concept of theatre as a "plague"—an unpredictable, cataclysmic, and contagious force that disrupts power structures and knowledge—the book challenges Aristotelian norms of theatre as a medium of "healing" and "teaching." Instead, theatricality emerges as a force of radical disruption, what Artaud called "the return of the repressed," demanding openness to otherness.



The chapters present theatricality as primarily aural rather than visual, inciting "paranoiac listening," invoking unretrievable "primal scenes," and allowing unconscious "psychic" contamination. "Theatricality" is explored through works by Artaud, Genet, Novarina, and Koltès, but also Freud, Barthes, Kristeva, Girard, and Derrida. Each writer challenges the premises of their own artistic genres and fields of study, questioning binary systems like artistic production versus theoretical articulation, the technological versus the natural, and art versus life.



As shown, these binaries underpin mechanisms of repression, sacrificial violence, and the exclusion of the voiceless other. The book assigns a generative function to traditionally maligned notions like unintelligibility, madness, marginality, contagion, and criminality.

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.

Transformative Professional Learning in Arts Integration invites educators and artists to name and center dilemma, discovery, and learning at the core of their collaborative efforts to improve the learning culture of classrooms through the arts. A dilemma comes in many forms.



Personal and programmatic dilemmas are often the result of a rupture between personal belief and the requirements of a system. The rupture - or dilemma - seeds a desire for something new, something better. However, as Queensland Aboriginal activists remind us, we must address our own bias and power in relationship to those we presume to support: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” This text, therefore, shares the stories of individuals working towards collective educational improvement and change.



It is a story of failure and possibility, about individuals “bound up with” with each other, harnessing the power of the arts, in the common effort to make education more just and equitable for all.

Drama for Schools and Beyond: Transformative Learning Through the Arts, tells the story of twenty years of research and practice grounded in the Drama for Schools (DFS) professional development learning model based at The University of Texas at Austin, USA.



This book offers a critical look at the evolution of Drama for Schools through the learnings of its leaders and participants. It also gathers stories from partners across the globe who have adapted and built upon this model at their own sites. It is a primer for how to centre teacher and student inquiry and learning at the core of educational improvement. It is an invitation for teachers, administrators, and researchers to address their own bias and power in relation to those they aim to support.



Throughout, the authors show that by integrating the arts across education, new networks of possibility can be grown, to create a more just and equitable education for all.

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 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. From apparent melodrama and eroticism to fantasy and horror, these eight directors redefine satire’s limits, providing evidence that irony in cinema often goes unrecognised.



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.

There is a mental health crisis among media professionals around the world - in journalism, advertising/marketing/PR, film and television, digital games, music (recording and performance), and online content creation. The crisis consists of mental issues – with extraordinarily high instances of anxiety, trauma, burnout, and depression; physical ailments - prevalent substance abuse, unhealthy living, sleep problems, and exhaustion; and spiritual problems – including people becoming disenchanted with the promise of a creative career.

At the same time, most professionals claim to love doing what they do, suggesting that what makes people happy also makes them sick.

This book documents what is particular about well-being in creative careers in the media, offers an analysis of systemic issues throughout the media industries that explain why so many practitioners get sick on the job and shows what can be done. What ends up causing work-related stress disorders is a combination of a lack of reciprocity between what people bring to the job and what the industry offers in return, organizational injustice as people perceive policies and decisions at work to be discriminatory and unfair, and persistent high workloads.

In conclusion, Deuze suggests that the labor-of-love work ethic that is so typical of the way people 'make it work' can be a problem as much as it provides a way forward.