Intellect 2023 Collection

This book of highly original essays addresses the field of movement-based and dance somatics through lenses of ethics and ecology. It is based in methods of phenomenology.

A new collection of essays previously published with Intellect as journal articles, with the addition of new essays and editorial material. The text considers body-based somatic education relative to values, virtues, gender fluidity, lived experience, environmental awareness, fairness, and collective well-being. In delineating interdependent values of soma, ecology, and human movement that are newly in progress, the collection conceives links between personal development of subjective knowledge and cultural, critical, and environmental positionality.

The text raises questions about defining somatics and self, gender dynamics, movement preferences, normative body conceptions, attention to feelings, inclusiveness, ethics of touch, and emotional intelligence in somatics contexts. I include these crucial concerns of somatics and ethics as relational, globally complex, and ongoing.

Like much of Sondra Fraleigh’s writing, these essays utilize phenomenology as a method to investigate embodied relationships—often through lenses of ethics and aesthetics. In providing some examples, the text explores specific values of gratitude, listening, and emotional intelligence in somatic bodywork and learning environments.

This book focuses on Somatic Movement Dance Therapy and the importance of self-regulation and co-regulation.  The chapters attend to self-regulating different tissues through movement, breath, sound and the imagination.

Throughout the book the author shares processes and practices that support participants to balance their living tissues, moving from sympathetic arousal into parasympathetic ease and release. The study of the autonomic nervous system and how to innervate the parasympathetic through breath awareness, heart-sensing and intero-ception is the central through-line in the book.

Uniquely, Williamson attends to the anatomical and physiological complexity underlying the apparent simplicity of somatic movement dance practice. How to sense-perceive and move with attuned awareness of specific body tissues, such the skeletal-muscular and craniosacral system invites the reader into a deep anatomical and physiological excavation of self-regulation. The interconnectivity of fascia, and the importance of cardio-ception, breath awareness and gravity lie at the heart of this book. Sensory-perceptual awareness of the heart is foregrounded as the most important ingredient in the efficacy of practice, as well as gravi-ception, soft-tissue-rolling and fascial unwinding.

Includes a collective foreword from Sarah Whatley, Daniel Deslauriers, Celeste Snowber and Karin Rugman 

This is a must-read practice-as-research book, for under- and postgraduate students, researchers and educators and especially important for practitioners who feel the weight and condescension of the mechanistic paradigm.

Scream for Me Africa! examines the hard rock and metal scenes in five African countries: Botswana, Togo, South Africa, Kenya and Ghana. Banchs spent significant time in each country interviewing musicians, producers and fans to create vivid pictures of each of these rarely discussed scenes. These scenes are 'a disruption of the norm, a disruption of what we have come to expect from Africa and rock and metal music'. He has chosen to shed light on these particular scenes now because of their difference and because they are reflections of their countries.

This exciting new book considers how heavy metal's subculture is viewed in Africa, and how musicians in the continent have stepped forward to make this genre their own. It looks at the continent's blossoming scenes through various themes including hybridity, othering and how scenes have collided with their difficult political systems.

Scream For Me, Africa! Is the first book of its kind and an engaging look at the various metal scenes across the African continent, and how they are constructing an identity as metal fans in their modern nation states under the shadow of post-colonialism. Written in a clear, approachable manner it is accessible to academic and non-academic readers.

Edward Banchs is a freelance writer and independent scholar – and a metal fan – based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA whose writing has appeared in The Guardian, Afropop, Metal Hammer, Metal Music Studies and The Pittsburgh City Paper. He is also author of Heavy Metal Africa (2016).

This new book fills a gap in the market for an academic text on metal in Africa, expanding published scholarship on metal in the global south. It book has potential use as a resource on courses in several disciplines including sociology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and Africa studies.  It will also be of interest to the more general readers with an interest in the musical genre.

Will appeal to anyone who is interested in metal, African culture, anthropology and sociology and history.  Particularly musicologists and ethnomusicologists and those with an interest in metal in the global south.