Blurred Boundaries

Download or read book Blurred Boundaries written by Bill Nichols and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.

Download or read book Blurred Boundaries written by Rainer Bauböck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1999, this volume examines new forms of cultural diversity which result from migration and globalization. Historically, most liberal democracies have developed on the basis of national cultures – either a single one, or a dominant one, or a federation of several ones. However, political and economic developments have upset traditional patterns and have blurred established boundaries. Ongoing immigration from diverse origins has inserted new ethnic minorities into formerly homogenous populations. Democratic liberties and rights provided opportunities for old and new marginalized minorities to resist assimilation and to assert identities. The resulting pattern of multiculturalism is different from earlier ones. Often cultural boundaries are neither clearly defined nor do they simply dissolve by assimilation into a dominant group – they have become fuzzy and a constant source of real or imagined hostility and anxiety. A proliferation of mixed identities goes together with stronger claims for cultural rights and escalating hostilities between ethnic minorities and national majorities. In many countries multiculturalism is today perceived as a challenge rather than as an enrichment. The book focuses on the question how institution and policies of liberal democracies can cope with these trends. The book addresses two tasks: 1) To compare different national contexts and types of ethnic groups (immigrant and indigenous, linguistic and religious minorities) and to discuss how policies of multicultural integration have to be adapted in order to cope with such differences. 2) To evaluate the impact of common rends of globalization which link societies and encourage convergence between national models of multicultural integration.

Download or read book Blurred Borders written by and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blurred Borders

Download or read book Animals and Ourselves written by Kathy Merlock Jackson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between humans and animals has always been strong, symbiotic and complicated. Animals, real and fictional, have been a mainstay in the arts and entertainment, figuring prominently in literature, film, television, social media, and live performances. Increasingly, though, people are anthropomorphizing animals, assigning them humanoid roles, tasks and identities. At the same time, humans, such as members of the furry culture or college mascots, find pleasure in adopting animal identities and characteristics. This book is the first of its kind to explore these growing phenomena across media. The contributors to this collection represent various disciplines, to include the arts, humanities, social sciences, and healthcare. Their essays demonstrate the various ways that human and animal lives are intertwined and constantly evolving.

Download or read book Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre-Modern Texts and Images written by Dafna Nissim and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.

Download or read book Deviance written by Leon Anderson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This sociology of deviance textbook draws on up-to-date scholarship across a spectrum of deviance categories, providing a symbolic interactionist analysis of the deviance process. The book addresses positivistic theories of deviant behavior within a more encompassing description of the deviance process that includes the work of deviance claims-makers, rule-breakers, and social control agents. Cross-cultural and historical treatment of deviance categories provides background for understanding current conceptions of, and responses to, deviance. The book is divided into four parts. Section One introduces students to the sociology of deviance. A sociological approach to deviance is contrasted with popular views of deviants as demonic, mentally ill, and culturally exotic. Sociological methods for studying deviance are described, with particular emphasis on deviance ethnography. Classic positivistic theories of deviant behavior are presented with critique and discussion of revised formulations of the theories. The symbolic interactionist/constructionist approach is presented as a recursive set of processes involving deviance claims-making by moral entrepreneurs, rule-breaking, actions of social control, and stigma management and resistance by those labelled as deviant. Section Two focuses on high consensus criminal deviance, with chapters on murder, rape, street-level property crime, and white collar crime. Chapters in Section Three addresses various forms of lifestyle deviance, including alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and sex work. Section Four examines three categories of status deviance: mental illness, obesity and eating disorders, and LGBTQ identities."--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Blurring the Boundaries written by Jack Levin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book communicates the power and importance of sociological thinking to major, worldwide trends.