Approaching Recent World History Through Film: Context, Analysis, and Research explores the relationships between twentieth-century world history and film by providing analysis of a diverse range of films organized by global history topics, including war and conflict, decolonization, political economy, and long-distance travel. This insightful text describes how to analyze films as original historical sources and how to carry out research projects using films. The text provides guidance on the types of world history films, their conventions, and how to analyze the historical arguments in movies. Scott C.M. Bailey incorporates in-depth discussions of the historical content and context of a wide range of international films connected with important twentieth-century global history topics. The book also offers many prompts for discussion, historical timelines, and suggestions for further reading and viewing, as well as instructions on how to construct research papers and projects which employ the use of films as historical sources. This book will be of interest to students in world history and film history courses.

Bailey describes how the Sea of Okhotsk area became integrated into a world system of economic and cultural ties between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This happened primarily because of maritime explorations, travel, and trade, which led to increased connections with both Russia and Japan. Individual chapters of the book provide analyses of historical sources which describe cross-cultural encounters and changes in the Sea of Okhotsk area. This includes analyses of explorers and travelers who traversed the region for commerce, exploration, diplomacy, and possible colonization. Historical sources are explored from the different perspectives of Russians, Japanese, Indigenous peoples, and international observers from Western countries. Cross-cultural encounters in the region among these groups led to collaboration, syncretism, and resistance, sometimes violent and sometimes peaceful. The last chapter discusses how some international travelers and foreign residents of Hokkaidō described the area at the end of the nineteenth century. Their perspectives confirm that Hokkaidō had become a fully colonized space. An essential resource for students and scholars of cross-cultural studies, Russian history, Japanese history, and Ainu and Indigenous history.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY 3.0 IGO International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The notion of development influences and is influenced by all aspects of human life. Social science is but one representational option among many for conveying the myriad ways in which development is conceived, encountered, experienced, justified, courted, and/or resisted by different groups at particular times and places. As international development has become more quantitative and economics-centred, there is an enduring sense that what is measured (and thus 'valued' and prioritized) may have become too narrow, that the powers of prediction claimed by some areas of economics and management may have overreached, and that the human dimension is in danger of being lost. Reflecting this concern, New Mediums, Better Messages? contributes to new conversations between science, social science, and the humanities around the roles of different kinds of knowledge, stories, and data play in relation to global development. It brings together a team of multidisciplinary contributors to explore popular representions of development, including music, blogs, and fiction.

Science fiction literature and film are an underappreciated source for the teaching of history. Finding material that can excite a student’s curiosity can be a key towards greater student engagement, especially among students who are taking history as a requirement, rather than from interest. The discovery that they can read or watch science fiction as part of their classwork often comes as a pleasant surprise. Beyond its popularity, however, utilizing science fiction for class assignments has certain pedagogical advantages: it introduces students to new vistas in historical thought, helps them learn how literature and film can be applied as a primary source, and can encourage participation in projects that are enjoyable. Each chapter provides case studies focusing on a different subject in the modern history curriculum and in addition to providing an analysis of specific texts and/or cinematic sources, gives suggestions on assignments for the students.

This book explores how minds at the movies understand minds in the movies and introduces readers to some fundamental principles of Cognitive Studies—namely conceptual blending, Theory of Mind, and empathy/perspective-taking—through their application to film analysis. A cognitive approach to recent popular historical films demonstrates cinema’s potential to stimulate viewers’ critical thinking about crucial events of the past century. Diverging from the focus on narrative processing in traditional cognitivist theory, this book examines film reception and production in the context of the latest developments in cognitive and social psychology. Turning to German cinema as a case study for this interdisciplinary partnership, Jennifer Marston William offers a fresh look at some internationally successful films of the twenty-first century, including Nowhere in Africa, Goodbye, Lenin!, Sophie Scholl, Downfall, The Lives of Others, and The Baader-Meinhof Complex.

Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Aesthetics and Reception in Cinema offers a renewed critical outlook on Western classic film directly from the pantheon of European and American masters, including Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Jean-Pierre Melville, John Ford, Leo McCarey, Sam Peckinpah, and Orson Welles. The book contributes an “Eastern Approach” into the critical studies of Western films by reappraising selected films of these masters, matching and comparing their visions, themes, and ideas with the philosophical and paradigmatic principles of the East. It traces Eastern inscriptions and signs embedded within these films as well as their social lifestyle values and other concepts that are also inherently Eastern. As such, the book represents an effort to reformulate established discourses on Western cinema that are overwhelmingly Eurocentric. Although it seeks to inject an alternative perspective, the ultimate aim is to reach a balance of East and West. By focusing on Eastern aesthetic and philosophical influences in Western films, the book suggests that there is a much more thorough integration of East and West than previously thought or imagined.

Many global film industries fail in expanding the role of Muslims on screen. Too often they produce a dichotomy between "good" and "bad" Muslims, limiting the narrative domain to issues of national security, war, and terrorism. Naturally, much of the previous scholarship on Muslims in film focused on stereotypes and the politics of representation. This collection of essays, from an international panel of contributors, significantly expands the boundaries of discussion around Muslims in film, asking new questions of the archive and magnifying analyses of particular cultural productions. The volume includes the exploration of regional cinemas, detailed analysis of auteurs and individual films, comparison across global cinema, and new explorations that have not yet entered the conversation. The interdisciplinary collection provides an examination of the multiple roles Islam plays in film and the various ways Muslims are depicted. Across the chapters, key intersecting themes arise that push the limits of how we currently approach issues of Muslims in cinema and ventures to lead us in new directions for future scholarship. This book adds new depth to the matrix of previous scholarship by revisiting methodological structures and sources, as well as exploring new visual geographies, transnational circuits, and approaches. It reframes the presiding scholarly conventions in five novel trajectories: considering new sources, exploring new communities, probing new perspectives, charting new theoretical directions, and offering new ways of understanding conflict in cinema. As such, it will be of great use to scholars working in Islamic Studies, Film Studies, Religious Studies, and Media.

Building on a long tradition in German-language literature and culture, this volume focuses on contemporary engagements with ethical concerns in literary texts, essays, and films. There has been an "ethical turn" in the literature, culture, and theory of recent years. Questions of morality are urgent at a time of increasing global insecurities. Yet it is becoming ever more difficult to make ethical judgments in multicultural, relativist societies. The European economic meltdown has raised further ethical difficulties, widening the gap between rich and poor. Such divisions and difficulties heighten the widespread fear of "the other"in its various manifestations. And in the German context especially, the past and its representation offer ongoing moral challenges. These ethical concerns have found their way into recent German-language literature andculture in texts that deal with history and memory (Timm, Petzold, Schoch, Strubel); materiality (Krauß, Overath); gender (Berg, Schneider); age and generation (Moster, Pehnt, Schalansky); religion, especially Islam (Senocak, Kermani, Ruete); and nomadism (Tawada). The relationship between self and other; the connection between particular and general; the personal and political consequences of individuals' actions; and the potential, and danger, of representation itself are issues that are vital to the shaping of our future ethical landscapes, as this volume demonstrates. Contributors: Monika Albrecht, Angelika Baier, David N. Coury, Anna Ertel & Tilmann Köppe, Emily Jeremiah, Alasdair King, Frauke Matthes, Aine McMurtry, Gillian Pye, Kate Roy. Emily Jeremiah is Senior Lecturer in German at Royal Holloway, University of London. Frauke Matthes is Lecturer in German at the University ofEdinburgh.

Critical Approaches to African Cinema Discourse utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to lay bare the diversity and essence of African cinema discourse. It is an anthology of historical reflections, critical essays, and interviews by film critics, historians, theorists, and filmmakers that signifies a dialogue and engagement apropos the ideology and cultural politics of film production in Africa. The contributors are extremely concerned, not only with the history of African cinema, but with its future and its potential. This book, then, is not limited to the expansion of the discourse on African cinema, but tries to approach the definition of the critical canon within the exigencies and manifestations of art and African sociopolitical practices. The authors view these practices as an investment in a cultural imperative stemming from the quest to delineate how critical methodologies are derived from and shape contemporary historical and cultural practices. Hence, the contributions are less about the usual constrictive method of analysis and more about illustrating manifestations of an interrogative critical methodology that is certainly an offspring of an indigenous African critical cum cinematic culture and paradigms.

An essential guide to incorporating critical research into higher education scholarship. Winner of the Outstanding Publication Award of the Post-secondary Education Division of the American Educational Research Association Critical theory has much to teach us about higher education. By linking critical models, methods, and research tools with an advocacy-driven vision of the central challenges facing postsecondary researchers and staff, Critical Approaches to the Study of Higher Education makes a significant—and long overdue—contribution to the development of the field. The contributors argue that, far from being overly abstract, critical tools and methods are central to contemporary scholarship and can have practical policy implications when brought to the study of higher education. They argue that critical research design and critical theories help scholars see beyond the normative models and frameworks that have long limited our understanding of students, faculty, institutions, the organization and governance of higher education, and the policies that shape the postsecondary arena. A rigorous and invaluable guide for researchers seeking innovative approaches to higher education and the morass of traditionally functionalist, rational, and neoliberal thinking that mars the field, this book is also essential for instructors who wish to incorporate the lessons of critical scholarship into their course development, curriculum, and pedagogy.