This book celebrates and builds on Alan Clarke (1956–2021) and Allan Jepson’s 2015 book Exploring Community Festivals and Events. It showcases how far the study of community festivals and events has come in the intervening years, and in so doing it is a response to recent calls for researchers to take a more critical approach to event studies. This is an interdisciplinary book that draws together empirical research across a wide range of community event types, sizes and within diverse communities. Chapters in this book are grouped into four themes that highlight the breadth and depth of work being done: reviving and maintaining tradition(s); a focus on belonging; challenges and tensions; and innovations in teaching and research. Another of its core strengths is its international perspective – the book encompasses research from around the world including Turkey, Portugal, Greece, India, the UK, the US, Austria and New Zealand. There is also a diverse range of theoretical lenses applied to the study of community events, and some innovative methodologies used to achieve research aims and objectives. This volume will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of critical event studies, cultural studies, place-making, tourism, music, sociology and geography. Several chapters also provide insights and key learnings for those lecturing and working in event management and industry professionals.

Volume 1: Theories, Methods and Ideas explores the mobility of ideas through time and space and how interdisciplinary theories and methodological approaches used in mobilities studies can be profitably utilised within the humanities and social sciences. Through a series of short chapters, mobility is employed as an elastic, inclusive and multifaceted concept across various disciplines to shed light on a geographically and chronologically broad range of issues and case studies. In doing so, the concept of mobility is positioned as a powerful catalyst for historical change and as a fruitful approach to research in the humanities and social sciences. Like its sister volume, this volume is edited and written by members of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities (MoHu) at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and The Ancient World (DiSSGeA) of the University of Padua, Italy. The structure of the book mirrors the Theories and Methods, and Ideas thematic research clusters of the Centre. Afterwords from leading scholars from other institutions synthesise and reflect upon the findings of each section. This volume, together with Volume 2: Objects, People and Texts, makes a compelling case for the use of mobility studies as a research framework in the humanities and social sciences. As such, it will be of interest to students and researchers in various disciplines.

This book is an outgrowth of an international conference – The Black Body: Imagining, Writing, and Re(Reading) – held at DePaul University, Chicago in 2004. The various contributing authors critically examine the changing discourses on the black body to address how it has been constituted as a site for construction and maintenance of social and political power. Drawing examples from Europe, Africa, the United States as well as other places in the Black Diaspora, the subject matter in this book discusses the raced, gendered, classed and culturally produced discourses about the black body. Through its examination of these and related issues, this book contributes to a dialogue across various disciplines about the black body, its meanings and negotiations as read, interpreted, and imagined in different frames of perception and imagination. Print editions not for sale in Sub-Saharan Africa. This book is part of Routledge’s co-published series 30 Years of Democracy in South Africa, in collaboration with UNISA Press, which reflects on the past years of a democratic South Africa and assesses the future opportunities and challenges.

Situated against a backdrop of multiple global pandemics—COVID-19, racial injustice and violence, inequitable resource distribution, political insurrections and unrest—this timely and critical volume argues for a divestment in white privilege and an investment in anti-racist pedagogies and practice across early childhood contexts of research, policy, and teaching and learning. Featuring established scholar-practitioners alongside emerging voices, chapters explore key issues around equitable and inclusive practices for young children, covering topics such as multilingualism and multicultural practices of immigrant communities, language varieties, and dialects across the Black diaspora, queer pedagogies, and play at the intersection of race, gender, disability, and language. Thoughtfully and compellingly written, each chapter offers an overview of the issue, the theoretical framework and critical context surrounding it and implications for practice.

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Unique cross-cultural and multimedial approach to class identity and precarity in literature, theatre, and film Contemporary culture not merely reflects ongoing societal transformations, it shapes our understanding of rapidly evolving class realities. Literature, theatre, and film urge us to put the question of class back on the agenda, and reconceptualize it through the lens of precarity and intersectionality. Relying on examples from British, French, Spanish, German, American, Swedish and Taiwanese culture, the contributors to this book document a variety of aesthetic strategies in an interdisciplinary dialogue with sociology and political theory. Doing so, this volume demonstrates the myriad ways in which culture opens up new pathways to imagine and re-imagine class as an economic relation, an identity category, and a subjective experience. Situated firmly within current debates about the impact of social mobility, precarious work, intersectional structures of exploitation, and interspecies vulnerability, this volume offers a wide-ranging panorama of contemporary class imaginaries.

This book investigates the contemporary social, political and economic issues faced by women in South Asia. It focuses on the policies and practices that have challenged or perpetuated gender inequalities, and the evolving role of women in South Asian societies. With contributions from practitioners, policy makers, academics and civil society activists from across South Asia, this volume provides a broad and diverse range of viewpoints on South Asian women's labour force participation, political participation, education, and health, as well as country-specific insights.The volume is conceived as a stage for debate where specific insights act as a window into wider themes, practices and policies. Each essay is followed by policy-relevant recommendations and suggestions for avenues to improve current practice. This book will be relevant for undergraduate students and lecturers of South Asian studies, development, and policy studies, as well as industry practitioners.

The contributors in this edited collection scrutinize the changing dynamics of space and place in relation to current political, social, and environmental urgencies across the globe. The discussions provide a cohesive study for disclosing latent understandings of multiple phenomena characterizing the world in which we live.

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the groundbreaking Testimony, this collection brings together the leading academics from a range of scholarly fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing like literature and poetry, and its place in society. It visits testimony in relation to a range of critical developments, including the rise of Truth Commissions and the explosion and radical extension of human rights discourse; renewed cultural interest in perpetrators of violence alongside the phenomenal commercial success of victim testimony (in the form of misery memoirs); and the emergence of disciplinary interest in genocide, terror, and other violent atrocities. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. At the volume’s core is an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a ‘new’ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists. The collection draws together an international range of case-studies, including discussion of the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, and Rwanda, and encompasses a cross-disciplinary set of texts, novels, plays, testimonial writing, and hybrid testimonies. The volume situates itself at the cutting-edge of debate and as such brings together the leading thinkers in the field, requiring that each address the future, anticipating and setting the future terms of debate on the importance of testimony.