The Playing Self is a groundbreaking new work from influential cultural sociologist and clinical psychologist Alberto Melucci, best known for his work on social movements and collective identities. In this book, he delves deeper into questions about the self as both a psychological and socio-cultural entity, particularly in the context of a global society for which information has become a basic resource. His phenomenological approach accounts for the self both as a site of highly subjective and intimate experiences, such as crying, laughing and loving, and in relation to social structural dynamics, through more impersonal experiences, such as the experience of time, and links of the self to politics. Melucci explores the critical search for meaning at the boundary of visible collective processes and individual day-to-day experience.

Cultural Realities of Being offers a dialogue between academic activity and everyday lives by providing an interface between several perspectives on human conduct. Very often, academic pursuits are arcane and obscure for ordinary people, this book will attempt to disentangle these dialogues, lifting everyday discourse and providing a forum for advancing discussion and dialogue. Nandita Chaudhary, S. Anandalakshmy and Jaan Valsiner bring together contributors from the field of cultural psychology to consider how people living within social groups, regardless of how liberal, are guided by collective reality and interconnected with life circumstances. The book discusses experiences and events in the lives of people of Indian cultures covering topics including family, food, pilgrimages, social dynamics and truth, in order to expand the material on human phenomena under the broad frame of cultural psychology. The book builds upon rich cultural traditions present in India, and precisely because of this focus, the book has much larger implications and relevance to the field and aims to orient the academic reader from around the world to viewing India and Indian society as a valuable area for research. Divided into three sections, the book covers: • Social presentation in culture • Representing relations • Children and youth in culture This book includes commentaries from expert academics from outside of India, providing a bridge between academic reality and cultural discourse and throwing fresh light on the everyday events presented in the text. Cultural Realities of Being will be essential reading for those studying Cross Cultural Psychology as well as those interested in social representation and identity.

As the name suggests, this book has been written for the absolute beginner and assumes no prior musical knowledge - just the desire to do it! You will not be disappointed with this superb book which is probably the easiest and most user friendly book of its sort available! Items covered include: ● Buying your first keyboard or piano; ● Reading music from scratch; ● Easy, effective finger exercises which require minimal reading ability; ● Important musical symbols; ● Your first tunes; ● Audio links for all tunes and exercises; ● Key signatures and transposition; ● Pre-scale exercises; ● Major and minor scales in keyboard and notation view; ● Chord construction; ● Chord fingering; ● Chord charts in keyboard view; ● Arpeggios in keyboard and notation view; ● Arpeggio exercises; ● Playing from a Fake book with and without auto accompaniment; ● Plus more! Please note that the Paperback version is in monochrome only.

This text examines American norms of masculinity and their role in the law, with essays from legal academics, literary scholars, and judges. Together, these papers reinvigorate the law-and-literature movement by bringing a range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives to bear on the complex interactions of masculinity with both law and literature - ultimately shedding light on all three.

From its earliest days as little more than a series of monophonic outbursts to its current-day scores that can rival major symphonic film scores, video game music has gone through its own particular set of stylistic and functional metamorphoses while both borrowing and recontextualizing the earlier models from which it borrows. With topics ranging from early classics like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to more recent hits like Plants vs. Zombies, the eleven essays in Music in Video Games draw on the scholarly fields of musicology and music theory, film theory, and game studies, to investigate the history, function, style, and conventions of video game music.

At last, Jean Benedetti has succeeded in translating Stanislavski's huge manual into a lively, fascinating and accurate text in English, remaining faithful to the author's original intentions within a colloquial and readable style for today's actors.