How have feelings, presumptions, and preconceptions concerning racialized Blackness intersected with film noir? Dan Flory relies on recent advances in philosophy of film, philosophy of emotion, cognitive film theory, and critical philosophy of race to guide his analyses of this well-known film genre.Making sense of techniques, themes, and characterizations filmmakers have used in order to structure movies into film noirs, Flory focuses on those viewer responses that...

The title of this collection, The Logic of Racial Practice, pays homage to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term habitus to name the pretheoretical, embodied dispositions that orient our social interactions and meaningfully frame our lived experience. The language of habit uniquely accounts for not only how we are unreflectively conditioned by our social environments but also how we responsibly choose to enact our habits and can change them. Hence, this collection of essays edit...

This collection fills a gap in the current literature in philosophy and film by focusing on the question: How would thinking in philosophy and film be transformed if race were formally incorporated moved from its margins to the center?The collection’s contributors anchor their discussions of race through considerations of specific films and television series, which serve as illustrative examples from which the essays’ theorizations are drawn. Inclusive and current in its selection ...

Accessible, entertaining, anecdotal. A good introduction to issues in contemporary civics as well as a measured and thoughtful response to major themes and figures in cultural studies.Civility in politics is a subject throughout, and analyses of both Obama's rhetoric and the use of lowest-common-denominator insults in public debate will be well-timed going into the 2012 election campaignNot just formal essays: some are dialogues, some personal meditations, some direct addre...

This brief and engagingly written book provides a unique introduction to the process of social inquiry and the theoretical and methodological frameworks that support that inquiry, offering a strong foundation in critical thinking that is rooted in the social sciences but maintains relevance across the disciplines.

In Anthropology and Social Theory the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action ...

This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other ad...

Arts Based Research isideal for students, researchers, and practitioners. This unique book provides a framework for broadening the domain of qualitative inquiry in the social sciences by incorporating the arts as a means of better understanding and rethinking important social issues. In the book′s 10 thought-provoking chapters, authors Tom Barone and Elliot W. Eisner--pioneers in the field--address key aspects of arts based research, including its purpose and fundamental i...

Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema examines the way that contemporary film reflects today’s changing gender roles. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the central issues in feminist film criticism with analyses of over twenty popular contemporary films across a range of genres, such as chick flicks, teen pics, hommecoms, horror, action adventure, indie flicks, and women lawyer films. Contributors explore issues of femininity as well...

Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural...

In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms’especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.In a Queer Time and Place

This book analyzes how contemporary popular films with fantastic themes, including Candyman, Frozen, The Cabin in the Woods, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, cultivate neoliberal subjectivities. These films promise dramatic change, but they too often deliver more of the same. Although proponents maintain the illusion that the militant enforcement of freemarket economics will resolve racism, climate change, and imperialism, their magical thinking actu...