First published in 1987. Toward the end of August 1984, when most people were enjoying the last beaches and breezes of summer holidays, over 700 people gathered from all parts of the world at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, to hear about, talk about, and think about thinking. The present volume offers a selection of papers from the many more presented at the 1984 International Conference on Thinking, continuing the tradition established by its predecessor volume.

Drawing on ethnographic accounts of children's media-referenced play, this book explores children's engagement with media cultures and playground experiences, analyzing a range of issues such as learning, fantasy, communication and identity.

Elegant ideas deserve elegant expression. Sword dispels the myth that you can’t get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions or eager to write for a larger audience, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books enjoyable to read—and to write.

Popular assumptions about gender and communication - famously summed up in the title of the massively influential 1992 bestseller Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus - can have unforeseen but far-reaching consequences in many spheres of life, from attitudes to the phenomenon of 'date-rape' to expectations of achievement at school, and potential discrimination in the work-place. In this wide-ranging and thoroughly readable book, Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and ...

How is our language affected by our ethnicity, gender, and region? How are our conversations and other interactions structured? How does society view and regulate language? How do we use language to present ourselves to others? In this revised and updated second edition of the popular What Is Sociolinguistics? Gerard Van Herk explores these and other intriguing questions about language, how we use it, and its relationships to society. Van Herk guides the reader on a tour through t...

How do you picture identity? What happens when you ask individuals to make visual representations of their own identities, influences, and relationships?Drawing upon an array of disciplines from neuroscience to philosophy, and art to social theory, David Gauntlett explores the ways in which researchers can embrace people's everyday creativity in order to understand social experience.Seeking an alternative to traditional interviews and focus groups, he outlines studies in wh...

Practice-led research is a burgeoning area across the creative arts, with studio informed doctorates frequently favoured over traditional approaches to research. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry is specifically designed as a training tool and is structured on the model used by most research programmes. A comprehensive introduction lays out the book's framework and individual chapters provide concrete examples of studio-based research in art, film and video...

The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour.The zeal with which television executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising,...

Emphasising the contradictions of fandom, Matt Hills outlines how media fans have been conceptualised in cultural theory. Drawing on case studies of specific fan groups, from Elvis impersonators to X-Philes and Trekkers, Hills discusses a range of approaches to fandom, from the Frankfurt School to psychoanalytic readings, and asks whether the development of new media creates the possibility of new forms of fandom. Fan Cultures also explores the notion of "fan cults" or followings,...

The nature of childhood, the consideration of whether a certain age denotes innocence or not, and the desire to teach good citizenship to our children are all issues commonly discussed by today's media. This book brings together a variety of perspectives on the study of childhood: how this has been treated historically and how such a concept is developing as we move into the next century.The book is divided into five main sections:* part one sets the scene a...

The aim of this book is to offer an informed account of changes in the nature of the relationship between play, media and commercial culture in England through an analysis of play in the 1950s/60s and the present day.

Children and young people in the early twenty-first century encounter, and creatively adapt to, a range of cultural phenomena in an increasingly mediated, commercialised and globalised world. Children and young people's cultural worlds offers a critical introduction to childhood in the digital age. Childhood innocence is a concept that often underpins the way adults think about children and new technologies. The book challenges adult concerns, highlighting instead the diversity of children...