Exploring Character Through Structural Metaphor will help performers discover new and valuable insights into the characters they play.Grounded in a contemporary approach to understanding and applying the power of metaphor, it offers a practical guide for both actors and directors. This book introduces the idea of metaphor as a way of thinking rather than simply as clever comparison or figurative language. It demonstrates limitations of ways metaphor has traditionally been ...

Putting Image Repair to the Test:Quantitative Applications of Image Restoration Theory examines content analytic, attitudinal, and behavioral claims to advance current assertions made about image repair discourse, its effects, and the surrounding discourse. The contributors provide empirical data to answer research questions and to test various hypotheses in one substantive volume that builds on prior research in this field. Recommended for scholars in communication studies, public relatio...

Grounded in narrative theory, this book offers a case study of a liberal arts college’s use of narrative to help build identity, community, and collaboration within the college faculty across a range of disciplines, including history, psychology, sociology, theatre and dance, literature, anthropology, and communication. Exploring issues of methodology and their practical application, this narrative project speaks to the construction of identity for the liberal arts in today’s higher educat...

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to p...

From an award-winning anthropologist, a lively accessible, and at times irreverent introduction to the subjectWhat is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled the globe, from Papua New Guinea to suburban England and from China to California, uncovering surprising facts and insights about how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. In the process,...

What makes a speech community? How do they evolve? How are speech communities identified? Speech communities are central to our understanding of how language and interactions occur in societies around the world and in this book readers will find an overview of the main concepts and critical arguments surrounding how language and communication styles distinguish and identify groups. Speech communities are not organized around linguistic facts but around people who want to share their opinio...

Tracing the African American dance from the Diaspora to the dance floor, this book covers a social history germane not only to the African American experience, but also to the global experience of laborers who learn lessons from hip hop dance. Examining hip hop dance as text, as commentary, and as a function of identity construction within the confines of consumerism, the book draws on popular cultural images from films, commercials, and dance studios. A bibliography, discography, and film...

Black performance theory is a rich interdisciplinary area of study and critical method. This collection of new essays by some of its pioneering thinkers—many of whom are performers—demonstrates the breadth, depth, innovation, and critical value of black performance theory. Considering how blackness is imagined in and through performance, the contributors address topics including flight as a persistent theme in African American aesthetics, the circulation of minstrel tropes in Liverpool and...

What is the relationship between music and culture? The first edition of The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction explored this question with groundbreaking rigor and breadth. Now this second edition refines that original analysis while examining the ways the field has developed in the years since the book’s initial publication. Including contributions from scholars of music, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, this anthology provides a comprehen...

Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the “down low”—black men who have sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—has exploded in news media and popular culture, from the Oprah Winfrey Show to R & B singer R. Kelly’s hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. Most down-low stories are morality tales in which black men are either predators who risk infecting their unsuspecting female partners with HIV or victims of a pathological black culture ...

This text involves students in understanding and using the "tools" of critical social and literary theory from the first day of class. It is an ideal first introduction before students encounter more difficult readings from critical and postmodern perspectives.Nealon and Searls Giroux describe key concepts and illuminate each with an engaging inquiry that asks students to consider deeper and deeper questions. Written in students' own idiom, and drawing its examples from the social ...

The human body is thought of conventionally as a biological entity, with its longevity, morbidity, size and even appearance determined by genetic factors immune to the influence of society or culture. Since the mid-1980s, however, there has been a rising awareness of how our bodies, and our perception of them, are influenced by the social, cultural and material contexts in which humans live. Drawing on studies of sex and gender, education, governance, the economy, and religion, Chris Shill...