ALBERT

Description: Never before has a collection of original essays strived to create such constructive, shared discourse between ecocritical and narrative scholars as well as environmental humanities scholars interested in narrative. Erin James and Eric Morel’s volume Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology explores the complexity of pairing material environments and their representations with narrative forms of understanding. To explore the methodological possibilities within “econarratology,” the contributors evaluate the mechanics of how narratives convey environmental understanding via building blocks such as the organization of time and space, characterization, focalization, description, and narration. They also query how readers emotionally and cognitively engage with such representations and how the process of encountering different environments in narratives stands to affect real-world attitudes and behaviors.

Description: The information overload produced by the printing press and the new forms of the structuring of knowledge are echoed in fictional works. The essays assembled in this book study the textualization of problematic forms of knowledge in medieval and early modern Spanish literature. Literary Works like the Libro buen amor, La Lozana Andaluza, or the Guzmán de Alfarache are read against the backdrop of scientific developments of their times.

Description: Chapter 3 examines the formation of the “prophetic critic” in Kaebyŏk (The opening, 1920- 1926) through distant reading. As the most influential intellectual magazine of the 1920s, Kaebyŏk introduced various social ideas of Marxism, social reform, and humanitarianism into Korea’s religious thought. Thus, this chapter analyses the digitalized version of the magazine through quantitative approaches to word-frequency and co-occurring words; in particular it employs topic modelling. Because it assigns topics by measuring the probability of keywords rather than simply locating co-occurring words, topic modelling reveals how different topics are semantically interrelated in a larger text. With this method, Chapter 3 examines the interplay between topics of art and literature and society-related themes such as nation, economic classes, and social reconstruction. It pays particular attention to the two topics of saengmyŏng (vitality) and saenghwal (ways of living or livelihood) to examine how Korean writers articulated a proto-type of Marxist realism (saenghwal) out of romanticism (saengmyŏng). In the end, Chapter 3 argues that Kaebyŏk shaped the “prophetic critic” who preemptively combined religious, social, and literary worldviews of the future to create the guiding principles for the realist fiction that would dominate the latter half of the 1920s.

Description: What is persistent pain? How do we communicate pain, not only in words but in visual images and gesture? How do we respond to the pain of another, and can we do it better? Can explaining how pain works help us handle it? This unique compilation of voices addresses these and bigger questions. Defined as having lasted over three months, persistent pain changes the brain and nervous system so pain no longer warns of danger: it seems to be a fault in the system. It is a major cause of disability globally, but it remains difficult to communicate, a problem both to those with pain and those who try to help. Language struggles to bridge the gap, and it raises ethical challenges in its management unlike those of other common conditions. Encountering Pain shares leading research into the potential value of visual images and non-verbal forms of communication as means of improving clinician–patient interaction. It is divided into four sections: hearing, seeing, speaking, and a final series of contributions on the future for persistent pain. The chapters are accompanied by vivid photographs co-created with those who live with pain. The volume integrates the voices of leading scientists, academics and contemporary artists with poetry and poignant personal testimonies to provide a manual for understanding the meanings of pain, for healthcare professionals, pain patients, students, academics and artists. The voices and experiences of those living with pain are central, providing tools for discussion and future research, shifting register between creative, academic and personal contributions from diverse cultures and weaving them together to offer new understanding, knowledge and hope. Praise for Encountering Pain 'This book is the result of a collaborative, multi-disciplinary investigation into the experience of pain and how it might be understood and ameliorated. Deborah Padfield's photographs, made in collaboration with pain sufferers, reveal how an otherwise debilitating, highly subjective and individualising experience might become a topic for intersubjective communication. Through her innovative and experimental photography we learn that the photographic image can potentially play a role in the medical field by addressing 'what is felt' by the patient alongside the usual indexical medical documentation of 'what is there'. In so doing photography may provide a means of sharing perceptual experience and stimulating doctor-patient discussion around the emotional interplay of body and mind. – Gina Glover, a photographic artist working in the fields of health, genetics and science.www.ginaglover.com ‘This is a majestic volume. Visually striking, intellectually challenging, and experientially transformative, this book promises to change how everyone encounters pain.’ – Dr Rob Boddice, Freie Universität Berlin 'From a remarkable variety of disciplinary and cultural perspectives – from medicine and therapy to the creative arts and philosophy – this inspirational and eye-opening collection succeeds in articulating the mysterious and overwhelmingly complex sensory experience that is pain. Pain, the encounters in this volume suggest, defies definition; it is subjective and unpredictable; it can be phantom or real. Through its radical and engaging use of testimonies, Encountering Pain never shies away from metaphor and the unfounded fear, that the allegorising of pain will dilute its reality. Examined through a multitude of verbal and non-verbal paradigms, contributors discuss the physicality of pain and its political, administrative and medical regulation; the body’s trauma and expressiveness; how pain is transmuted into art. The communication of something that resists being expressed straightforwardly in verbal form metamorphoses, as you read this extraordinarily rich and innovative volume, into a metaphor for life itself, for who we are, how we become social beings by developing empathy and respect for the pain of others, for how we develop and then question through these interactions our sense of identity.' – Professor Stella Bruzzi, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, UCL ‘Deborah Padfield's book, Perceptions of Pain (2003), introduced a ground-breaking strategy through which photography became an effective tool to interpret pain – an aspect of human experience that can, so often, appear inexplicable. The powerful images in this book are further evidence of the collaborative strength of photography and its special ability to give voice to those who are excluded.’ – Dewi Lewis, Publisher 'A work that brings photographic, figurative and poetic images of chronic pain to the clinic and demonstrates how visual, communicative frameworks can re-voice experiences and diagnoses of pain. This major, deeply reflective collection of papers represents a turning-point in defining the multifaceted importance of painscapes in clinical, therapeutic, and humanistic advocacy work. It firmly situates the arts and humanities, alongside the sciences, in responding to the pressing need for new strategies to alleviate chronic pain.' - Prof Brian Hurwitz, Emeritus Professor of Medicine and the Arts, King's College London 'Pain and its ever-increasing numbers of sufferers inhabit a kind of night world isolated from the “normal” day world. 'A bandage hides the place where each is living', W.H. Auden once wrote, while we, the healthy, 'stand elsewhere’. Encountering Pain is an attempt to narrow this rift by making sure sufferers are heard, seen, and able to speak again – so that they might be better understood. Padfield and Zakrzewska have assembled an impressive team of patients, healthcare providers, artists and academicians, all determined to make pain more visible and communicable. The authors compellingly demonstrate that language -- whether in the form of words, gestures or images – is a necessary first step towards alleviating pain. That it can often be as powerful as medicine. '- Dr David Biro, Associate Clinical Professor of Dermatology at SUNY Health Science Center @ Brooklyn and author of The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief.

Description: This volume is based on the section “Transnationalities – Transidentities – Hybridities – Diasporization”, organized by the Ibero-American and Francophone Research Centres of the University of Leipzig as part of the First Annual Conference of the Centre for Area Studies at the University of Leipzig. By now, already a decade has passed since our conference section took place and it is due to various circumstances that this volume has not been published earlier. It carries along, in some sense, its own migration trace. Nevertheless, the questions examined in the contributions have reached even more relevance since then in both, the Old World and the New, due to the various political, social, economic and ecological crisis around the globe that have led to the increased arrival of refugees to Europe and the harsh discussion about a concrete or “intelligent” wall to shield the USA from Latin American migrants, among others. Today, there is an urgent political and social need for concepts of living together in much more heterogeneous and much less familiar societies. The questions, notions and cases explored in the nine contributions that comprise this publication focus on this emergency.

Description: The Modernist Anthropocene examines how modernist writers forged new and innovative ways of responding to rapidly changing planetary conditions and emergent ideas about nonhuman life, environmental change and the human species. Drawing on ecocritical analysis, posthumanist theory, archival research and environmental history, this book resituates key works of modernist fiction within the ecological moment of the early twentieth century, a period in which new configurations of the relationship between human life and the natural world were migrating between the sciences, philosophy and literary culture. The author makes the case that the early twentieth century is pivotal in our understanding of the Anthropocene both as a planetary epoch and a critical concept. In doing so, he positions James Joyce, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf as theorists of the modernist Anthropocene, showing how their oeuvres are shaped by, and actively respond to, changing ideas about the nonhuman that continue to reverberate today.

Description: Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces. Taking her cues from early Internet ethnographies that stress the importance of treating the Internet as both a site and product of cultural production, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies, Niki Akhavan traces key developments and confronts conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular. Akhavan focuses largely on the years between 1998 and 2012 to reveal a diverse and combative virtual landscape where both geographically and ideologically dispersed individuals and groups deployed Internet technologies to variously construct, defend, and challenge narratives of Iranian national identity, society, and politics.l

Description: All over the world new ideas and models emerge on how to organize the higher education sector and its institutions. The contributions in this volume identify the most influential transnational models and investigate their origins and mechanisms of dissemination as well as the resulting consequences for national systems. Will global trends in higher education lead to homogeneity or will they result in an increased differentiation? This question is addressed by higher education researchers with very different disciplinary and national backgrounds. Contributors are, among others, Jürgen Enders, John W. Meyer, Christine Musselin and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson.

Description: Changing the Course of AIDS is an in-depth evaluation of a new and exciting way to create the kind of much-needed behavioral change that could affect the course of the global health crisis of HIV/AIDS. This case study from the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic demonstrates that regular workers serving as peer educators can be as—or even more—effective agents of behavioral change than experts who lecture about the facts and so-called appropriate health care behavior. After spending six years researching the response of large South African companies to the epidemic that is decimating their workforce as well as South African communities, David Dickinson describes the promise of this grassroots intervention—workers educating one another in the workplace and community—and the limitations of traditional top-down strategies. Dickinson's book takes us right into the South African workplace to show how effective and yet enormously complex peer education really is. We see what it means when workers directly tackle the kinds of sexual, gender, religious, ethnic, and broader social and political taboos that make behavior change so difficult, particularly when that behavior involves sex and sexuality. Dickinson's findings show that people who are not officially health care experts or even health care workers can be skilled and effective educators. In this book we see why peer education has so much to offer societies grappling with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and why those interested in changing behaviors to ameliorate other health problems like obesity, alcoholism, and substance abuse have so much to learn from the South African example.

Description: Despite frequent protests and abounding discussions about the subject, climate action measures to counter human-made climate change have so far remained largely ineffective. By identifying profound climate-cultural differences, Sarah Kessler offers an explanation to this issue and shows that conventional assumptions of an implicit consensus on the need to prioritise climate action should be reconsidered. She uncovers climate-cultural variations in (implicit and explicit) denial of climate change and thus challenges existing approaches that treat the German public as a unified entity waiting to be activated by the right kind of rationally convincing information.