City of Children

Francesco Tonucci, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council, Italy

ISBN: 978-1-62273-763-5
Availability: Forthcoming

The city, born as a place of meeting and exchange, has for several decades taken as a default model the strong citizen, man, adult and worker, thereby transforming into a hostile space for the weakest: the elderly, the disabled, the poor and the children. The automobile, the toy of choice for the privileged citizen, is also taken to be the senior citizen of the city, thus endangering the health, aesthetics and mobility of the commonweal. This book proposes a new philosophy of city governance that takes children as the default citizens, with the confidence that a city sensitive to the needs of childhood will be healthier for everybody. This work recovers elements of the 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child that recognize the full citizenship of children to suggest two principle axioms for optimal city design: the participation of children in city governance and the restitution of their autonomy, which allows them to stay with their friends and play freely. Boys and girls, in this way, represent all those excluded from decisions and power. This book is primarily written for politicians and city managers so that they can take on board the ideas within. Yet it is also important for teachers and parents so that they can respect the rights provided in the convention. City of Children should be made available to students on teacher-training courses, and also to the children who are the book’s true protagonists. At present, more than two hundred cities in Spain, Italy, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Lebanon have joined this project. This book is a translation of "La Ciudad de los Niños" and was translated as part of the Bridging Language and Scholarship initiative. The English edition by Vernon Press follows previous editions of this important work in Italian and the four languages of the Spanish nation (Galego, Basque, Catalan and Castilian) to make available for the first time this important work to a broader international audience.

Negotiating Waters: Seas, Oceans and Passageways in the Colonial and Postcolonial Anglophone World

Edited by André Dodeman, University of Grenoble Alpes, France and Nancy Pedri, Memorial University of Newfoundland

ISBN: 978-1-62273-758-1
Availability: Available 4 weeks
212pp. ¦ $60 £45 €51

This book examines how seas, oceans, and passageways have shaped and reshaped cultural identities, spurred stories of reunion and separation, and redefined entire nations. It explores how entire communities have crossed seas and oceans, voluntarily or not, to settle in foreign lands and undergone identity, cultural and literary transformations. It also explores how these crossings are represented. The book thus contributes to oceanic studies, a field of study that asks how the seas and oceans have and continue to affect political (narratives of exploration, cartography), international (maritime law), identity (insularity), and literary issues (survival narratives, fishing stories). Divided into three sections, Negotiating Waters explores the management, the crossings, and the re-imaginings of the seas and oceans that played such an important role in the configuration of the colonial and postcolonial world and imagination. In their careful considerations of how water figures prominently in maps, travel journals, diaries, letters, and literary narratives from the 17th century onwards, the three thematic sections come together to shed light on how water, in all of its shapes and forms, has marked lands, nations, and identities. They thus offer readers from different disciplines and with different colonial and postcolonial interests the possibility to investigate and discover new approaches to maritime spaces. By advancing views on how seas and oceans exert power through representation, Negotiating Waters engages in important critical work in an age of rising concern about maritime environments.

Machinima – Socio-Cultural Disturbance

Tracy Gaynor Harwood, De Montfort University and Ben Grussi

ISBN: 978-1-62273-273-9
Availability: Forthcoming

Since its birth in 1996, machinima (machine-cinema) has grown into a truly global phenomenon – and its latest transformation is evident in the Lets Play community. Machinima is the first digital culture to have emerged from the internet into a mainstream creative genre and it has taken shape as an important fan culture. Its impact has been felt across many aspects of popular culture and its influence can be found in contexts such as the arts and cinema, performance, creative technologies and social media, politics and citizenship. This book traces its history and impacts through a selection of the most culturally significant works. It firstly sets out to describe the key films, provides an overview of the creative processes and interviews with filmmakers and contributors involved in their development. It then traces their release and impact among fans, users and appropriators, supported with material and interviews. This important new work focuses on the specific disruptive socio-cultural impacts of key works identified by the community and Harwood research over a period of 10 years – from film and filmmaking to digital arts, practice and theory. The book will be of interest to machinima researchers and practitioners, including game culture, media theorists and digital artists, and those interested in how creative technologies influences communities of practice over time.

Love is Green: Compassion as responsibility in the ecological emergency

Lucy Weir

ISBN: 978-1-62273-372-9
Availability: Available 4 weeks
244pp. ¦ $61 £46 €52

This book links three themes, non-dualistic agency, ‘the good’ of systems, and compassionate attunement, and relates them to the ecological emergency. The author begins by examining how we currently understand our ability to choose what we do, our agency and conclude that this is dualistic: we think of an action to do, and then we physically act. Yet an understanding that we are enmeshed in context means our capacity to act freely dissolves in the mesh. We evolved capacities for consciousness and awareness, capacities that allow us to realise that we are here, now but that do not inevitably imply choice. Our capacity for ‘realisation’ gives us the ability to elicit an emotional response. When we understand our enmeshment, we can attune to a deep compassion for ourselves and indeed for all systems unfolding through time. Compassionate attunement allows a different set of options for action to become available to us. This then shifts how we respond to ourselves, our human relationships and to the ecological emergency, we are currently embroiled in. This work is inspired by the great Kamakura Zen Master Eihei Dōgen. The book’s contribution is to extend and link the notion of practice-realisation with the literature on evolutionary biology and entropy maximisation which allows us to speak of ‘the good’ of systems. Systems unfold as ‘good’ for us when biodiversity maximisation occurs. By considering the ecological emergency in light of compassionate attunement, we open ourselves to a new array of possibilities for action. Some of these the author outlines in the conclusion, relating them to existing literature on compassionate achievement and compassionate communication, to show how our this practice shifts our relationship to ourselves, to one another, and to the ecological emergency, thus changing the course of human history.

Reason, causation and compatibility with the phenomena

Basil Evangelidis

June 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-755-0
Availability: In stock
207pp. ¦ $60 £45 €51

'Reason, Causation and Compatibility with the Phenomena' strives to give answers to the philosophical problem of the interplay between realism, explanation and experience. This book is a compilation of essays that recollect significant conceptions of rival terms such as determinism and freedom, reason and appearance, power and knowledge. This title discusses the progress made in epistemology and natural philosophy, especially the steps that led from the ancient theory of atomism to the modern quantum theory, and from mathematization to analytic philosophy. Moreover, it provides possible gateways from modern deadlocks of theory either through approaches to consciousness or through historical critique of intellectual authorities. This work will be of interest to those either researching or studying in colleges and universities, especially in the departments of philosophy, history of science, philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and quantum mechanics, history of ideas and culture. Greek and Latin Literature students and instructors may also find this book to be both a fascinating and valuable point of reference.