Christiana Spens – författare

Lena, a photographer, takes up an offer to escape to a friend’s retreat on a remote Scottish island, where she meets like-minded new friends. But as birds start washing up on the beaches, and the spiritual teachings of the group become ever more consuming, Lena starts to doubt her desire to surrender her old self entirely.Reminiscent of authors such as Shirley Jackson, Emma Cline and Sophie MacIntosh, as well as films like Midsommar and The Wickerman, this is a satirical exploration of the wellness industry, the human desire for escapism, and the ways in which we are all contagious, in the end.The Colony offers a chilling, thought-provoking reflection on how easily utopias can become dystopias.

In an age of PR, public protest and other forms of dissent have lost their meaning and impact. The intense media interest in rioting and political violence, as well as an existing obsession with youth culture, have led to an over-saturation and misrepresentation of what these movements are about. Political protest has become a pantomime where activists are always villains, and therefore the politics of these groups are routinely ignored. By identifying the ways in which publicity has helped and hindered a wide range of movements, Shooting Hipsters will find out the ways in which dissenting groups can thrive and survive in a media-saturated age, as well as describing the common ways that they can be undermined.

In an age of PR, public protest and other forms of dissent have lost their meaning and impact. The intense media interest  in rioting and political violence, as well as an existing obsession with youth culture, have led to an over-saturation and misrepresentation of what these movements are about. Political protest has become a pantomime where activists are always villains, and therefore the politics of these groups are routinely ignored. By identifying the ways in which publicity has helped and hindered a wide range of movements, Shooting Hipsters will find out the ways in which dissenting groups can thrive and survive in a media-saturated age, as well as describing the common ways that they can be undermined.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A philosophical memoir about the deepest and most primal of human emotions, how it controls us all, and how we try to control one another when the stakes are so high.The Fear is a book about what scares us the most, how we live with these threats, and the emotional turmoil they inspire.From gas-lighting to terrorism, and from scapegoating to psychoanalysis, The Fear stares deep into the abyss, searching for the monsters, horrors and spectres that destabilise and haunt us, and finding out what these fears-and how we respond to them-shape us as people and societies.The Fear is a personal and critical exploration of fear and its impact in public and private lives, revealing how our cultural landscape informs and even justifies the way we relate to one another, and how it can set us free. Combining memoir with philosophical reflection on terrorism, psychology, relationships and culture, The Fear is a multi-faceted and poetic response to a subject that plagues us all.

This book explores how terrorists have been portrayed in the Western media, and the wider ideological and social functions of those representations. Developing a theory of scapegoating related to narrative closure, as well as an integrated, genealogical method of intervisuality, the book proposes a new way of thinking about how political images achieve power and influence the public. By connecting modern portrayals of terrorists (post-9/11) with historical and fictional images of villains from Western cultural history, the book argues that the portrayal and punishment of terrorists in the Western media implicitly perpetuates neo-Orientalist attitudes. It also explains that by repeating these narrative patterns through a ritual of scapegoating, Western media coverage of terrorists partakes in a social process that uses punishment, dehumanization and colonialist ideas to purge the iconic ‘villain’, so as to build national unity and sustain hegemonic power following crisis.