Luísa Magalhães – författare

This volume provides innovative perspectives on the scholarly connection between the humanities and happiness, and considers the narrative expressions of happiness and recent investigations about happiness, its metrics, and objective insights about human wellbeing. This volume relates intemporal humanistic values to views across social and behavioural sciences, and thereby covers a broad interdisciplinary frame, from philosophy, psychology, literary studies, to the communication sciences. The philosophers in this volume discuss the achievement of happiness through the cultivation of virtue, as well as the logic of the gift as an experience of personal fulfilment and the fact that happiness is inextricably linked to hope. Their chapters take on the approach of the permanent human struggle to generate global horizons of happiness and thus attain eternal bliss. Scholars from other fields of the humanities and communication sciences consider the positive messages of environmental happiness in virtual platforms, where the Homo digitalis finds happiness at the click of a button, often under the endorsement of celebrities, or under the visual fruition of playful objects. They also present the intertextual memory of happiness as a condition for humanistic research. Finally, this volume considers the sphere of education as the best place in which to apply the results of sustainable happiness measurement and research, and to realize this complementary, humanistic perspective on happiness research.

This book approaches the generic theme of the series – studies in otherness and communication – from the perspectives of urban culture and posthumanist studies. It brings together a broad variety of essays examining the different ways in which agency reinvents itself, whether in the urban space, through the multiple forms and devices of art and culture, or through the relationship with technology and the surrounding environment, as a result of the contemporary conditions of post-humanism and the anthropocene. The sense of becoming other is added through a new paradigm that combines 1) a theoretical-essayistic mode, supported by illustrative cases with 2) the description of artistic processes and literary production. The essays are written by an international group of humanities and social sciences scholars/artists, consisting of Cristina Álvares, Pier Luca Marzo, Edwige Armand, Chiara Mengozzi, Ricardo G. Soeiro, Panagiotis Ferentinos, Mónica Aubán Borrell, Luis Campos Medina, Bill Psarras, Cíntia Sanmartin Fernandes, Micael Herschmann, Mitja Velikonja, Teresa Mora and Tiago Porteiro.

This book offers various perspectives from media studies, interpersonal communication, and intercultural communication on the experience and effects of being othered, excluded, and treated as less than. Its three sections cover: 1) expressions of otherness in everyday life, 2) experiences of otherness in media discourses and 3) strategies against otherness in social interaction. This book challenges the expression of otherness that is frequently related on texts of colonialism and of western social hegemonic characteristic of the Global North, therefore giving voice to perspectives from the Global South, in a pluralistic reading.  The collection of contexts in which the expression of otherness is highlighted in this book, are presented in the perspective of the powerless other. As a receiver involved in a communicative process, the othered individual is approached in relation to his identitarian demonstrations, both in daily life, face-to-face and virtual contexts and in critical situations. These range from households to school and to media environments, therefore enhancing a thorough perspective on the phenomenon of othering in plural contexts.