Shirley Jordan – författare

Cities Interrupted explores the potential of visual culture – in the form of photography, film, performance, architecture, urban design, and mixed media – to strategically interrupt processes of globalization in contemporary urban spaces. Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York, and Paris, the book brings together original essays to reveal how the concept of ’interruption’ in global cities enables new understanding of the forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today’s rapidly transforming urban environments.The idea of ‘interruption’ addressed in this book refers to deliberate interventions in the spaces and communities of contemporary cities – interventions that seek to disrupt or destabilize the experience of everyday urban life through creative practice. Interruption is used as an analytic and conceptual tool to challenge – and explore alternatives to – the narratives of speed, hyper-mobility, rapid growth, and incessant exchange and flow that have dominated critical thinking on global cities.Bringing art and creative practice into the centre of discussions about the future of cities, alongside discussions of development, design, justice, health, sustainability, technology, and citizenship, this book is essential reading for anyone working at the intersections of a range of urban, cultural and visual fields, including urban studies, urban design and architecture, visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, and social and cultural geography.

This volume responds to important questions about the formal properties of literary texts and the agency of form. A central feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone writing has been the exploration of how cultural forms (literary, philosophical and visual) create distinctive semiotic environments and at the same time engage powerfully with external realities. How does form propose a bridge between the environment of the text and the world beyond? What kinds of formal innovations have authors devised in response to the complexity of that world? How do the formal properties of texts inflect our reading of them, and perhaps also our apprehension of the real? In addressing such questions as they apply to a wide corpus of texts, including the novel, life writing, the essay, travel writing, poetry and textual/visual experiments, the chapters in this volume offer new perspectives on a wide range of creative figures including Proust, Picasso, Breton, Bataille, Ponge, Guillevic, Certeau, Camus, Barthes, Perec, Roubaud, Chauvet, Savitzkaya, Eribon, Ernaux, Laurens and Akerman. Collectively, they renew the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and of analysis in French studies.

This volume responds to important questions about the formal properties of literary texts and the agency of form. A central feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone writing has been the exploration of how cultural forms (literary, philosophical and visual) create distinctive semiotic environments and at the same time engage powerfully with external realities. How does form propose a bridge between the environment of the text and the world beyond? What kinds of formal innovations have authors devised in response to the complexity of that world? How do the formal properties of texts inflect our reading of them, and perhaps also our apprehension of the real? In addressing such questions as they apply to a wide corpus of texts, including the novel, life writing, the essay, travel writing, poetry and textual/visual experiments, the chapters in this volume offer new perspectives on a wide range of creative figures including Proust, Picasso, Breton, Bataille, Ponge, Guillevic, Certeau, Camus, Barthes, Perec, Roubaud, Chauvet, Savitzkaya, Eribon, Ernaux, Laurens and Akerman. Collectively, they renew the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and of analysis in French studies.

The women represented in this volume as both authors and protagonists exert power by resisting the social paradigms that govern how they ‘should’ behave – by thwarting expectations of typical ‘feminine’ conduct (whether in relation to female corporeality and sexuality) or by their (non)adherence to the institutions of marriage and motherhood. However, they also claim power by espousing more conventionally ‘feminine’ roles, recuperating and revaluing those that entail caring and nurturing. They emphasise, in ways consistent with the growing body of feminist work on care relations, the positive, life-affirming potential that such roles embody. This volume focuses on women who, through smaller and larger acts of empowerment, seek to exert influence over their life choices. Its diverse contributions acknowledge the contextual, historical and intersectional specificities governing every woman’s power to choose her own present and future, and the important role played by even incremental changes in contributing to a greater sense of personal independence and self-knowledge, without which there can be no meaningful political change.

This book looks at the role of cultural studies and intercultural communication in language learning. The book argues that learners who have an opportunity to stay in the target language country can be trained to do an ethnographic project while abroad. Borrowing from anthropologists' the idea of cultural fieldwork and 'writing culture', language learners develop their linguistic and cultural competence through the study of a local group. This book combines a theoretical overview of language and cultural practices with a description of ethnographic approaches and materials specifically designed for language learners.

This book looks at the role of cultural studies and intercultural communication in language learning. The book argues that learners who have an opportunity to stay in the target language country can be trained to do an ethnographic project while abroad. Borrowing from anthropologists' the idea of cultural fieldwork and 'writing culture', language learners develop their linguistic and cultural competence through the study of a local group. This book combines a theoretical overview of language and cultural practices with a description of ethnographic approaches and materials specifically designed for language learners.