Inter/Connexions – förlag

It has been argued that situational and experiential factors provide a moral lens through which people judge the morality or otherwise of actions. The research presented within this volume takes this a step further and illustrates that individual differences may interact with these situational and experiential factors to explain the acquisition of positive attitudes towards immoral behaviour. Here the presence of propaganda promoting immoral cognitions interacts with the moral personality (moral identity) of individuals, with those exposed to propaganda and with low moral identity most likely to develop extreme immoral attitudes. This does have implications for the way we think about the role of context in shaping decision-making.

Painful Conversations emerges from a meeting of practitioners, scholars and artists. The task was to make sense of pain. Problems to communicate pain were discussed, and attempts to explain and understand pain from theological and philosophical perspectives were presented. 'It's not about the pain on my hands, but the pain in my heart,' says a crucified penitent in one of the chapters. A statement exemplifying pain's ambiguous character: being something both physical and psychical, necessary for survival and a means to reach wisdom - and still it hurts so bad. Examples from fake Holocaust biographies, terminal care and medical treatment, mortification in seventeenth-century Italy, voluntary self-sacrifice and self-injury, and the writings of Emerson and Joyce were used to provide a solution to the task, to make sense of pain.

Look into the dark mirror of the Gothic text and you will become aware of the strange and uncanny aspects of familiar spaces. The twelve chapters in this collection are enquiries into the nature of Gothic spatiality, exploring Gothic spaces from Italy to Cornwall to small-town USA, looking at Gothic locations like the London suburbs and a remote mining town in the Indian jungle, or Gothic buildings like the Paris opera, the haunted high-rise buildings of Finnish suburbia, or a semi-abandoned North-American motel. Reading Gothic spaces as reflections of various cultures, the contributors not only explore Gothic localities, which possess the potential to raise a number of critical questions, but also examine Gothic mind-sets like those evoked by enclosed, segregated, remote, lonely, haunted, strange or suddenly unfamiliar spaces. Bringing together a variety of critical perspectives, the collection will be of interest to academics and students interested in the Gothic, literary and cultural studies, film and media studies as well as creative writing and popular culture.

Introducing a series of reflections on different cultural and disciplinary perspectives through which madness is observed, experienced, examined and treated. This book explores the role of history in explaining madness; lay people's understanding of psychic disorder as 'mental suffering', academic philosophical discourses compared and woven together with personal experiences of madness; madness as a subtext to conflict, precariousness and struggle for identity; the globalisation of the depression 'industry'; the notion of intent in suicide; specific interpretations of classical works of literature; the links between emotional disorders and rationality; and the dynamics and activities of those who suffer from psychic disorders where viewpoints that are normally marginalised and concealed by medical expert opinions, are transformed into exercises of meaningful citizenship.

From practitioners concerned with post-traumatic stress syndrome in soldiers to theorists exploring testimony and Holocaust survivors it is apparent that war, trauma and memory are closely related concerns. Utilizing varied disciplinary approaches and artifacts crossing modern history, this volume engages the following questions: Do trauma narratives enable us to address the unspeakability of war? How do they complicate our reaction to war? What is the link between the impulse to memorialize war and the traumatic experience of war? What is the relationship between war trauma and national identity? Unit One in this volume addresses commemoration as a means of both individual and collective response to trauma. Unit Two considers how literature and film bear witness, how they re-imagine war trauma, presenting it for an audience that might not otherwise understand that trauma. The final unit examines how identity is shaped by trauma and how that shaping is expressed in narrative.

The first volume of the two-volume book publication entitled "Multiculturalism, Conflict and Belonging", which stems out of the four-day international conference under the same title organized by Interdisciplinary.Net at Mansfield College, Oxford University, in September 2012, aims not only at exploring the concepts of "identity", "difference" and "belonging" from a theoretical perspective, but more importantly at relating them empirically to multicultural contexts that shed a better light on the concepts in question. Both volumes are composed of chapters under various themes that provide an analytical analysis on how individuals choose and shift from one identity to the other as well as how they voluntarily and involuntarily belong to one or the other group thus shaping the very fabrics of a multicultural environment. This first volume entitled "Identity, Difference and Belonging" is composed of nine chapters that are divided under two main themes, namely: (1) Making and Negotiating Identities: Education, Religion and Culture; and (2) Making Identities: Cultural Representations.

How have our social and cultural perspectives of humanity been influenced by cyberculture? How do our concepts of self and identity change when we interact in cyberspace? How does science fiction reflect or inform our technorganic environment? The increasing human interface with machines is an expanding area of interest for social and cultural theorists and stimulates a socially influential sphere of cultural, political and economic action and interaction. This book generates multiple inquiries into how these technologies influence and/or redesign our social and political landscapes, offering new conceptions of self and community. The chapters that make up this book offer a multidisciplinary survey of just some of the issues and developments humanity's interaction and integration with cyberculture, cyberspace and science fiction can reveal.

New Human Fictions addresses a range of themes relating to life in our digitally networked age. With contributions by emerging and established scholars from around the world, the chapters collected here explore intersections of cyberspaces and human communities. Video games, science fiction, architecture, viral videos, films, and digital spaces are surveyed; hybrid bodies and cyborg cultures are examined; and traditional distinctions between mind and body, human and machine, and real and virtual are happily disrupted. Three general themes develop throughout this book; these three themes focus on the programmable human, technology and the body, and the impact of technology on cultural forms and artefacts. The chapters collected here are often difficult, but through careful and generous reading they suggest strategies for living alongside and within our new human fictions.

"In a world of continual conflict, rethinking the way we communicate with other cultures, religions, or nations is of paramount importance. Standing in the way is the unconscious assumption that our own views reflect ‘the way things are’ – an assumption both inefficient and harmful. The Way Things Aren’t: Deconstructing ‘Reality’ to Facilitate Communication explores communication as a meeting point between different perceptions of reality, presenting how our assumptions and convictions hinder effective communication with those who are different from us. Featuring case examples from Somalia, Romania, and other regions, the chapters describe how authorities and the media often create ‘reality’ to relegate some people, cultures, languages, or religions to ‘the wrong side of the tracks’.Featuring scholars and practitioners from many disciplines, this discussion challenges readers with the idea that in order to remain open for new perspectives we must be aware that things are not always ’the way things are‘. "

Philosophical discussions on beauty have a long history. The discussions manifest the ambiguity of the concept; meanings of beauty and its role as an explanatory power of diverse tangible and intangible phenomena vary between disciplines and theoretical points of view. What is the essence of beauty? The notions of beauty comprises opposing qualities by being simultaneously a timeless idea penetrating all cultures and a profoundly historical concept, whose focuses, definitions, and contents change in the process of time and vary between different cultural contexts. The significance of beauty for man is undeniable: it is a driving force in cultural production and creative thinking and a source of diverse emotions ranging from exhilaration to religious devoutness. Philosophies of Beauty on the Move investigates the essence of beauty by exploring its ontological and epistemological terms of existence in order to understand the paradoxes of beauty.