Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions – serie

Do witches and witchcraft represent our understanding of how women who threaten the patriarchy are demonised?If to be born female is to be born deviant, how deviant is a body transformed to be female?There are few explorations of whether power exercised by women is as robust as that exercised by men, and therefore whether it is more open to abusive use. This fascinating anthology examines these questions through the lens of literary critique, history, criminology, and psychology to explore another representation of women - in relation to how they abuse power, or how they react when they are the victims of that abuse. With themes ranging from the personal consideration of female bodies, to the supernatural hidden realm, to the public condemnation of women who fall foul of either the law or of a male-dominated world, this collection of interdisciplinary essays provides an in-depth look at the fate of women who abuse or are abused by power.

Moving Spaces and Places is about movement as a transformative experience, showing how movement changes affect and percept of spaces and place and solidifies space into meaningful places. The cross-disciplinary contributions in this collection – brought together by aesthetics and artistic practices and embodied and participatory research approaches – illustrate how the physical act of moving and the psychological experience of movement are inextricably interwoven.Traversing the knowledge domains and practices of culture, art, pedagogy, geography, architecture, and city planning, the chapters reveal the diversity of the study of movement in relation to space and place; as a way of setting things in motion, as a psychological act of agency, and as a way to reflect, instantiate, and eventually reconcile—and even heal—relationships between people, spaces, and places. This multi-layered investigation of movement takes temporal, physical, and psychological transformation as its conceptual core, and appeals to a myriad of readers ranging from architectural practitioners and urban planners to activists, artists and geographers.

While 'space' and 'place' appear as key concepts in the study of culture, their complexity and mutability require ever-new frameworks when approaching them critically. Including chapters by authors from different fields, career stages, and geopolitical backgrounds, the contributors in this edited collection scrutinize the changing dynamics of space and place in relation to current political, social, and environmental urgencies across the globe.With chapters investigating both real and imaginary spaces and places, the diversified discussions included in this collection provide a cohesive study for disclosing latent understandings of multiple phenomena characterizing the world in which we live. From the protests in Egyptian and Turkish squares, to the power-related narratives embedded in institutional buildings, from the development of the commercial arena in Victorian and Edwardian London, to the effects of current environmental concerns on the evaluation of urban and rural locations, the volume ultimately serves as a progressive connection of fields, minds, and outlooks through an innovative, pluralistic vision.This interdisciplinary focus not only emphasizes the centrality of spaces and places when disentangling the complexities comprising our past and present, but also suggests a more pluralistic approach for exploring fundamental concepts in future spaces and places studies.

Monsters show us our deepest fears and anxieties, our discomfort with difference, and our simultaneous repulsion with and fascination for the other. Understanding that the concept of the monster can be a political tool used to dehumanize opponents and a psychological tool that can help us reconsider our beliefs, Interdisciplinary Essays on Monsters and the Monstrous analyses and explores the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human societies.Introducing the innovative practice of “imagining monsters” as a way to rethink the key organizing principles in our society that we have traditionally taken for granted, the authors explore not only what monsters are but, most importantly, what monsters reveal about us. This cutting-edge collection of chapters challenges us to contradict worldviews, such as the binary of gender, that have organized our thinking for millennia. Showcasing discussions loaded with ontological, ideological, socio-political, and aesthetic implications, the monstrous is rendered uncannily familiar as our own public and domestic socio-political and psycho-emotional realities are subjected to scrutiny.Launching a critical question: when faced with an existential threat, what can we do? The authors show us how the study of monsters and monstrosity is perfectly positioned to answer. Tackling this question from a unique interdisciplinary scope, the research presented in the chapters are interesting reading for a variety of researchers interested in monsters and the monstrous from across sub-disciplines.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.Gender Violence, the Law, and Society analyses and explores the historical and cultural roots of issues of gender-based and sexual violence in Japan, India and South Africa. Using a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods, this edited collection highlights the intersection of marginalized gender and sexual identities – such as raped women, gay men and women who are victims of commodified violence – and marginalized geographic areas.Taking a structured and holistic approach, the chapters authors break down issues across three levels: violence, state, and society. By exploring case studies from the three selected geographical areas, both the roots and effects and related organization and belief systems are explored in their relations to the issues of sexual and gendered violence. The chapters expose and consider the complexities and nuances in each country in terms of their varying cultural practices, their religious and caste systems, and racial disparities, whilst exploring and expanding the understanding of the concept of violence itself.Gender Violence, the Law, and Society takes an important step towards synthesizing area-specific issues and knowledge into a more comprehensive and global body of knowledge on the apparently universal appearances of forms of sexual and gendered violence.

A ‘good woman’ is hard to find. To be ‘good’, after all, women face expectations that are shifting, internally contradictory, emotionally extreme, and prospectively even deadly. To be divergent, on the other hand, is an expansive position, encompassing cackling witches, childfree women, struggling mothers, insecure teenagers, and persecuted innocents. Exploring divergent women from a variety of critical and creative perspectives, this edited collection puts forth a dialogic discussion of how non-conforming women are coded as ‘evil’, and asks, what happens when women choose to be divergent?Delving into reflective and auto-ethnographic perspectives which explore subjective responses to the influence of the representation and treatment of evil women, Divergent Women is ultimately a celebratory reclamation of the concept of feminine transgression.Featuring perspectives from North Korea to Victorian England, from Biblical to digital narratives, this boundary breaking text demonstrates that divergent women have complex inner lives, agencies, and a unique ability to inspire other women to resist social sanctions. Encompassing global perspectives and bringing together artistic and academic work, the authors invite readers to explore the possibilities for divergence that exist under the label of womanhood.

Embodied encounters with death affect humans deeply, with the power to crush, transform and strengthen individuals and relationships. Understanding that these encounters often have a musical accompaniment, this edited collection offers a range of critical, analytic, discursive and personal reflections on how music provides both a container and a medium for experiencing, processing and integrating embodied encounters with death.The collection showcases new and original interdisciplinary case studies written by authors from several different countries across Australia, France, The Netherlands, Poland and the UK. Taking an international, interdisciplinary and inclusive approach, this carefully curated collection elaborates embodied encounters with death through music across a variety of praxes and disciplines such as death & grief, queer studies, disability, philosophy, and more. Providing a mix of personal perspectives and insights on the impact of music and death alongside more conventional academic studies, the chapters reveal how music and human nature are intimately, and bodily, entwined.Framed by opening and closing chapters written by the team of three editors, this core text in the field provides a unique overview of the implications and ramifications of the embodiment of death through music and the musicalisation of death through the body, and signposts possibilities for further research.

Engaging with the complex natures of space and belonging, Migrations and Diasporas provides a means for understanding the plight of migrants and diasporas as they move through a world divided between those committed to welcoming them into their communities and those who perceive them as a problem or threat.Split into two parts, chapters address a range of critical issues, including the inclusive practices of both state and non-state actors, practices of exclusion expressing xenophobia and nativist policies that can jeopardize migrant safety, and the geographies and spaces that can restore lost histories, as well as help migrants negotiate new boundaries. Capturing institutional and organized civil society practices, the authors build an understanding of the struggles and challenges migrants and diasporas face, including climate change, assimilation, and complex legal systems. Grounded in a rich interdisciplinarity, contributors bring together perspectives from international relations, political science, law, philosophy, development economics, peace and conflict studies, forest and food sciences, linguistics, pedagogy, and human geography, as well as contexts across the United States, Australia, Europe, Honduras, Canada, New Zealand, Lebanon, Ukraine, Syria, and Armenia, from the Trump era to the Rwandan genocide.Advocating for a more welcoming world involves respecting the human dignity and fundamental rights of all individuals, regardless of their place of origin or immigration status. This perspective offers a powerful insight into the dynamics of social justice across borders.

Music is often our companion when dealing with the incomprehensibility of loss, and yet death and dying are topics that are rarely discussed or analysed in the academic space, especially in combination with music studies. This edited collection examines several ways in which diverse music cultures and societies imagine, express and provide a means of coping with death, grief and remembrance. Written from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including both personal essays and academic studies, the nine chapters are divided into three subsections focusing respectively on mourning, underground scenes, and performance. The authors speak to the multifarious and complex ways in which music accompanies, supplements, and complements aspects of death and dying, whether this is the death of a loved one, or a celebrity from popular culture. The book cuts across disciplines such as musicology, death studies, funeral studies, cultural studies, media studies, celebrity studies, sociology, anthropology and theology, and includes perspectives from Australia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States.