Atlas of Material Worlds is a highly designed narrative atlas illustrating the agency of nonliving materials with unique, ubiquitous, and often hidden influence on our daily lives. Employing new materialism as a jumping-off point, it examines the increasingly blurry lines between the organic and inorganic, engaging the following questions: What roles do nonliving materials play? Might a closer examination of those roles reveal an undeniable agency we have long overlooked or disregarded? If so, does this material agency change our understanding of the social structures, ecologies, economies, cosmologies, technologies, and landscapes that surround us? And, perhaps most importantly, why does material agency matter? This is the story of the world’s driest nonpolar desert, pink flamingos, and cerulean blue lithium ponds; industrial shipping logistics, pudding-like jiggling substrates, and monuments of mud; galactic bodies, radioactive sheep, and the yellowcake of uranium. Put simply, this book dares readers to see the world anew, from material up. Atlas of Material Worlds offers this new relationship to our host environment in a time of mounting crises—accelerating climate change, ballooning socioeconomic inequality, and rising toxic nationalism—uniquely telling materialist stories for practitioners and students in landscape, architecture, and other built environment disciplines.

Despite a growing literature on identity theory in the last two decades, much of its current use in archaeology is still driven toward locating and dating static categories such as ‘Phoenician’, ‘Christian’ or ‘native’. Previous studies have highlighted the various problems and challenges presented by identity, with the overall effect of deconstructing it to insignificance. As the humanities and social sciences turn to material culture, archaeology provides a unique perspective on the interaction between people and things over the long term. This volume argues that identity is worth studying not despite its slippery nature, but because of it. Identity can be seen as an emergent property of living in a material world, an ongoing process of becoming which archaeologists are particularly well suited to study. The geographic and temporal scale of the papers included is purposefully broad to demonstrate the variety of ways in which archaeology is redefining identity. Research areas span from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean, with case studies from the Mesolithic to the contemporary world by emerging voices in the field. The volume contains a critical review of theories of identity by the editors, as well as a response and afterward by A. Bernard Knapp.

Geographic information systems (GIS) have spurred a renewed interest in the influence of geographical space on human behavior and cultural development. Ideally GIS enables humanities scholars to discover relationships of memory, artifact, and experience that exist in a particular place and across time. Although successfully used by other disciplines, efforts by humanists to apply GIS and the spatial analytic method in their studies have been limited and halting. The Spatial Humanities aims to re-orient—and perhaps revolutionize—humanities scholarship by critically engaging the technology and specifically directing it to the subject matter of the humanities. To this end, the contributors explore the potential of spatial methods such as text-based geographical analysis, multimedia GIS, animated maps, deep contingency, deep mapping, and the geo-spatial semantic web.

Mark J.P. Wolf’s study of imaginary worlds theorizes world-building within and across media, including literature, comics, film, radio, television, board games, video games, the Internet, and more. Building Imaginary Worlds departs from prior approaches to imaginary worlds that focused mainly on narrative, medium, or genre, and instead considers imaginary worlds as dynamic entities in and of themselves. Wolf argues that imaginary worlds—which are often transnarrative, transmedial, and transauthorial in nature—are compelling objects of inquiry for Media Studies. Chapters touch on: a theoretical analysis of how world-building extends beyond storytelling, the engagement of the audience, and the way worlds are conceptualized and experienced a history of imaginary worlds that follows their development over three millennia from the fictional islands of Homer’s Odyssey to the present internarrative theory examining how narratives set in the same world can interact and relate to one another an examination of transmedial growth and adaptation, and what happens when worlds make the jump between media an analysis of the transauthorial nature of imaginary worlds, the resulting concentric circles of authorship, and related topics of canonicity, participatory worlds, and subcreation’s relationship with divine Creation Building Imaginary Worlds also provides the scholar of imaginary worlds with a glossary of terms and a detailed timeline that spans three millennia and more than 1,400 imaginary worlds, listing their names, creators, and the works in which they first appeared.

The eleven contributions in this book address the history of contacts and exchanges in the Bronze and Iron Ages within West Asia, extending far beyond the boundaries of the previously defined contact zone of the ‘Ancient Near East’.

Hop on Pop showcases the work of a new generation of scholars—from fields such as media studies, literature, cinema, and cultural studies—whose writing has been informed by their ongoing involvement with popular culture and who draw insight from their lived experiences as critics, fans, and consumers. Proceeding from their deep political commitment to a new kind of populist grassroots politics, these writers challenge old modes of studying the everyday. As they rework traditional scholarly language, they search for new ways to write about our complex and compelling engagements with the politics and pleasures of popular culture and sketch a new and lively vocabulary for the field of cultural studies. The essays cover a wide and colorful array of subjects including pro wrestling, the computer games Myst and Doom, soap operas, baseball card collecting, the Tour de France, karaoke, lesbian desire in the Wizard of Oz, Internet fandom for the series Babylon 5, and the stress-management industry. Broader themes examined include the origins of popular culture, the aesthetics and politics of performance, and the social and cultural processes by which objects and practices are deemed tasteful or tasteless. The commitment that binds the contributors is to an emergent perspective in cultural studies, one that engages with popular culture as the culture that "sticks to the skin," that becomes so much a part of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to examine it from a distance. By refusing to deny or rationalize their own often contradictory identifications with popular culture, the contributors ensure that the volume as a whole reflects the immediacy and vibrancy of its objects of study. Hop on Pop will appeal to those engaged in the study of popular culture, American studies, cultural studies, cinema and visual studies, as well as to the general educated reader. Contributors. John Bloom, Gerry Bloustein, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Diane Brooks, Peter Chvany, Elana Crane, Alexander Doty, Rob Drew, Stephen Duncombe, Nick Evans, Eric Freedman, Joy Fuqua, Tony Grajeda, Katherine Green, John Hartley, Heather Hendershot, Henry Jenkins, Eithne Johnson, Louis Kaplan, Maria Koundoura, Sharon Mazer, Anna McCarthy, Tara McPherson, Angela Ndalianis, Edward O’Neill, Catherine Palmer, Roberta Pearson, Elayne Rapping, Eric Schaefer, Jane Shattuc, Greg Smith, Ellen Strain, Matthew Tinkhom, William Uricchio, Amy Villarego, Robyn Warhol, Charles Weigl, Alan Wexelblat, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

“THE TRUE DIMENSION OF CITIES IS NOT SPACE, BUT TIME” (Konstantinos Doxiadis) This shift from the spatial dimension to that of time, places the focus on the individual’s scale of perception. How individuals spend their time shapes and infuses our environments with meaning, influencing social dynamics and cultural values. The Next Generation EU project exemplifies this shift by integrating lifestyle and environmental sustainability into urban planning. The goal is to facilitate a just transition to a circular economy, redefining not only the physical layout of cities but also the lived experience of its citizens within these evolving spaces. The evolution from the “Citizens’ Sustainable eXperience” to the “Communities’ Sustainable eXperience” , in the interdisciplinary research funded by the European Union, underscores a significant progression from individual to collective experience. UX, rooted in human-centered design, focuses on optimizing products and environments for personal use and satisfaction, CX expands these principles into the realm of more-than-human-centered design, where the focus extends beyond individual users to include wider community interactions and ecosystems. Therefore, the shift from UX to CX in urban planning and design is profoundly ethical. It calls for a paradigm that prioritizes collective well-being and sustainable development, inclusivity and cooperation.

Fieldwork in Landscape Architecture: Methods, Actions, Tools addresses the initial encounters between landscape designer and landscape site, an encounter that determines the entire course of the design process. The book offers a four-part framework (‘what you seek,’ ‘what you carry,’ ‘how you act,’ and ‘what you leave behind’) for learning and practicing fieldwork as a landscape design skill, and contains over sixty first-person accounts by international practitioners and educators about the methods and tools they bring to the field, from drones to dance. The first title of its kind, Fieldwork will be an invaluable resource for students and instructors of landscape architecture, as well as for anyone interested in the practice and experience of direct encounter with real places.

What are the contemporary definitions of materiality and culture and how do they interrelate? This expansive brief is the starting point for this publication, which draws from some of the definitions presented at the Material Worlds Conference, held at the University of Glasgow in 2005. Following the keynote set by Professor Catherine Belsey, participants debated how it is that the real is negotiated and mediated by cultural practice. Those who contributed to this volume seek to examine how the intangible can be made real through different media and how these influence our experience of the world. Furthermore they also ask what it is about the real that resists cultural transcription. Included in these papers are analyses of attempts to inscribe the soul; the ongoing difficulty of propertizing concepts; and the material, sometimes pornographic, manifestations of capitalism and empire. By the end of the conference a concern was expressed that even the antinomy between culture and the real was something which had largely been discursively or ideologically determined and demanded a fundamental revision. This is something which Professor Peter Hallward highlights when he seeks to outline the position of the real in modern philosophy.