For as long as Mexicans have emigrated to the United States they have responded creatively to the challenges of making a new home. But although historical, sociological, and other aspects of Mexican immigration have been widely studied, its cultural and artistic manifestations have been largely overlooked by scholars—even though Mexico has produced the greatest number of cultural works inspired by the immigration process. And recently Chicana/o artists have addressed immigration as a central theme in their cultural productions and motifs. Culture across Borders is the first and only book-length study to analyze a wide range of cultural manifestations of the immigration experience, including art, literature, cinema, corridos, and humor. It shows how Mexican immigrants have been depicted in popular culture both in Mexico and the United States—and how Mexican and Chicano/Chicana artists, intellectuals, and others have used artistic means to protest the unjust treatment of immigrants by U.S. authorities. Established and upcoming scholars from both sides of the border contribute their expertise in art history, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and other fields, capturing the many facets of the immigrant experience in popular culture. Topics include the difference between Chicano/a and Mexican representation of immigration; how films dealing with immigrants are treated differently by Mexican, Chicano, and Hollywood producers; the rich literary and artistic production on immigration themes; and the significance of immigration in Chicano jokes. As a first step in addressing the cultural dimensions of Mexican immigration to the United States, this book captures how the immigration process has inspired powerful creative responses on both sides of the border.

Communities across Borders examines the many ways in which national, ethnic or religious groups, professions, businesses and cultures are becoming increasingly tangled together. It show how this entanglement is the result of the vast flows of people, meanings, goods and money that now migrate between countries and world regions. Now the effectiveness and significance of electronic technologies for interpersonal communication (including cyber-communities and the interconnectedness of the global world economy) simultaneously empowers even the poorest people to forge effective cultures stretching national borders, and compels many to do so to escape injustice and deprivation.

This volume explores the challenges and possibilities of research into the European dimensions of popular print culture. Popular print culture has traditionally been studied with a national focus. Recent research has revealed, however, that popular print culture has many European dimensions and shared features. A group of specialists in the field has started to explore the possibilities and challenges of research on a wide, European scale. This volume contains the first overview and analysis of the different approaches, methodologies and sources that will stimulate and facilitate future comparative research. This volume first addresses the benefits of a media-driven approach, focussing on processes of content recycling, interactions between text and image, processes of production and consumption. A second perspective illuminates the distribution and markets for popular print, discussing audiences, prices and collections. A third dimension refers to the transnational dimensions of genres, stories, and narratives. A last perspective unravels the communicative strategies and dynamics behind European bestsellers. This book is a source of inspiration for everyone who is interested in research into transnational cultural exchange and in the fascinating history of popular print culture in Europe.

"'Merging across Borders' offers insight into social, cultural, communicative and political dynamics in complex organizational change processes following mergers and acquisitions; dynamics which have often been neglected in previous research. The book is written by a Nordic research team, and it is based on their extensive field study of a series of cross-border mergers and acquisitions leading to the creation of Nordea, the largest Nordic financial services group today."

How do students' online literacy practices intersect with online popular culture? In this book scholars from a range of countries illustrate and analyze how literacy practices that are mediated through and influenced by popular culture create both opportunities and tensions for secondary and university students.

Books Across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951 is a history of the emotional, ideological, informational, and technical power and meaning of books and libraries in the aftermath of World War II, examined through the cultural reconstruction activities undertaken by the Libraries Section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The book focuses on the key actors and on-the-ground work of the Libraries Section in four central areas: empowering libraries around the world to acquire the books they wanted and needed; facilitating expanded global production of quality translations and affordable books; participating in debates over the contested fate of confiscated books and displaced libraries; and formulating notions of cultural rights as human rights. Through examples from France, Poland, and surviving Jewish Europe, this book provides new insight into the complexities and specificities of UNESCO’s role in the realm of books, libraries, and networks of information exchange during the early postwar, post-Holocaust, Cold War years.

Highlights and explores the ways in which culture acts as a framework organising our experience. The emphasis is placed on the differences across and between cultures and the depths to which these can go.

What exactly does it mean to be a close friend? With smart phones, social media and the Internet, the technical barriers to making new friends and keeping up with old ones have all but disappeared. What remains are more subtle borders resulting from cultural diversity, and these can be much more perplexing to navigate. These cultural differences in close friendships are the primary focus of Friends Beyond Borders.It turns out that we in the U.S. think quite differently about our friendships compared to people in many other cultures around the globe. Cross-cultural research shows that people from various cultures can have very different, even conflicting, ideas about what it means to be a good friend. One's friendly intentions can be seen as patently unfriendly by someone from another culture—they simply wouldn't fit with how others think about, feel about, and behave toward their close friends. In Friends Beyond Borders, Roger Baumgarte demystifies these differing approaches to friendship. He describes six distinct cultural styles of close friendship, each comparing what might be typical in the U.S. with what would be found in contrasting cultures. Although each culture might have a dominant style of friendship, he makes it clear that all six of these styles can be found within any given culture, especially one as diverse as the U.S. You will come away from this book thinking about your own friendships, whether or not they cross cultural borders, in new and creative ways. You might very well gain a renewed enthusiasm for your closest friends. Beyond cultural issues, there's also a chapter devoted to Facebook, taking primarily a social research perspective, attempting to explain and defend clearly and empirically what social media have to do with close friendships. The results of these studies surprised even the author. There's a chapter entitled “Friends make good medicine” which reviews the empirical research demonstrating the numerous benefits, including health benefits, of cultivating close and satisfying friendships. People who regularly make time for their friends tend to live much longer, have lower levels of stress, and are even less likely to catch a cold. These are but a sampling of those benefits.Friends Beyond Borders will inspire you to invest more in your close friendships, and help you to appreciate more fully these important people in your lives. Written with a touch of humor and genuine affection, Friends Beyond Borders offers both a researcher's perspective and numerous personal anecdotes about the roles that culture and gender play in our experience of close friendship.

While gender issues are almost always multidimensional and complex, this book discusses them from a cultural angle and with a focus on crossing borders, to represent their concepts meaningfully and to illuminate their realities as sharply as possible. Its five parts detail specific aspects and issues within that focus, namely communication, literary representation, equality and violence, work and politics, and cross-cultural connections. This combination of a wide topical range with specific discussions of gender issues makes the volume’s insights worthwhile for a wide range of readers, from individuals and groups engaging with current gender challenges, to institutional and political decision-makers entrusted with improving gender relations on national or international levels, up to social, economic or educational institutions empowered to implement such solutions in everyday reality. Its “unity in diversity” contributes to gender and cultural studies by offering considerations and conclusions that are specific and generalizable, theoretically robust and empirically tested, professionally rational and poetically ravishing.

* AWARDED BEST ANTHOLOGY BY THE ART ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND * How has Asia been imagined, represented and transferred both literally and visually across linguistic, geopolitical and cultural boundaries? This book explores the shifting roles of those who produce, critique and translate creative forms and practices, for which distinctions of geography, ethnicity, tradition and modernity have become fluid. Drawing on accounts of modern and contemporary art, film, literature, fashion and performance, it challenges established assumptions of the cultural products of Asia. Special attention is given to the role of cultural translators or 'long-distance cultural specialists' whose works bridge or traverse different worlds, with the inclusion of essays by three important artists who share personal accounts of their experiences creating and showing artworks that negotiate diverse cultural contexts. With contributions from key scholars of Asian art and culture, including art historian John Clark and anthropologist Clare Harris, alongside fresh voices in the field, Asia Through Art and Anthropology will be essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, art history, Asian studies, visual and cultural studies. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The publication of the color plates of works by Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Savanhdary Vongpoothorn is funded by the Australian Government.