This book compares how British and Spanish media have covered the French ban on hijab wearing in public schools. Using interdisciplinary approaches ranging from social psychology, semiology, cognitive linguistics and sociology, it seeks to explain how the hijab is interpreted as a sign by the mainstream culture, and hijab-wearing Muslim sub-culture. Based on an analysis of 108 articles published in the national newspaper from each context, this comparative study operates on two levels: a micro-level analysis of within-culture variations between mainstream culture and the hijab-wearing women; and a macro-level analysis of the cross-cultural variation between the British context and the Spanish one. The result is a profound insight into how each discourse reveals the different level of social integration of hijab-wearing women in these two different contexts. The Analysis methodology combines between Critical Discourse Analysis CDA, Conceptual Metaphor Theory CMT, and Cognitive Linguistics CL. The book introduces a novel analysis methodology for social and linguistic sciences. It is the Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis methodology CCDA.

The Anthropology of Digital Practices connects for the first time three distinct research areas – digital ethnography, causal ethnography, and media practice theory – to explore how we might track the effects of new media practices in a digital world. It invites media and communication students and scholars to overcome the field’s old aversion to ‘media effects’ and explores the messy, complex, open-ended effects of new media practices in a digital age. Based on long-term ethnographic research and drawing from recent advances in the study of causality and ethnography, this book tells the ‘formation story’ of the anti-woke movement through a series of critical media events. It argues that digital media practices (e.g. podcasting, YouTubing, tweeting, commenting, broadcasting) will have ‘formative’ effects on an emerging social world at different points in time. One important task of the digital ethnographer is precisely to distinguish between the formative and non-formative effects of specific media practices. This book makes three contributions to our understanding of media practices in the digital era, namely a theoretical, methodological, and empirical contribution. Theoretically, it furthers the ‘practice turn’ in media and communication studies by engaging with the latest thinking on causality and ethnography. Methodologically, it serves as a compelling, up-to-date guide to doing digital ethnography, with special reference to the study of digitally mediated practices. Empirically, it is the first book-length study of the anti-woke movement, a major actor in the ‘culture wars’ currently being fought across the Western world. With its accessible language and rich case studies, The Anthropology of Digital Practices will make an ideal supplementary textbook for a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in research methods, digital ethnography/anthropology, and digital activism.

Heated debates about Muslim women's veiling practices have regularly attracted the attention of European policymakers over the last decade. The headscarf has been both vehemently contested by national and/or regional governments, political parties and public intellectuals and passionately defended by veil wearing women and their supporters. Systematically applying a comparative perspective, this book addresses the question of why the headscarf tantalises and causes such controversy over issues about religious pluralism, secularism, neutrality of the state, gender oppression, citizenship, migration, and multiculturalism. Seeking also to establish why the issue has become part of the disciplinary practices of some European countries but not of others, this work brings together an important collection of interpretative research regarding the current debates on the veil in Europe, offering an interdisciplinary scope and European-wide setting. Brought together through a common research methodology, the contributors focus on the different religious, political and cultural meanings of the veiling issue across eight countries and develop a comparative explanation of veiling regimes. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of religion & politics, gender studies and multiculturalism.

Despite the growing importance of heroines across literary culture—and sales figures that demonstrate both young adult and adult females are reading about heroines in droves, particularly in graphic novels, comic books, and YA literature—few scholarly collections have examined the complex relationships between the representations of heroines and the changing societal roles for both women and men. In Heroines of Comic Books and Literature: Portrayals in Popular Culture, editors Maja Bajac-Carter, Norma Jones, and Bob Batchelor have selected essays by award-winning contributors that offer a variety of perspectives on the representations of heroines in today’s society. Focused on printed media, this collection looks at heroic women depicted in literature, graphic novels, manga, and comic books. Addressing heroines from such sources as the Marvel and DC comic universes, manga, and the Twilight novels, contributors go beyond the account of women as mothers, wives, warriors, goddesses, and damsels in distress. These engaging and important essays situate heroines within culture, revealing them as tough and self-sufficient females who often break the bounds of gender expectations in places readers may not expect. Analyzing how women are and have been represented in print, this companion volume to Heroines of Film and Television will appeal to scholars of literature, rhetoric, and media as well as to broader audiences that are interested in portrayals of women in popular culture.

This masterful work brings together the crème de la crème of EU law academics and practitioners in celebration of Eleanor Sharpston, KC. As one of the foremost Advocates General serving the Court of Justice, her opinions shaped various aspects of EU procedural and substantive law. Many of them have quickly become classics (Zambrano, Sturgeon, Miles, Bougnaoui, and Farell II) and they do and will continue to shape EU law now and for decades to come. Her contribution and legacy is expertly assessed over 6 parts spanning: her career; EU constitutional law; fundamental rights and citizenship; litigation; internal market; and external relations. This is a worthy commentary on a truly remarkable legal legacy.

How do words mean? What is the nature of meaning? How can we grasp a word’s meaning? The frame-semantic approach developed in this book offers some well-founded answers to such long-standing, but still controversial issues. Following Charles Fillmore’s definition of frames as both organizers of experience and tools for understanding, the monograph attempts to examine one of the most important concepts of Cognitive Linguistics in more detail. The point of departure is Fillmore’s conception of “frames of understanding” – an approach to (cognitive) semantics that Fillmore developed from 1975 to 1985. The envisaged Understanding Semantics (“U-Semantics”) is a semantic theory sui generis whose significance for linguistic research cannot be overestimated. In addition to its crucial role in the development of the theoretical foundations of U-semantics, corpus-based frame semantics can be applied fruitfully in the investigation of knowledge-building processes in text and discourse.

The events of September 11, 2001, forever changed the world as we knew it. In their wake, the quest for international order has prompted a reshuffling of global aims and priorities. In a fresh approach, Gilles Kepel focuses on the Middle East as a nexus of international disorder and decodes the complex language of war, propaganda, and terrorism that holds the region in its thrall. The breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 2000 was the first turn in a downward spiral of violence and retribution. Meanwhile, a neo-conservative revolution in Washington unsettled U.S. Mideast policy, which traditionally rested on the twin pillars of Israeli security and access to Gulf oil. In Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, a transformation of the radical Islamist doctrine of Bin Laden and Zawahiri relocated the arena of terrorist action from Muslim lands to the West; Islamist radicals proclaimed jihad against their enemies worldwide. Kepel examines the impact of global terrorism and the ensuing military operations to stem its tide. He questions the United States' ability to address the Middle East challenge with Cold War rhetoric, while revealing the fault lines in terrorist ideology and tactics. Finally, he proposes the way out of the Middle East quagmire that triangulates the interests of Islamists, the West, and the Arab and Muslim ruling elites. Kepel delineates the conditions for the acceptance of Israel, for the democratization of Islamist and Arab societies, and for winning the minds and hearts of Muslims in the West.

Since the early 2010s, an increasing number of European countries have passed laws that prohibit the wearing of various kinds of Islamic veil in particular circumstances. This insightful book considers the arguments used to justify such laws and analyses the legitimacy of these arguments both generally and in regards to whether such laws can be seen as justified interferences with the rights of women who wish to wear such garments.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein. These films, Milo Sweedler argues, give narrative and audiovisual form to the increasingly pervasive sense that the economic system we have known and accepted as inevitable and ubiquitous is in fact riddled with self-destructive flaws. Analyzing four movies from before the global financial crisis of 2008 and two that allegorize the financial meltdown itself, Sweedler explores how cinema responded to one of the defining crises of our time. Films examined include Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), Stephen Gaghan's Syriana (2005), Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener (2005), Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006), Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013).