The fate of the university has become an object of urgent concern for academics in many disciplines around the globe, as higher education has been commercialized by the global movement to “reform” toward new managerial structures common in business and industry. In English-language academic publishing, the future of the university has attracted the attention of critical theorists, but most works discussing the effects of profit-oriented corporatization on curriculum and pedagogy have focused on North America. Drawing on examples of university restructuring in China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan, Russia, and the United States, these trenchantpersonal essays take global transformation of the university in the age of informatic capital as an urgent question. Prominent scholars in humanities, cultural studies, translation, critical theory and postcolonial studies discuss theemergence of cognitive capitalism, neo-colonialism and the hegemony of academic English, academic freedom, and the rise of new, exploitative regimes of self-management that have implicated the university in a profound reorganization of labor dissolving distinctions between the “mental” and “manual.”

This volume introduces key concepts for a trans/national expansion in the study of culture. Using translation as an analytical category, it explores what is translatable and untranslatable between nation-specific approaches such as British/American cultural studies, German Kulturwissenschaften and other traditions in studying culture. The range of articles included in the book covers both theoretical reflections and specific case studies that analyze the tensions and compatibilities amongst contemporary perspectives on the study of culture. By testing various key concepts – translation, cultural transfer, travelling concepts – this volume reflects on an essential vocabulary and common points of reference for scholars seeking new frameworks and methodologies for the foundation of a trans/national study of culture that is commensurate with the entangled nature of our world society.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Culture collects into a single volume thirty-two state-of-the-art chapters written by international specialists, overviewing the ways in which translation studies has both informed, and been informed by, interdisciplinary approaches to culture. The book's five sections provide a wealth of resources, covering both core issues and topics in the first part. The second part considers the relationship between translation and cultural narratives, drawing on both historical and religious case studies. The third part covers translation and social contexts, including the issues of cultural resistance, indigenous cultures and cultural representation. The fourth part addresses translation and cultural creativity, citing both popular fiction and graphic novels as examples. The final part covers translation and culture in professional settings, including cultures of science, legal settings and intercultural businesses. This handbook offers a wealth of information for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in translation and interpreting studies.

Sonic branding, guerrilla marketing, celebrity endorsements, customer service excellence and multi-channel advertising are just some of the popular sales techniques that currently promote consumerism in contemporary capitalism. Considerable energy is devoted to encouraging consumers to desire new fashions, to celebrate 'good design', to have feelings for brands and to immerse themselves in sensory experiences, without worrying about the ethics of their practices. Work, Consumption and Capitalism looks at how consumption is produced by focusing on the multiple kinds of work that make consumption possible, from advertising creatives to fashion designers, from self-service checkouts to the hippest barista in the coolest coffee shop. The text encourages students to consider the place of consumerism in global capitalism to develop their own answers to the question: How is consumption made possible? This wide-ranging study of the relations between work, consumption and capitalism draws on interdisciplinary research in cultural and economic sociology, history, marketing studies and cultural studies. With research tasks and discussion questions at the end of each chapter and case studies throughout, it stands as an accessible introduction for students of sociology, business and management, media and communication, cultural policy and cultural studies. Listen to a podcast about the book.

The great diversity of ethnicities and languages in Africa encourages a vision of Africa as a fragmented continent, with language maps only perpetuating this vision by drawing discrete language groups. In reality, however, most people can communicate with most others within and across linguistic boundaries, even if not in languages taught or learned in schools. Many disciplines have looked carefully at language movement and change on the continent, but their lack of interaction has prevented the emergence of a cohesive picture of African languages. Tracing Language Movement in Africa gathers eighteen scholars together to offer a truly multidisciplinary representation of language in Africa, combining insights from history, archaeology, religion, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. The resulting volume illuminates commonalities and distinctions in these disciplines' understanding of language change and movement in Africa. The volume is empirical -- aiming to represent language more accurately on the continent -- as well as theoretical. It identifies the theories that each discipline uses to make sense of language movement in Africa in plain terms and highlights the themes that cut across all disciplines: how scholars use data, understand boundaries, represent change, and conceptualize power. The volume is organized to reflect differing conceptions of language that arise from its discipline-specific contributions: that is, tendencies to study changes that consolidate language or those that splinter it, viewing languages as whole or in part. Each contribution includes a short explanation of a discipline's theoretical and methodological approaches to language movement and change to ensure that the chapters are accessible to non-specialists, followed by an illustrative empirical case study. This volume will inspire multidisciplinary conversations around the study of language change in Africa, opening new interdisciplinary dialogue and spurring scholars to adapt the questions, data, and method of other disciplines to the problems that animate their own fields.

The French philosopher Renaud Barbaras remarked that late in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s career, “The phenomenology of perception fulfills itself as a philosophy of expression.” In Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology, Véronique M. Fótiaddresses the guiding yet neglected theme of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. She traces Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how individuals express creative or artistic impulses through his three essays on aesthetics, his engagement with animality and the “new biology” in the second of his lecture courses on nature of 1957–58, and in his late ontology, articulated in 1964 in the fragmentary text of Le visible et l’invisible (The Visible and the Invisible). With the exception of a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Fóti engages with Merleau-Ponty’s late and final thought, with close attention to both his scientific and philosophical interlocutors, especially the continental rationalists. Expression shows itself, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, to be primordial, and this innate and fundamental nature of expression has implications for his understanding of artistic creation, science, and philosophy.

Paola Marrati considers the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as a guiding thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works.

Law’s Trace takes Derrida's reading of Hegel as its point of departure in order to provide a definitive account of the political importance of deconstruction.

Every human being knows that we are walking through life following trails, whether we are aware of them or not. Medieval poets, from the anonymous composer of Beowulf to Marie de France, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Guillaume de Lorris to Petrarch and Heinrich Kaufringer, predicated their works on the notion of the trail and elaborated on its epistemological function. We can grasp here an essential concept that determines much of medieval and early modern European literature and philosophy, addressing the direction which all protagonists pursue, as powerfully illustrated also by the anonymous poets of Herzog Ernst and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Dante’s Divina Commedia, in fact, proves to be one of the most explicit poetic manifestations of the fundamental idea of the trail, but we find strong parallels also in powerful contemporary works such as Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine and in many mystical tracts.

The Hindu-Arabic numeral system (1, 2, 3,…) is one of mankind's greatest achievements and one of its most commonly used inventions. How did it originate? Those who have written about the numeral system have hypothesized that it originated in India; however, there is little evidence to support this claim.This book provides considerable evidence to show that the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, despite its commonly accepted name, has its origins in the Chinese rod numeral system. This system was widely used in China from antiquity till the 16th century. It was used by officials, astronomers, traders and others to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and other arithmetic operations, and also used by mathematicians to develop arithmetic and algebra. Based on this system, numerous mathematical treatises were written.Sun Zi suanjing (The Mathematical Classic of Sun Zi), written around 400 AD, is the earliest existing work to have a description of the rod numerals and their operations. With this treatise as a central reference, the first part of the book discusses the development of arithmetic and the beginnings of algebra in ancient China and, on the basis of this knowledge, advances the thesis that the Hindu-Arabic numeral system has its origins in the rod numeral system. Part Two gives a complete translation of Sun Zi suanjing.In this revised edition, Lam Lay Yong has included an edited text of her plenary lecture entitled “Ancient Chinese Mathematics and Its Influence on World Mathematics”, which was delivered at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Beijing 2002, after she received the prestigious Kenneth O. May Medal conferred by the International Commission on the History of Mathematics. This should serve as a useful and easy-to-comprehend introduction to the book.