What can Italy teach us about our relationships with the nonhuman world in the current socio-environmental crisis? 'Italy and the Ecological Imagination: Ecocritical Theories and Practices' focuses on how Italian writers, activists, visual artists, and philosophers engage with real and fictional environments and how their engagements reflect, critique, and animate the approach that Italian culture has had toward the physical environment and its ecology since late antiquity. Through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the essays collected in this volume explore topics including climate change, environmental justice, animal ethics, and socio-environmental degradation to provide a cogent analysis of how Italian ecological narratives fit within the current transnational debate occurring in the Environmental Humanities. The aim of 'Italy and the Ecological Imagination' is thus to explore non-anthropocentric modes of thinking and interacting with the nonhuman world. The goal is to provide accounts of how Italian historical records have potentially shaped our environmental imagination and how contemporary Italian authors are developing approaches beyond humanism in order to raise questions about the role of humans in a possible (or potentially) post-natural world. Ultimately, the volume will offer a critical map of Italian contributions to our contemporary investigation of the relationships between human and nonhuman habitats and communities.

This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of Occupations flooding across cities in American, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples over twenty authors analyse, explain and helps us understand the movement. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation and maintenance of opposition. The novelties of these movements, along with their radical positioning and the urgency of their claims all demand analysis. This book investigates the crucial questions of how and why this form of action spread so rapidly and so widely, how the inclusive discourse of ‘the 99%’ matched up to the reality of the practice. It is vital to understand not just the choice of tactics and the vitality of protest camps in public spaces, but also how the myriad of challenges and problems were negotiated. This book was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

This volume explores the Italian contribution to the current global phenomenon of a “return to reality” by examining the country’s rich cultural production in literature and cinema. The focus is particularly on works from the period spanning the Nineties to the present day which offer alternatives to notions of reality as manufactured by the collusion between the neo-liberal state and the media. The book also discusses Italy’s relationship with its own cultural past by investigating how Italian authors deal with the return of the specter of Neorealism as it haunts the modern artistic imagination in this new epoch of crisis. Furthermore, the volume engages in dialogue with previous works of criticism on contemporary Italian realism, while going beyond them in devoting equal attention to cinema and literature. The resulting interactions will aid the reader in understanding how the critical arts respond to the triumph of hyperrealism in the current era of the virtual spectacle as they seek new ways to promote cognitive transformations and foster ethical interventions.

Stories, whether they are fact or fiction, popular or not, are a proven method of pedagogy. In the age of media convergence and with the advancement of technology, stories have morphed into new forms; however, their core purpose remains the same, which is to pass on knowledge and information. The internet, with its inherent interactivity, and story, with its inherent capacity to engage, can lead to innovative and transformative learning experiences in media-rich environments. This book focuses on web-based Transmedia Storytelling Edutainment (TmSE) as an andragogical practice in higher education. Story is at the forefront of this investigation because narrative is the basis for developing entertainment media franchise that can be incorporated into pedagogical practice. The propulsion of this analysis consists of practice-based research through narrative inquiry and an e-module case study presented on multimedia storytelling in the classroom. A Transmedia Storytelling Framework is provided for creating screenplays for cross-media projects and for analyzing their appropriateness in education. Additionally, a hypertext screenplay, which allowed students to dig deeper into the story word and to build more knowledge, is evaluated for its use in higher education. Since screenplays are by nature writing for the screen, it is believed that the more visual the input, the more likely it is to be memorized and recalled. A link to The Goddess Within screenplay is available for download on the right hand side of this page.

Great Britain in the 1970s appeared to be in terminal decline -- ungovernable, an economic train wreck, and rapidly headed for global irrelevance. Three decades later, it is the richest and most influential country in Europe, and Margaret Thatcher is the reason. The preternaturally determined Thatcher rose from nothing, seized control of Britain's Conservative party, and took a sledgehammer to the nation's postwar socialist consensus. She proved that socialism could be reversed, inspiring a global free-market revolution. Simultaneously exploiting every politically useful aspect of her femininity and defying every conventional expectation of women in power, Thatcher crushed her enemies with a calculated ruthlessness that stunned the British public and without doubt caused immense collateral damage. Ultimately, however, Claire Berlinski agrees with Thatcher: There was no alternative. Berlinski explains what Thatcher did, why it matters, and how she got away with it in this vivid and immensely readable portrait of one of the towering figures of the twentieth century.

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.

Improper Names offers a genealogy and theory of the “improper name,” which author Marco Deseriis defines as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors. Although such names are often invented to pursue a specific social or political agenda, they are soon appropriated for different and sometimes diverging purposes. This book examines the tension arising from struggles for control of a pseudonym’s symbolic power. Deseriis provides five fascinating and widely varying case studies. Ned Ludd was the legendary and eponymous leader of the English Luddites, textile workers who threatened the destruction of industrial machinery and then advanced a variety of economic and political demands. Alan Smithee—an alias coined by Hollywood film directors in 1969 in order to disown films that were recut by producers—became a contested signature and was therefore no longer effective to signal prevarication to Hollywood insiders. Monty Cantsin was an “open pop star” created by U.S. and Canadian artists in the late 1970s to critique bourgeois notions of authorship, but its communal character was compromised by excessive identification with individual users of the name. The Italian media activists calling themselves Luther Blissett, aware of the Cantsin experience, implemented measures to prevent individuals from assuming the alias, which was used to author media pranks, sell apocryphal manuscripts to publishers, fabricate artists and artworks, and author best-selling novels. The longest chapter here is devoted to the contemporary “hacktivist” group known as Anonymous, which protests censorship and restricted access to information and information technologies. After delving into a rich philosophical debate on community among those who have nothing in common, the book concludes with a reflection on how the politics of improper names affects present-day anticapitalist social movements such as Occupy and 15-M.

Between 1948 and the end of the 1950s, Italian and American government agencies and corporations commissioned hundreds of short films for domestic and foreign consumption on topics such as the fight against unemployment, the transformation of rural and urban spaces, and the re-establishment of democratic regimes in Italy and throughout Europe. In Schooling in Modernity, Paola Bonifazio investigates the ways in which these sponsored films promoted a particular vision of modernization and industry and functioned as tools to govern the Italian people. The author uses extensive archival research and various theoretical approaches to examine the politics of sponsored filmmaking in postwar Italy. Among the many topics explored are target audiences and audience response, sources of funding, censorship, debates on cinematic realism, and the connections and differences between American and Italian strategies and styles of documentary filmmaking. Insightful and richly detailed, Schooling in Modernity shows the importance of these under-appreciated films in the postwar modernization process, the transition from Fascism to democracy, and Italy’s involvement in the Cold War.

“What the future fortunes of [Gramsci’s] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this.” —Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci’s masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary. Gramscian terms such as “civil society” and “hegemony” are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci’s purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci’s writings, is absorb Gramsci’s methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of “grand explanatory schemes,” the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: “Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society.” The rigor of Santucci’s examination of Gramsci’s life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.