Bodies And Media

Drawing together literature from sociology, gender studies and psychology, this text offers a broad discussion of the topic in the context of socio-cultural change, gender politics and self-identity.

Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really "moving" through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings. Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual.

Tracing the evolution of contemporary body discourse, this book analyses the tension between a fragmented and holistic body concept in performance art, popular culture, media arts, and architecture. It covers contemporary body discourse in philosophy and cultural studies to its roots in twentieth-century thought.

This book presents a recasting of Aristotle’s theory of spatial displacement of inanimate objects. Aristotle’s claim that projectiles are actively carried by the media through which they move (such as air or water) is well known and has drawn the attention of commentators from ancient to modern times. What is lacking, however, is a systematic investigation of the consequences of his suggestion that the medium always acts as the direct instrument of locomotion, be it natural or forced, while original movers (e.g. stone throwers, catapults, bowstrings) act indirectly by impressing moving force into the medium. Filling this gap and guided by discussions in Aristotle’s Physics and On the Heavens, the present volume shows that Aristotle’s active medium enables his theory - in which force is proportional to speed - to account for a large class of phenomena that Newtonian dynamics - in which force is proportional to acceleration - accounts for through the concept of inertia. By applying Aristotle’s medium dynamics to projectile flight and to collisions that involve reversal of motion, the book provides detailed examples of the efficacy and coherence that the active medium gives to Aristotle’s discussions. The book is directed primarily to historians of ancient, medieval, and early modern science, to philosophers of science and to students of Aristotle’s natural philosophy.

Images of faces, bodies, selves and digital subjectivities abound on new media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and others-these images represent our new way of being online and of becoming socially mediated. Although researchers are examining digital embodiment, digital representations, and visual vernaculars as a mode of identity performance and management online, there exists no cohesive collection that compiles all these contemporary philosophies into one reader for use in graduate level classrooms or for scholars studying the field. The rationale for this book is to produce a scholarly fulcrum that pulls together scholars from disparate fields of inquiry in the humanities doing work on the common theme of the socially mediated body. The chapters in Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media represent a diverse list of contributors in terms of author representation, inclusivity of theoretical frameworks of analysis, and geographic reach of empirical work. Divided into three sections representing three dominant paradigms on the socially mediated body: representation, presentation, and embodiment, the book provides classic, creative, and contemporary reworkings of these paradigms.

Bringing together scholars from around the world to research the intersection between media and disability, this edited collection aims to offer an interdisciplinary exploration and critique of print, broadcast and online representations of physical and mental impairments. Drawing on a wide range of case studies addressing how people can be ‘othered’ in contemporary media, the chapters focus on analyses of hateful discourses about disability on Reddit, news coverage of disability and education, media access of individuals with disabilities, the logic of memes and brain tumour on Twitter, celebrity and Down Syndrome on Instagram, disability in TV drama, the metaphor of disability for the nation; as well as an autoethnography of treatment of breast cancer. Providing a much-needed global perspective, Disability, Media, and Representations examines the relationship between self-representation and representations in either reinforcing or debunking myths around disability, and ways in which academic discourse can be differently articulated to study the relationship between media and disability. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of disability studies and media studies as well as activists and readers engaged in debates on diversity, inclusivity and the media.

Body, Capital and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century brings together new research from leading scholars from Europe and North America working at the intersection of film and media studies and social and cultural history of the body. The volume focuses on visual media in the twentieth century in Europe and the U.S. that informed and educated people about life and health as well as practices improving them. Through a series of in-depth case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate the relationships between film/television, private and public actors of the health sector and economic developments. The book explores the performative and interactive power of these visual media on individual health understandings, perceptions and practices. Body, Capital and Screens aims to better understand how bodily health has evolved as a form of capital throughout the century.

The central focus of Reclaiming Canadian Bodies is the relationship between visual media, the construction of Canadian national identity, and notions of embodiment. It asks how particular representations of bodies are constructed and performed within the context of visual and discursive mediated content. The book emphasizes the ways individuals destabilize national mainstream visual tropes, which in turn have the potential to destabilize nationalist messages. Drawing upon rich empirical research and relevant theory, the contributors ask how and why particular bodies (of Estonian immigrants, sports stars, First Nations peoples, self-identified homosexuals, and women) are either promoted and upheld as “Canadian” bodies while others are marginalized in or excluded from media representations. Essays are grouped into three sections: Embodied Ideals, The Embodiment of “Others,” and Embodied Activism and Advocacy. Written in an accessible style for a broad audience of scholars and students, this volume is original within the field of visual media, affect theory, and embodiment due to its emphasis on detailed empirical and, in some cases, ethnographic research within a Canadian context.