Contested Images

Contested Images: Women of Color in Popular Culture is a collection of 17 essays that analyze representations in popular culture of African American, Asian American, Latina, and Native American women. The anthology is divided into four parts: film images, beauty images, music, and television. The articles share two intellectual traditions: the authors, predominantly women of color, use an intersectionality perspective in their analysis of popular culture and the representation of women of color, and they identify popular culture as a site of conflict and contestation. Instructors will find this collection to be a convenient textbook for women’s studies; media studies; race, class, and gender courses; ethnic studies; and more.

This volume focuses on popular film, television, and online representations of contested corporealities and contributes to visual culture studies, disability studies, critical pedagogy, and medical humanities. Emphasizing unruly embodiments that transgress and transform, the volume conceptualizes visual culture as a space of query and accountability. In their introduction, the editors underline how spaces of cultural production provide necessary contexts for analyzing the social impact of contested corporealities. Contributors, in turn, offer new perspectives on technologies, disability, and cultural production. Eunjung Kim argues that life-size dolls in contemporary art films show how acts of caring for radically passive bodies can emerge as both erotic and beautiful; Nicole Markotić critiques the prioritizing of death as the most desirable, logical outcome in biopics of disability; and Katherine W. Sweaney's article on the online anatomization of an amnesiac's brain reminds us of the high stakes for medicine and science in the public display of knowledge-making. Working at the intersection of fat and critical race studies, Scott Stoneman discusses the body politics of the film Precious. Katerie Gladdys and Deshae E. Lott reflect on their lyrical installation about life with mechanical ventilation, and Ann Fudge Schormans and Adrienne Chambon examine how image-making by persons with intellectual disabilities can intervene in ableist-defined social space. With attention to queer theory and transnationalism, Michael Gill considers the British web-based RTV program, The Specials, where young men labeled as intellectually disabled fashion their erotic self-understandings as they discuss and appreciate an ensemble of Thai kathoey performers. Concentrating on the global politics of organ transplantation, Donna McCormack critically examines feature films that mediate questions of community, ethics, and mobility. The volume is further enriched by the inclusion of an interview in which Danielle Peers, Melisa Brittain, and Robert McRuer discuss the significance of crip possibilities in art and academia. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

In this comprehensive, long-view study on the concept of the Neue or Moderne Frau (New or Modern Woman) that spans the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, post-war period, and a divided Germany, Contested Femininities explores how different political and social groups constructed images of women to present competing visions of the future. It takes the highly contested representations of women presented in the illustrated press and examines how they emerged as crucial markers of modernity. In doing so it reveals the surprising continuity of these images across political periods and reflects on how debates over paid work, the gender division of labor in the household, the politics of the body, and consumption, played a central role in how different German regimes defined the Modern Woman.

This book presents innovative ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between art, anthropology, and contested cultural heritage, drawing on research from the interdisciplinary TRACES project (funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program). The case studies in this volume critically assess how and in which arrangements artistic/aesthetic methods and creative everyday practices contribute to strengthening communities both culturally and economically. They also explore the extent to which these methods emphasize minority voices and ultimately set in motion a process of reflexive Europeanisation from below which unfolds within Europe and beyond its borders. At the heart of the book is the development of a new way of transmitting contentious cultural heritage, which responds to the present situation in Europe of unstable political conditions and a sense of Europe in crisis. With chapters looking at difficult art exhibitions on colonialism, death masks, Holocaust memorials, and skull collections, the contributors articulate a response to the crisis in current economic-political conditions in Europe and advances brand new theoretical groundwork on the configuration of a renewed European identity.

Jane M. Gaines examines the phenomenon of images as property, focusing on the legal staus of mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. Bridging the fields of critical legal studies and cultural studies, she analyzes copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law, asking how the law constructs works of authorship and who owns the country's cultural heritage.

Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories brings together intellectuals from a variety of fields, backgrounds, generations, and continents to deepen and reinvigo-rate the theoretical and intellectual integrity of African studies. Building on recent debate within African studies that has revolved around the role of Africanists in the United States as “gatekeepers” of knowledge about Africa and Africans, this volume of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the contested character of the production of knowledge itself. In every chapter, case studies and ethnographic materials, drawn from such regions as South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Malagasy Republic, Angola, Ghana, and Senegal, demonstrate the application of theory to concrete situations.

Landscapes are not just backdrops to human action; people make them and are made by them. How people understand and engage with their material world depends upon particularities of time and place. These understandings are dynamic, variable, contradictory and open-ended. Landscapes are thus always evolving and are often volatile and contested. They are also always on the move - people may or may not be rooted, but they have 'legs'. From prehistoric times onwards people have travelled, but the process of people-on-the-move - as tourists, or on global business, as migrant workers or political or economic refugees - has vastly accelerated. How and why do people who share the same landscape have different and often violently opposed ways of understanding its significance? How do people-on-the-move make sense of the unfamiliar? How do they create a sense of place? How do they rework the memories of places left behind? There is nothing easeful about the landscapes discussed in this book, which are often harsh-edged and troubled both socially and politically. The contributors tackle contested notions of landscape to explain the key role it plays in creating identity and shaping human behaviour. This landmark study offers an important contribution towards an understanding of the complexity of landscape.

The Curriculum and Pedagogy book series is an enactment of the mission and values espoused by the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group, an international educational organization serving those who share a common faith in democracy and a commitment to public moral leadership in schools and society. Accordingly, the mission of this series is to advance scholarship that engages critical dispositions towards curriculum and instruction, educational empowerment, individual and collectivized agency, and social justice. The purpose of the series is to create and nurture democratic spaces in education, an aspect of educational thought that is frequently lacking in the extant literature, often jettisoned via efforts to de-politicize the study of education. Rather than ignore these conversations, this series offers the capacity for educational renewal and social change through scholarly research, arts-based projects, social action, academic enrichment, and community engagement. Authors will evidence their commitment to the principles of democracy, transparency, agency, multicultural inclusion, ethnic diversity, gender and sexuality equity, economic justice, and international cooperation. Furthermore, these authors will contribute to the development of deeper critical insights into the historical, political, aesthetic, cultural, and institutional subtexts and contexts of curriculum that impact educational practices. Believing that curriculum studies and the ethical conduct that is congruent with such studies must become part of the fabric of public life and classroom practices, this book series brings together prose, poetry, and visual artistry from teachers, professors, graduate students, early childhood leaders, school administrators, curriculum workers and planners, museum and agency directors, curators, artists, and various under-represented groups in projects that interrogate curriculum and pedagogical theories.