Elling

This wonderful collection--based on oral testimony, diaries, journals, and newspaper accounts--presents an eerie history of the state's legendary mining towns.

"The endearing and hilarious story of two just-released mental patients - one shy and imaginative, the other big and dumb - who struggle to find their place in the real world." "The Norwegian government has decided that Elling and his roommate, Kjell Bjarne, are ready to leave the Broynes Rehabilitation Center and move into an apartment in Oslo together. Told to live like "normal" people, the neurotic Elling and the oafish Kjell Bjarne quickly find themselves overwhelmed with important life lessons: phone sex lines cost a lot of money, kittens do not belong on the metro, and when you're invited to a friend's house for dinner, it's best not to arrive five hours early." "Gradually, carefully, our heroes reach out beyond each other - Elling to a reclusive old man he meets at a poetry reading, Kjell Bjarne to a pregnant neighbor abandoned by her boyfriend - and in so doing find the strength not just to rely on someone else, but also to be relied on themselves." "Sweet, sarcastic, and moving, the original Norwegian novel was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film in 2001."--BOOK JACKET.

How can action research further new research orientations towards sustainability? This book, empirically situated in the field of upstream public engagement, involving local residents, researchers and practitioners in bottom-up processes deliberating on urban sustainability, answers this question by analysing processes of social learning. The book addresses the need to move towards sustainability at societal level as a democratic challenge questioning the way we live on planet earth. By conceptualising sustain-ability as an immanent and emergent ability of ecological and social life, continuously to renew itself without eroding its own foundation of existence, it argues that since sustainability cannot be invented but only supported (or eroded) by science, we need to reframe science in the role of sustaining sustain-ability. Through analyses of a three year action research programme, aiming to provide local citizens with a greater say in the future of urban sustainability research, this book shows how action research can make important methodological contributions to processes of social learning between citizens and scientists by enabling free spaces in peoples everyday life and within academia, where aspects of un-sustainability can be addressed and new imaginations of more sustainable futures emerge.

An extensive biographical and critical survey of more than 300 jazz and popular singers is comprised of provocative, opinionated essays that incorporate the views of peers, fans and critics while assessing key movements and genres.