Experts In Action

Action movie stars ranging from Jackie Chan to lesser-known stunt women and men like Zoë Bell and Chad Stahelski stun their audiences with virtuosic martial arts displays, physical prowess, and complex fight sequences. Their performance styles originate from action movies that emerged in the industrial environment of 1980s Hong Kong. In Experts in Action Lauren Steimer examines how Hong Kong--influenced cinema aesthetics and stunt techniques have been taken up, imitated, and reinvented in other locations and production contexts in Hollywood, New Zealand, and Thailand. Foregrounding the transnational circulation of Hong Kong--influenced films, television shows, stars, choreographers, and stunt workers, she shows how stunt workers like Chan, Bell, and others combine techniques from martial arts, dance, Peking opera, and the history of movie and television stunting practices to create embodied performances that are both spectacular and, sometimes, rendered invisible. By describing the training, skills, and labor involved in stunt work as well as the location-dependent material conditions and regulations that impact it, Steimer illuminates the expertise of the workers whose labor is indispensable to some of the world's most popular movies.

"Experts in Action approaches the transnational circulation of Hong Kong action cinema aesthetics and technique in relation to the industrial need for and creation of expert performers. "Hong Kong-style action" is an assemblage of elements most commonly associated with action design work from Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s: stunt performers as stars, Asian martial arts, complex fight sequences with multiple points of physical contact between cuts, and dynamic and fluid wire-work. These technical histories of corporeal practices congeal in the body of the expert action performer. The expert performers discussed in this book are "transnational" not simply because of the global marketing, distribution, and reception of their films and television programs, but because the act of production adapts techniques and corporeal practices common to Hong Kong action films to localized media contexts"--

Research in action engages the researcher who wants to live up to the challenges of contemporary science and to contribute to innovation and social change. This ambition to contribute to change raises many questions. How to define the main target group of the research? What role does this group play in the research? Which methods of data collection are most appropriate? Who are the commissioners of the research and do their interests match with those of the prime target group? How to deal with power relations in research situations? What do these issues mean for the relation of researcher with the people in the researched situation? And, last but not least, what does it all imply for the researcher him- or herself? These questions have to be dealt with in situations in which the design and organization of the research is still open but also in situations where these have already been preformatted through the research proposal or earlier developments. In any case, they have to be framed in the theoretical considerations of what is science. This book aims to assist scholars and practitioners who would want to deal with this kind of research and questions. The book does not offer recipes, nor fixed scenarios. It presents a series of practical research cases and theoretical insights by experienced researchers who themselves struggled with what is probably the most meaningful questions of the science today. The practical examples of research in action are from different disciplines and include themes from health care, policy research, agricultural technology and education, in Northern and Southern context. Four leading themes of research in action are introduced in the first chapter. In the last chapter the editors return to the dilemmas research in action and try to clarify the options and responses that are possible in different situations.

Since 1991, the edited book series Studies in Perception and Action has appeared in conjunction with the biennial International Conference of Perception and Action (ICPA), a conference that provides an opportunity for individuals who share interests in ecological psychology to come together to present current research, exchange ideas, and engage in conversation on theoretical and methodological concerns. The Studies in Perception and Action series is a way to preserve the dialogues between conference attendees and researchers displaying their latest work. This volume, the eighth in the series, presents the conversations held at the 13th ICPA meeting in the summer of 2005. Studies in Perception and Action VIII includes broad coverage of the most current advances in research on perceiving and acting, including contributions from researchers in Australia, China, Japan, Europe, and North America. It addresses cutting-edge research in dynamics and human movement, recent progress in ecological approaches to perceiving and acting, and substantially extends our knowledge of just how rich a source of information the world is across a wide range of modalities. This volume will appeal to individuals who follow the research literature in ecological psychology, as well as those interested in perception, perceptual development, human movement dynamics, and social processes.