Exploring The Critical Issues Of Beauty

Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty offers a wide range of topics on concepts of Beauty from scholars, academics and researchers around the world.

The emergence of unconventional metaphors of beauty calls on us to pay attention to competing and seemingly intractable connotations of fear, darkness, ugliness, oppression, repression, callousness and dejection that won’t leave us indifferent to their appeal.

This ebook is an inter-disciplinary collection of topics representing conventional and unconventional approaches to fashion studies, exposing a wide variety of methodological perspectives from fields including anthropology, history, art history, sociology, and material culture.

'Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues' is an inter-disciplinary study exploring the nature of how we conceive, construct, interpret, practice, perceive and represent space and place.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. The ever-elusive field of Beauty Studies is one that often underappreciated, yet it is a key concept across all spheres of knowledge, transcending traditional and innovative epistemologies, and providing provocative insights into fundamental aspects of human existence. Here, researchers from around the globe contribute rich and diverse ideas and perspectives from a multitude of disciplines to highlight, explore, and re-evaluate the significance and infinite implications of this pervading topic, within history, science, society, culture, new media, mathematics, art, and literature.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Crafting Allure: Beauty, Culture and Identity explores the complexity of physical beauty, the kind we can see in human beings, their representations, and in nature. From the self-presentations of eighteenth-century English ladies, to that of Civil Rights era African-American protestors, Afro-French women, and contemporary Asian-Indians; to the meanings of mannequins, retail beauty work, eating disorders, and hair; to a reconsideration of naturalised beauty in architecture, the embodiment of truth as a beautiful women, and what the appearance of Amerindians symbolised for Europeans of the Age of Exploration, culture and identity thread their way through the book. Written by scholars from a range of disciplines that reflect the book’s diversity as well as the complexity of visual beauty itself, Crafting Allure consists of eleven chapters divided into four parts: Fashioning Beauty Cultures, Beauty Workers, Racialising Beauty, and Beauty in Architecture and Allegory

Taking the concept of beauty seriously, this encyclopedia examines how humanity has sought and continues to seek what is "beautiful" in a variety of cultural contexts, giving readers an understanding of how to look at beauty both intellectually and critically. Is beauty ever more than "skin deep"? Arguably yes, considering that the concept of beauty—and the pursuit of it—has shaped cultures worldwide, across every time period, and has even served to change the course of history. Studying beauty practices yields insight into social status, wealth, political ideology, religious doctrine, and gender expectations, including gender nonconformity. A truly interdisciplinary text, Beauty around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia presents an insightful perspective on beauty that draws from philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and feminist studies, giving readers a unique view of world beauty practices. This volume offers information about beauty practices from the past to the present in alphabetical entries that address terms and topics such as "beards," "dreadlocks," "Geisha," "moko tattoos," and "progressive muscularity." Readers will better comprehend how beauty shapes many social interactions in profound ways worldwide, and that the unspoken social agreements that shape ideals of attractiveness and desirability within any given culture can matter very much. The encyclopedia's entries challenge readers to consider the questions "What is beauty?" and "Why does it matter?" A comprehensive bibliography is a valuable resource for further research.