Imagined Worlds

Chapters have such headings as: Stories, Science, Technology, Evolution, and Ethics.

In 1974, the release of Dungeons & Dragons forever changed the way that we experience imagined worlds. No longer limited to simply reading books or watching movies, gamers came together to collaboratively and interactively build and explore new realms. Based on four years of interviews and game recordings from locations spanning the United States, this book offers a journey that explores how role-playing games use a combination of free-form imagination and tightly constrained rules to experience those realms. By developing our understanding of the fantastic worlds of role-playing games, this book also offers insight into how humans come together and collaboratively imagine the world around us.

"Stories matter. Stories speak about complex aspects of our lives that intuitively we know are important but for which the language of rational discourse is often inadequate. Stories draw on archetypal structures and evocative language in ways that create affect: they penetrate, provoke, and disturb. This is a book of nine stories about teachers and students. A young woman sits in her first teacher-education lecture and wonders what kind of a tribe she is joining. A preservice teacher clashes with his mentor teacher on a practicum. A teacher and students inhabit an online space with unpredictable consequences. Sally discovers the Universarium. Joseph writes a story that undoes his therapist. Sylvia struggles to free herself from an oppressive discourse about the nature of teaching. Two siblings support and console each other through their complex inductions into classroom lifeworlds. A secondary student goes missing and police, the media and his teachers wonder why. A teacher-education academic wrestles with elusive ideas in order to prepare a lecture that he hopes will make a more-than-passing impact. There is no other book like Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities. It not only tells nine gripping stories, but also positions these stories as part of a growing scholarship about story-telling. It includes, as well, practical ways of using the stories in teacher education and professional development. Steve Shann is a teacher and writer with over forty years experience in primary, secondary and tertiary classrooms. "

The purpose of this volume is twofold: to introduce readers to the study of cultural memory and identity in relation to the Hebrew Bible, and to set up strategies for connecting studies of the historical contexts and literature of the Bible to parallel issues in the present day. The volume questions how we can better understand the divide between insider and outsider and the powerful impact of prejudice as a basis for preserving differences between "us" and "them"? In turn the contributors question how such frameworks shape a community's self-perception, its economics and politics. Guided by the general framework of Anderson's theory of nationalism and the outsider, such issues are explored in related ways throughout each of the contributions. Each contribution focuses on social, economic, or political issues that have significantly shaped or influenced dominant elements of cultural memory and the construction of identity in the biblical texts. Together the contributions present a larger proposal: the broad contours of memory and identity in the Bible are the products of a collective desire to reshape the social-political world.

Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds foregrounds how the two important fields of visual culture and Internet culture interact. This collection of essays explores the intersections, overlaps and disparities in terms of how the two discourses illuminate our everyday negotiations as we become increasingly dependent on the Internet and virtual/visual imaginings for constructing who we are. What is being examined here are the ways in which we use visual/virtual lenses to see the world both individually and collectively. This book represents a transnational effort that began as a series of conversations during the Mid Atlantic Popular/American Culture conferences from 2005–2009. The editors, a Canadian and an American, have included contributors across national and geographic contexts. Cultural Production is aimed at raising questions, crossing borders and presenting points of departure for future scholarship in the relatively new and very rapidly changing disciplines of visual and virtual cultures. Our critical approach to this study includes viewing Internet images as contested sites of cultural activity and also as sites that advance ideologies related to cultural transformation.

An unrivaled visual guide to the cityscapes and buildings of the most celebrated and influential anime movies. Anime has been influencing cinema, literature, comic books, and video games around the world for decades. Part of what makes anime so popular are the memorable and breathtakingly detailed worlds designed by the creators, from futuristic cities of steel to romantic rural locales. Anime Architecture presents the fantastic environments created by the most important and revered directors and illustrators of Japanese animated films, such as Hideaki Anno, Koji Morimoto, and Mamoru Oshii. Unprecedented access to vast studio archives of original background paintings, storyboards, drafts, and film excerpts offers readers a privileged view into the earliest stages of conception, development, and finished versions of iconic scenes from critically acclaimed movies such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis, and more. Revealing the secret creative processes of these major anime studios, Anime Architecture is perfect for anyone touched by the beauty and imagination of classic anime, offering inspiration for artists, illustrators, architects, designers, video game makers, and dreamers.