Stillness In A Mobile World

A collection of essays on the conceptual, political & philosophical importance of stillness, the diversity of this contributions illuminates the multiplicity of ontological & epistemological registers through which stillness moves, from human geography to media studies, cultural theory to fine arts.

This edited collection of essays on the conceptual, political and philosophical importance of stillness is positioned within a world that has increasingly come to be understood through the theoretical and conceptual lens of movement. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the diversity of this collection illuminates the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which stillness moves: from human geography to media studies, cultural theory to fine arts. With the help of luminaries such as Deleuze, Bergson, Barthes and Beckett, this book interweaves cutting-edge theoretical insight with empirical illustrations which examine and traverse a multitude of practices, spaces and events. In an era where stasis, slowness and passivity are often held to be detrimental, this collection puts forward a new set of political and ethical concerns which help us to come to terms with, understand, and account for (im)mobile life. Stillness in a Mobile World in an essential source of reference for both undergraduate and post-graduate students working within disciplines such as cultural studies, sociology, mobility studies, and human geography.

This is a state-of-the-art survey of an emerging area of study in media, communication and cultural studies, mobility studies and mobile communications. ‘Mobile socialities’ demarcates a new area of research that captures people’s various and contrary experiences of media in relation to their mobilities and socialities. The chapters in this volume are written by a range of international scholars offering a comprehensive overview and source of inspiration for a diverse range of topics on the contingent practices and finite resources of people and media on the move. The book demonstrates through empirical and theoretical research how mobile socialities is a generative concept for thinking through power, identity and the contexts of media in public and mediated spaces, work and everyday life, addressing a spectrum of mobile socialities and lived politics. The research and various cases make visible previously hidden, or obscured, social practices and allow us to rethink the meanings of mobility, digital media or the home in these examples of people living within the centre and peripheries of society. The Handbook establishes mobile socialities as a new area of academic enquiry, ideal for advanced undergraduate students and scholars across the disciplines of media, communication and cultural studies, anthropology, cultural geography and sociology.

Across the world, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the tempo of modern life. Described simply as the 'slow phenomenon', this volume explores this new brand of living that entails not simply slowing down but an embracing of alternative activities that promote meaning, thoughtfulness, engagement and authenticity.

Slow Food began in the late 1980s as a response to the spread of fast food establishments and as a larger statement against globalization and the perceived deterioration of modern life. Since then, slow practices have permeated into other areas, including cities and territories and travel and tourism. This book provides an in-depth examination of slow food, tourism and cities, demonstrating how these elements are intertwined with one other as part of the modern search for "the good life." Part 1 locates the slow concept within the larger social setting of modernity and investigates claims made by the slow movement, examining aesthetic and instrumental values inherent to it. Part 2 explores the practices and places of slow, containing both conceptual and empirical chapters in Italy, the birthplace of the movement. Part 3 provides a comparative perspective by examining the practices in Spain, the UK, Germany and Canada. Slow Tourism, Food and Cities offers key theoretical insights and alternative perspectives on the varying practices and meanings of slow from a cultural, sociological and ethical perspective. It is a valuable text for students and scholars of sociology, geography, urban studies, social movements, travel and tourism, and food studies.

When life is moving at a breakneck pace or when at times we’re confronted with almost unreasonable demands clogging up our calendars, it can seem as if we have no time left to simply do nothing. Spending more time surrounded by calmness, resting and recovering, gives us the space to really process experiences, make sense of what we’re feeling, and put a good distance between us and all the things on our to do list. What’s more, this also makes us more present and able to devote our energy to the things that are important in life. Simply sitting in silence every once in a while, without moving, doing nothing, might just be the smartest choice you make in the world we live in. In The Art of Stillness in a Noisy World, meditation and yoga expert, Magnus Fridh, will help you find the calmness amidst the stresses of everyday life, helping you to become more present in a world where we seem to becoming ever more absent.

Still Modernism offers a critique of the modernist imperative to embrace motion, speed, and mobility. In the context of the rise of kinetic technologies and the invention of motion pictures, it claims that stillness is nonetheless an essential tactic of modernist innovation. More specifically, the book looks at the ways in which photographic stillness emerges as a counterpoint to motion and to film, asserting its own clear visibility against the blur of kinesis. Photographic stillness becomes a means to resist the ephemerality of motion and to get at and articulate something real or essential by way of its fixed limits. Combining art history, film studies and literary studies, Louise Hornby reveals how photographers, filmmakers, and writers, even at their most kinetic, did not surrender attention to points of stillness. Rather, the still image, understood through photography, establishes itself as a mode of resistance and provides a formal response to various modernist efforts to see better, to attend more closely, and to remove the fetters of subjectivity and experience. Still Modernism brings together a series of canonical texts, films, and photographs, the selection of which reinforces the central claim that stillness does not lurk at the margins of modernism, but was constitutive of its very foundations. In a series of comparisons drawing from literary and visual objects, Hornby argues that still photography allows film to access its own diffuse images of motion; photography's duplicative form provides a serial structure for modernist efforts to represent the face; its iterative structure articulates the jerky rhythms of experimental narrative as perambulation; and its processes of development allow for the world to emerge independent of the human observer. Casting new light on the relationship between photography and film, Hornby situates the struggle between the still and the kinetic at the center of modernist culture.

Explores the 'still life spirit' in modern painting, prose, dance, sculpture and poetryChallenges the conventional positioning of still life a 'minor' genre in art historyProposes a radical alternative to narratives of modernism that privilege speed and motion by revealing forms of stillness and still life at the heart of modern literature and visual cultureProvides the first study of still life to consider the genre across modern literature, visual cultures and danceUncovers connections and cultural exchange between networks of European and American artists including the Bloomsbury Group and Wallace StevensThe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the 'age of speed' but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Czanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Claudia Tobin reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement: the still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm; an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.