The Postworld In Between Utopia And Dystopia

This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background. The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics. This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.

This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background. The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics. This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women's and gender studies.

The book brings together contributions from curriculum history, cultural studies, visual cultures, and science and technology studies to explore the international mobilizations of the sciences related to education during the post-World War Two years. Crossing the boundaries of education and science studies, it uniquely examines how the desires of science to actualize a better society were converted to the search for remaking social life that paradoxically embodied cultural differences and social divisions. The book examines how cybernetics and systems theories traveled and were assembled to turn schools into social experiments and laboratories for change. Explored are the new comparative technologies of quantification and the visualization of educational data used in the methods of mass observation. The sciences not only about the present but also the potentialities of societies and people in the psychologies of childhood; concerns for individual development, growth, and creativity; teacher education; and the quantification and assessments of educational systems. The book also explores how the categories and classifications of the sciences formed at intersections with the humanities, the arts, and political practices. This informative volume will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of curriculum studies, the history of the social sciences, the history of education, and cultural studies, and to educators and school leaders concerned with education policy.

This edited volume is first of its kind to document and critically analyse the changes took place snice China’s opening-up and reform and its impact on Dongbei, China’s North-East region, known for its remote and vast landscape, unique and othered culture, rich resources, mighty infrastructures and industries, geopolitical significance. Through presenting up-to-date and multidimensional case studies, the book covers three major aspects of Dongbei, which put people at the heart of our scholarly focus, namely people’s mediated life through traditional and new media; people’s social, cultural, and living spaces; artistic and fictional representations of people’s everyday life.

This volume examines a variety of utopian writing for children from the 18th century to the present day, defining and exploring this new genre in the field of children's literature. The original essays discuss thematic conventions and present detailed case studies of individual works. All address the pedagogical implications of work that challenges children to grapple with questions of perfect or wildly imperfect social organizations and their own autonomy. The book includes interviews with creative writers and the first bibliography of utopian fiction for children.

This book discusses LGBTI+ childhood from a critical, interdisciplinary perspective with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of the complex relationship between sexuality, gender and childhood. Placing adultcentrism at the centre of the analytical inquiry, the international range of contributors consider experiences and subjectivities of children, their families and significant contexts. Topics covered include public policies, professional practices and care provision, as well as the tensions and contradictions stemming from the logics of otherness and exceptionality which populate dominant discourses, representations and practices around sex and gender in childhood. This book is intended for researchers and students in gender studies, sexuality studies, education, health, childhood studies and sociology.

This is an interdisciplinary examination of depictions of girlhoods through a comparative study of foundational fairy tales revised and reimagined in popular narrative, film, and television adaptations. The success of franchises such as The Hunger Games, Twilight and Divergence have re-presented the young heroine as an empowered female, and often a warrior hero in her own right. Through a selection of popular culture touchstones this empowerment is questioned as a manipulation of feminist ideals of equality and a continuation of the traditional vision of female awakening centering on issues of personal choice, agency, physical violence, purity, and beauty. By investigating re-occurring storytelling frameworks and archetypes, Untaming Girlhoods examines different portrayals of girlhoods in the 20th- and 21st-century Anglo-American cultural imaginary that configure modern girlhoods, beyond the fairy-tale princess or the damsel in distress, into refigurations that venture away from the well-trodden path for a new breakaway path to authentic selfhood. This will be a useful and enlightening text for students and researchers in Girlhood Studies, Gender Studies, Film Studies, Popular Culture and Media Studies.

This book is an exploration of the political struggle for visibility engendered by the growing number of women-centered popular films and a critical analysis of the intensifying misogynistic backlash that have accompanied such advances in the depiction of women on screen. The book draws from a variety of theoretical and methodological tools to provide critical cultural analysis and alternative readings of women-strong films and their important role in society. The authors engage with popular culture and the popular press, media studies, and rhetorical criticism examining new modes of communication while providing historical context to help make sense of these oppositional readings. The book includes case studies on Mad Max: Fury Road, Wonder Woman, Atomic Blonde, Star Wars, and Ghostbusters to analyze critical responses, men’s-rights activist boycotting campaigns, online harassment, and the political economy that precede and accompany the creation and presentation of these films. This is an accessible and timely analysis of the rise of feminist-friendly and women-led films and the inevitable counterculture of misogyny. It is suitable for students and researchers in Media and Communication Studies, Gender and Media, and Cultural Studies.