Travelling Around Cultures

Culture has always relied on art, just as artists have been dependent on culture as a problem field to draw inspiration from and as a store of social, ideological, and political practices to endorse or criticise. This volume addresses this dynamic reality by investigating how literary, cinematic, and artistic practices expose the often invisible structures and discourses which underlie the values, concepts, rites, and myths specific to Anglo-American cultural environments. On the one hand, the chapters (re-)visit classical, as well as contemporary, authors, including Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Janice Galloway and Matthew Kneale, through the lenses of culture, to explore how their works become social commentaries and a cultural diagnosis. On the other hand, they explore the politics and ideological effects of cultural practices exemplified by such matters as censorship, reading communities, fan fiction and travelogues.

The notion of time travel marked by both possibility and loss: making the case for cultural research that is oriented toward the future. Visual Cultures as Time Travel makes a case for cultural, aesthetic, and historical research that is oriented toward the future, not the past, actively constructing new categories of assembly that don't yet exist. Ayesha Hameed considers the relationship between climate change and plantation economies, proposing a watery plantationocene that revolves around two islands: a former plantation in St. George's Parish in Barbados, and the port city of Port of Spain in Trinidad. It visits a marine research institute on a third island, Seili in Finland, to consider how notions of temporality and adaptation are produced in the climate emergency we face. Henriette Gunkel introduces the idea of time travel through notions of dizziness, freefall, and of being in vertigo as set out in Octavia Butler's novel Kindred and Kitso Lynn Lelliott's multimedia installation South Atlantic Hauntings, exploring what counts as technology, how it operates in relation to time, including deep space time, and how it interacts with the different types of bodies—human, machine, planetary, spectral, ancestral—that inhabit the terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds. In conversation, Hameed and Gunkel propose a notion of time travel marked by possibility and loss—in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery and in the moment of mass illegalized migration, of blackness and time, of wildfires and floods, of lost and co-opted futures, of deep geological time, and of falling. Copublished with Goldsmiths, University of London

How do you get to school or travel around a big city? If you lived in a different country, the way you travel could be completely different! Kids in Cambodia ride in paddle boats to get to floating schools on the water. People in Australia often ride a monorail around crowded cities. Take a tour around the world, and see how people get from here to there.

How do we educate our students about cultural diversity and cultural differences, and eliminate cultural ignorance, stereotyping, and prejudice? What are the conceptual issues involved in reaching this goal? How can we integrate these perspectives in disciplinary and diversity courses, and the curriculum?This book is a resource for answering these questions. Within the framework of current scholarship and discussion of essential concepts, it offers practical techniques, and empirically proven “best practices” for teaching about diversity. The book opens with a conceptual framework, covering such issues as distinguishing teaching to a diverse audience from teaching about diversity and contrasting the incorporation of culture across the curriculum with tokenistic approaches. Subsequent chapters identify classroom practices that can optimize students’ learning, especially those from culturally diverse backgrounds; describe feminist principles of education that that promote learning for all students; and address principles of effective on-line instruction for diverse populations.The book is intended for faculty integrating diversity into existing courses, and for anyone creating courses on diversity. The ideas and suggestions in the text can be incorporated into any class that includes a discussion of diversity issues or has a diverse student enrollment. The contributors offer pragmatic and tested ways of overcoming student misconceptions and resistance, and for managing emotional responses that can be aroused by the discussion of diversity. The editors aim to stimulate readers’ thinking and inspire fresh ideas. The book further provides teachers of diversity with a range of effective exercises, and attends to such issues as teacher stress and burnout.This book can also serve to inform and guide department chairs and other administrators in the design and implementation of diversity initiatives.

The tremendous increase in migrations and diasporas of human groups in the last decades are not only bringing along challenging issues for society, especially related to the economic and political management of multiculturalism and culturally effective health care, but they are also creating dramatic changes in traditional knowledge, believes and practices (KBP) related to (medicinal) plant use. The contributors to this volume – all internationally recognized scholars in the field of ethnobiology, transcultural pharmacy, and medical anthropology – analyze these dynamics of traditional knowledge in especially 12 selected case studies. Ina Vandebroek, features in Nova's "Secret Life of Scientists", answering the question: just what is ethnobotany?

Bringing together innovative and internationally renowned experts, this volume provides concise presentations of the main concepts and cutting-edge research fields in the study of culture (rather than the infinite multitude of possible themes). More specifically, the volume outlines different models for the study of culture, explores avenues for interdisciplinary exchange, assesses key concepts and traces their travels across various disciplinary, historical and national contexts. To trace the travelling of concepts means to map both their transfer from one discipline, approach or culture of research to another, and also to identify the transformations which emerge through these processes of transfer. The volume serves to show that working with (travelling) concepts provides a unique strategy for research and research design which can open up a wide range of promising perspectives for interdisciplinary exchange. It offers an exemplary overview of an interdisciplinary and international approach to the travelling concepts that organize, structure and shape the study of culture. In doing so, the volume serves to initiate a dialogue that exceeds disciplinary and national boundaries and introduces a self-reflexive dimension to the field, thus affording a recognition of how deeply disciplinary premises and nation-specific research traditions affect different approaches in the study of culture.

It is becoming ever clearer that while people tour cultures, cultures and objects themselves are in a constant state of migration. This collection brings together some of the most influential writers in the field to examine the complex connections between tourism and cultural change and the relevance of tourist experience to current theoretical debates on space, time and identity.