Selected eBooks: 2018

Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) mapping. The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development.

Examines U.S. obscenity trials in the early twentieth century and how they framed a wide-ranging debate about the printed word's power to deprave, offend, and shape behavior.

To dismantle negative stereotypes of fans, this book offers a media ethnography of the digital culture, conventions, and urban spacesassociated with fandoms, arguing that fandom is an area of productive, creative, and subversive value. By examining the fandoms of Sherlock, Glee, Firefly, and other popular television-based franchises, the author appeals to fans and scholars alike in her empirically grounded methodology and insightful analysis of production hierarchies, gender, sexuality, play, and affect.

The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema illustrates how global horror film depictions of children re-conceptualised childhood at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book proposes that complex cultural and industrial shifts at the turn of the millennium resulted in these potent cinematic renegotiations of the concept of childhood. By demonstrating both the culturally specific and globally resonant properties of these frightening visions of children who refuse to grow up, the book outlines the conceptual and aesthetic mechanisms by which long entrenched ideologies of futurity, national progress, and teleological history started to waver at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The stories in Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's new collection are about finding resilience in the face of adversity. Following losses big and small, environmental and familial, universal and personal, the best of us try to recover and rebuild. The characters in her stories are learning to reconstruct themselves, their families, and their futures from the wreckage of their broken pasts.

Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global.

How did the idea of the imagination impact Romantic literature and science? Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason--but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.

To what extent is queer anti-identitarian? And how is it experienced by activists at the European level? At queer festivals, activists, artists and participants come together to build new forms of sociability and practice their ideals through anti-binary and inclusive idioms of gender and sexuality. These ideals are moreover channelled through a series of organisational and cultural practices that aim at the emergence of queer as a collective identity.

Sites of Translation illustrates the intricate rhetorical work that multilingual communicators engage in as they translate information for their communities. Blending ethnographic and empirical methods from multiple disciplines, Laura Gonzales provides methodological examples of how linguistic diversity can be studied in practice, both in and outside the classroom, and provides insights into the rhetorical labor that is often unacknowledged and made invisible in multilingual communication.

Katherine Bode's innovative approach to the new digital collections that are transforming research in the humanities are a model of how digital tools can transform how we understand digital collections and interpret literatures in the past.

The Greatest Films Never Seen: The Film Archive and the Copyright Smokescreen uses the prism of copyright to reconsider human agency and the politics of the archive, and asks what the practical implications are for educational institutions, the creative industries, and the general public.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor.