All ScholarLed presses
This page shows the latest publications (in descending order of publication date) from all of the open access publishers in the ScholarLed consortium (Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, African Minds, and mediastudies.press).
Metadata is licensed as Creative Commons Zero (CC0) and is retrieved from Thoth’s open APIs.
Last updated: 2024-09-16 00:00:19
September 2024
boy says: (a book with no ending)
Author: Néstor Ponce
Translator: Max Ubelaker Andrade
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts: Volume 2: Social Encounters with the Book
Author: Kathryn M. Rudy
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0379
In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.
Bitter-Sweet Democracy?: Analyzing citizens’ resentment towards politics in Belgium
Editor: Virginie Van Ingelgom
Editor: Karen Celis
Editor: Louise Knops
Editor: Heidi Mercenier
Editor: François Randour
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0401
Discussions about the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ have dominated scholarly and public discourse for some time now. But what does this phrase actually entail, and what is its relevance today? How do citizens themselves experience, feel and respond to this ‘crisis’? Bitter-Sweet Democracy grapples with the complexities of these questions in the context of citizens’ relations to politics in Belgium—a nation that has experienced political instability and protests as well as social mobilization and democratic vitality in recent years.
The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators
Author: Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Trix: The Other Kipling
Author: Barbara Fisher
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0377
This volume represents the first biography of Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), known as Trix. Rarely portrayed with sympathy or accuracy in biographies of her famous brother Rudyard, Trix was a talented writer and a memorable character in her own right whose fascinating life was unknown until now. In telling Trix’s story, Barbara Fisher rescues her from the misrepresentations, trivializations, and outright neglect of Rudyard’s many biographers.
Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy
Author: Karen Attar
Author: Adrian Rice
Author: Christopher Stray
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0408
When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’ and even as ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan’s life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.
An Anthology of Global Risk
Editor: SJ Beard
Editor: Tom Hobson
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0360
This anthology brings together a diversity of key texts in the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. It serves to complement the previous volume The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies by providing open access to original research and insights in this rapidly evolving field. At its heart, this book highlights the ongoing development of new academic paradigms and theories of change that have emerged from a community of researchers in and around the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The chapters in this book challenge received notions of human extinction and civilization collapse and seek to chart new paths towards existential security and hope.
August 2024
The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater
Author: Roberto Morales-Harley
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0417
This volume presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.
An Annotated Corpus of Three Hundred Proverbs, Sayings, and Idioms in Eastern Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t
Author: Giuliano Castagna
Contributions by: Suhail al-Amri
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0422
This book explores the rich paremiological heritage of Jibbali/Śḥərɛ̄́t, an endangered pre-literate language belonging to the Modern South Arabian sub-branch of Semitic, spoken by an ever-decreasing number of people in the Dhofar governorate of the Sultanate of Oman.
Night-sky: Vol. 2
Editor: Mehita Iqani
Editor: Wamuwi Mbao
Cape Town: African Minds, 2024
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928502920
What is science communication? This collection proposes that it can be creative writing aimed at the heart, rather than information directed to the mind.
FicSci playfully subverts the term ‘science fiction’ to offer an experimental process that explores the limits of imagination in relation to scientific possibility (and vice versa). FicSci is an experiment in hybridized creative practice that induces new forms of knowledge-making between the hard sciences and the social world. This collection offers writing that emerged from an encounter that brought twelve creative writers together with an astronomer.
The presented science invited contemplation of scientific aspects of the night sky, in specific X-ray binary stars, extra-galactic sources, and magellanic clouds. The creative writings that emerged are attendant to the wider potentialities of scientific thought, and reveal how methodologies for storying the scientific encounter are creatively multi-form.
Thinking Blue / Writing Red: Marxism and the (Post)Human
Author: Stephen Tumino
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0324
Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville’s narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films).
Taunting the Useful
Author: Loumille Métros
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast: Conservation Histories, Policies and Practices in North-west Namibia
Editor: Sian Sullivan
Editor: Ute Dieckmann
Editor: Selma Lendelvo
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0402
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners, working on topics ranging from colonial histories to water management, perceptions of ‘wildlife’ and the politics of belonging. Together, these essays confront a critical question: how can the conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes be reconciled with historical injustices of social exclusion and marginalisation?
Rocklands: On Becoming the First Generation of Black Psychologists in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Author: Liezille Jean Jacobs
Cape Town: African Minds, 2024
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928502890
This book makes a brave and erudite scholarly contribution to the field of psychology. Its method is unconventional but carefully considered. Those who have provided comments on the manuscript unanimously concur – this book is essential reading for students and academics, families and patriarchs in equal measure.
Voices from Nubia: Critical Essays on Contemporary Nubian Literature from Egypt
Editor: Mona M. Radwan
Editor: Amal Mazhar
Editor: Faten I. Morsy
Foreword by: Rasheed El-Enany
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
July 2024
The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020
Author: Marianne Sommer
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0396
This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns?
Atlas of Petromodernity
Author: Alexander Klose
Author: Benjamin Steininger
Translator: Ayça Türkoğlu
Foreword by: Stephanie LeMenager
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
June 2024
Music and Spirituality: Theological Approaches, Empirical Methods, and Christian Worship
Editor: George Corbett
Editor: Sarah Moerman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0403
The composer Sir James MacMillan has often referred to music as ‘the most spiritual of the arts’, and for many people, regardless of religious affiliation, this rings true. In listening to music, we are drawn to dimensions of human experience beyond the material. This collection brings together leading scholars from various disciplines – including Christian theology, musicology, and psychology and neuroscience – to interrogate the intimate relationship between music and spirituality.
Feliks Volkhovskii: A Revolutionary Life
Author: Michael Hughes
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0385
Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Feliks Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.
Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy
Author: James Reich
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Antisemitism in Online Communication: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Hate Speech in the Twenty-First Century
Editor: Laura Ascone
Editor: Karolina Placzynta
Editor: Chloé Vincent
Editor: Matthias J. Becker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0406
Drawing from disciplines such as corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, semiotics, history, and philosophy, this edited collection examines over 100,000 user comments from three language communities. Contributors explore various facets of online antisemitism, including its intersectionality with misogyny and its dissemination through memes and social networks. Through case studies, they examine the reproduction, support, and rejection of antisemitic tropes, alongside quantitative assessments of comment structures in online discussions. Additionally, the volume delves into the capabilities of content moderation tools and deep-learning models for automated hate speech detection. This multidisciplinary approach provides a comprehensive understanding of contemporary antisemitism in digital spaces, recognising the importance of addressing its insidious spread from multiple angles.
The Life of Nuns: Love, Politics, and Religion in Medieval German Convents
Author: Eva Schlotheuber
Author: Henrike Lähnemann
Translator: Anne Simon
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0397
In the Middle Ages half of those who chose the religious life were women, yet historians have overlooked entire generations of educated, feisty, capable and enterprising nuns, condemning them to the dusty silence of the archives. What, though, were their motives for entering a convent and what was their daily routine behind its walls like? How did they think, live and worship, both as individuals and as a community? How did they maintain contact with the families and communities they had left behind? Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber offer readers a vivid insight into the largely unknown lives and work of religious women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Psychological Perspectives on Musical Experiences and Skills: Research in the Western Balkans and Western Europe
Editor: Blanka Bogunović
Editor: Renee Timmers
Editor: Sanela Nikolić
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0389
This book features recent research on the psychology of music from the Western Balkans, foregrounding its specific topics, methods, and influences by bringing it into productive conversation with complementary research from Western Europe and further afield.
The Presence of Absence: Meditations on the Unsayable in Writing
Author: Katina L. Rogers
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Human Evolutionary Demography
Editor: Oskar Burger
Editor: Ronald Lee
Editor: Rebecca Sear
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0251
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines.
A Story of Witchery
Author: Jennifer Calkins
Illustrator: Thor Harris
Introduction by: Amy Gerstler
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories
Editor: Bruce Gaston
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0365
The short stories of Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, have remained in print continuously for over a hundred years. This collection is the first of its kind to present his stories as they were originally published in newspapers and magazines, preserving their internal consistency and contemporary references lost in revisions for The Chronicles of Clovis and subsequent collected editions. A trove of annotations and carefully sourced bibliographical information illuminates the Edwardian context behind the thirteen selected stories, of which three (‘Mrs. Pendercoet’s Lost Identity’, ‘The Romance of Business’ and ‘The Optimist’) were only recently rediscovered.
May 2024
Elementare Ekstasen: Sondierungen der Technosphäre
Author: Léa Perraudin
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Elementare Ekstasen überschwemmen, erodieren und evaporieren die wohlsortierten Grenzziehungen zwischen Technik, Umwelt und Mensch. Als Neuverortung im Spannungsfeld medienökologischer, neomaterialistischer und technikfeministischer Theoriebildung werden hier all jene Widerständigkeiten und Un/Verfügbarkeiten sondiert, die von techno-kapitalistisch protegierten Operationen nicht zu tilgen sind. Was hieße es, die planetarische Implikation der Technosphäre aus Mikroperspektiven zu denken, mit ihren Überlappungen, Leerstellen, Fragmentierungen, Akkumulationen des Technischen zu schreiben? Entlang ihrer materiellen Prozessualität werden elementare Medien wie Regen, Minerale, Staub und Schaum zur Gegenwartsdiagnose. Angesichts der umfassenden Ökologisierungstendenzen und ihrer experimentellen Verarbeitung in Medienkunst und Interfacedesign verdichtet sich ein kritisches Begriffsinventar, das die makrologische Karriere des Technischen anders denkt.
Roles and Relations in Biblical Law: A Study of Participant Tracking, Semantic Roles, and Social Networks in Leviticus 17-26
Author: Christian Canu Højgaard
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0376
Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on. The sojourner has his own obligations, as do the priests. Even God is said to behave in various ways towards various persons. Thus, the law text forms an intricate web of persons and interactions.
Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert
Author: Margaret Mehl
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0374
In only 50 years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese.
Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience
Author: Matt Tomlinson
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Teaching Music Performance in Higher Education: Exploring the Potential of Artistic Research
Editor: Gilvano Dalagna
Editor: Stefan Östersjö
Editor: Helen Julia Minors
Editor: Jorge Salgado Correia
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0398
This book contributes presenting examples of artistic research projects that are embedded within Higher Music Performance courses at universities and conservatoires across Europe.
Democratic Algorithms: Ethnography of a Public Recommender System
Author: Nikolaus Poechhacker
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Can an algorithm be democratic? And how can we understand algorithms not only as technical, but also as social and political phenomena? Democratic Algorithms offers theoretically and empirically informed perspectives on how we can imagine and design algorithms for a democratic society, and what we even mean by that. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book illustrates how a recommender system was built in a public broadcaster, raising questions not only about organizational and technical implementation, but also about the possible compatibility of such an algorithmic system with democratic constitutions.
Tacit Cinematic Knowledge: Approaches and Practices
Author: Haritha R.
Author: Claire Salles
Author: Felix M. Simon
Author: Felipe Soares
Author: Benoît Turquety
Author: Henning Schmidgen
Author: Vinzenz Hediger
Author: Andrea Mariani
Author: Bettina Paul
Author: Jelena Rakin
Author: Larissa Fischer
Author: Veena Hariharan
Editor: Rebecca Boguska
Editor: Guilherme da Silva Machado
Editor: Rebecca Puchta
Editor: Marin Reljić
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Moving images are increasingly finding their way into laboratories, dentist offices, clinics, airports and gyms. In these places and institutions film and moving image technologies serve to advance knowledge, to show how things are done, to train, teach, educate, mobilize people, as well as to imagine complex social facts and visualize dynamic models and schemes through data visualizations, pattern recognition software, and in social graphs. But what these moving images do goes beyond instruction, illustration and visual education. This publication introduces the concept of tacit cinematic knowledge to designate a broad variety of epistemic environments in which knowledge is configured in and through cinematic practices, and in the interaction with moving images. The concept thus describes a challenge not only for film and media scholars, but also for social scientists, economists, data analysts and artists.
Covering areas of study beyond the cinema and non-theatrical films which have recently become a focus of inquiry, the contributions analyze the operations of tacit cinematic knowledge in objects ranging from political campaigns, medical and scientific devices, corporate communications, devices for the study of animal behavior and more.
Ontohackers: Radical Movement Philosophy in the Age of Extinctions and Algorithms, Part I: Radical Movement Philosophy and the Body Intelligence R/evolution
Author: Jaym*/Jaime del Val
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery
Author: Dorothea Buck
Editor: Susanne Antonetta
Translator: Eva Lipton
Foreword by: Hans Krieger
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution
Author: Adrian Desmond
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0393
In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man’s institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil’s Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull’s pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.
Lividity
Author: Kim Rosenfield
Introduction by: Trisha Low
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Arabic Documents from Medieval Nubia
Author: Geoffrey Khan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0391
This volume presents an edition of a corpus of Arabic documents data-ble to the 11th and 12th centuries AD that were discovered by the Egypt Exploration Society at the site of the Nubian fortress Qaṣr Ibrīm (situated in the south of modern Egypt).
Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520
Author: Luke Clossey
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0371
For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China.
April 2024
Masks
Author: T.H.M. Gellar-Goad
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
The Nordic Minuet: Royal Fashion and Peasant Tradition
Editor: Petri Hoppu
Editor: Anne Margrete Fiskvik
Editor: Egil Bakka
Cambridge,UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0314
This major new anthology of the minuet in the Nordic countries comprehensively explores the dance as a historical, social and cultural phenomenon. One of the most significant dances in Europe, with a strong symbolic significance in western dance culture and dance scholarship, the minuet has evolved a distinctive pathway in this region, which these rigorous and pioneering essays explore.
No Prices No Games!: Four Economic Models
Author: Michael Richter
Author: Ariel Rubinstein
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0404
While current economic theory focuses on prices and games, this book models economic settings where harmony is established through one of the following societal conventions: • A power relation according to which stronger agents are able to force weaker ones to do things against their will. • A norm that categorizes actions as permissible or forbidden. • A status relation over alternatives which limits each agent’s choices. • Systematic biases in agents’ preferences.
(An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War
Editor: Mnemo ZIN
Editor: Iveta Silova
Editor: Nelli Piattoeva
Editor: Zsuzsa Millei
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0383
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. Collectively, these acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become.
A Grammar of the Jewish Arabic Dialect of Gabes
Author: Wiktor Gębski
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0394
This volume undertakes a linguistic exploration of the endangered Arabic dialect spoken by the Jews of Gabes, a coastal city situated in Southern Tunisia. Belonging to the category of sedentary North African dialects, this variety is now spoken by a dwindling number of native speakers, primarily in Israel and France. Given the imminent extinction faced by many modern varieties of Judaeo-Arabic, including Jewish Gabes, the study’s primary goal is to document and describe its linguistic nuances while reliable speakers are still accessible. Data for this comprehensive study were collected during fieldwork in Israel and France between December 2018 and March 2022.
Alone in the Dark: Cinephilia and the Heroic Imagination
Author: Doug Dibbern
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Age of Globalisation
Editor: Lilia Makhloufi
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0388
Tangible and Intangible Heritage in the Age of Globalisation offers a rich collection of perspectives on the complex interplay between tangible and intangible heritage. These essays illustrate the need to redefine heritage as an interdisciplinary and intercultural concept. They interrogate heritage paradigms while also providing concrete recommendations to promote the preservation of physical heritage spaces, and the cultural practices and social relationships that depend on them.
Neural Networks
Author: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal
Author: Théo Lepage-Richer
Author: Lucy Suchman
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices, social histories, mediating techniques, and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name. If so-called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction, then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron-like units to identify such patterns. Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence, however, neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century. Taking this traffic as its starting point, this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature, to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology, psychology, and sociability, and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise.
Heavy Metal: Earth’s Minerals and the Future of Sustainable Societies
Editor: Philippe D. Tortell
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0373
Heavy Metal: Earth’s Minerals and the Future of Sustainable Societies brings together world-leading experts from across the globe to reimagine the future of mineral exploration and mining in a post-fossil fuel world.
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context
Editor: Cathy McAteer
Editor: Muireann Maguire
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0340
Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context examines the translation and reception of Russian literature as a world-wide process. This volume aims to provoke new debate about the continued currency of Russian literature as symbolic capital for international readers, in particular for nations seeking to create or consolidate cultural and political leverage in the so-called ‘World Republic of Letters’. It also seeks to examine and contrast the mechanisms of the translation and uses of Russian literature across the globe.
March 2024
In Defense of Don Giovanni: A Feminist Mythobiography
Author: Luisa Passerini
Translator: Stella Tillyard
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
No Life Without You: Refugee Love Letters from the 1930s
Editor: Franklin Felsenstein
Introduction by: Rachel Pistol
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0334
The letters and journals of Ernst Moritz and Vera Hirsch Felsenstein, two German Jewish refugees caught in the tumultuous years leading to the Second World War, form the core of this book. Abridged in English from the original German, the correspondence and diaries have been expertly compiled and annotated by their only son who preserves his parents’ love story in their own words. Their letters, written from Germany, England, Russia, and Palestine capture their desperate efforts to save themselves and their family, friends and businesses from the fascist tyranny. The book begins by contextualizing the early lives of Moritz and Vera.
Byron and Trinity: Memorials, Marbles and Ruins
Editor: Adrian Poole
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0399
This is a collection of reprinted essays about the life and writing of Lord Byron and the themes of ‘memorials, marbles and ruins’ that were prominent in his thinking and feeling.
Tribulations of a Westerner in the Western World
Author: Vincent Dachy
Introduction by: Mary Burger
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London
Author: Leslie Howsam
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0392
Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.
Continuum 2: Writings – Scritti – Écrits 2015–2022
Author: Alessandro De Francesco
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
A Country of Shepherds: Cultural Stories of a Changing Mediterranean Landscape
Author: Kathleen Ann Myers
Translator: Grady C. Wray
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0387
This book draws on the life stories told by shepherds, farmers, and their families in the Andalusian region in Spain to sketch out the landscapes, actions, and challenges of people who work in pastoralism. Their narratives highlight how local practices interact with regional and European communities and policies, and they help us see a broader role for extensive grazing practices and sustainability.
February 2024
like a dog
Author: lauren samblanet
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia
Author: Selina Robertson
Author: Patrice Rollet
Author: Marcos Uzal
Author: So Mayer
Author: Claire Allouche
Author: Raymond Bellour
Author: Mélina Delmas
Author: Garin Dowd
Author: Chloé Galibert-Laîné
Author: Theresa Heath
Author: Andrea Inzerillo
Author: Hervé Joubert-Laurencin
Author: Philipp Dominik Keidl
Author: Simon Pageau
Author: Sylvie Pierre-Ulmann
Author: Bamchade Pourvali
Editor: Pierre Eugène
Editor: Kate Ince
Editor: Marc Siegel
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
French critic Serge Daney was a central figure in film, television and media criticism of the second half of the twentieth century. He died of AIDS in 1992, just as the concept of queer cinema entered international film studies and just before the start of the digital era that has transformed film culture. This collection of new essays investigates the legacy of Daney’s work alongside considerations of feminist, queer and digital cinephilia and contemporary practices of film curation.
Genetic Inroads into the Art of James Joyce
Author: Hans Walter Gabler
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0325
This book is a treasure trove comprising core writings from Hans Walter Gabler‘s seminal work on James Joyce, spanning fifty years from the analysis of composition he undertook towards a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, to Gabler‘s latest essays on (appropriately enough) Joyce’s sustained artistic innovation.
Szenen kritischer Relationalität
Author: Shirin Weigelt
Author: Philipp Hohmann
Author: Eva Krivanec
Author: Rémy Bocquillon
Author: Irina Raskin
Author: Julia Schade
Author: Martin Siegler
Author: Christiane Voss
Author: Max Walther
Author: Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Author: Lorenz Engell
Author: Jakob Claus
Author: Lorenzo Gineprini
Editor: Jasmin Degeling
Editor: Gabriel Geffert
Editor: Martin Kallmeyer
Editor: Gereon Rahnfeld
Editor: Nathalie Schäfer
Editor: Katia Schwerzmann
Editor: Maximilian Rünker
Editor: Charlotte Bolwin
Lüneburg: meson press, 2024
Kritische Relationalität interveniert in Ordnungen des Denkens, die Kritik als Operation des Trennens und Auseinanderhaltens entworfen und damit die modernen Dualismen von Menschlichem und Nicht-Menschlichem, Subjekten und Objekten, Organischem und Technischem, Natur und Kultur geprägt haben. Ausgehend von multiplen, verschränkten Krisen suchen die Beiträge dieses Bandes konkrete Szenen auf, in denen das kritische Potenzial von Verbindungen und Verstrickungen anschaulich wird. Das Ausloten von Relationalität wird dabei zu einem analytischen Modus, der für die Produktivität von Verbindungen sensibilisiert und zugleich ihre differenziellen Dimensionen anerkennt.
Tener Demasiado: Ensayos Filosóficos sobre el Limitarismo
Editor: Ingrid Robeyns
Translator: Héctor Iñaki Larrínaga Márquez
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0354
‘Tener demasiado’ es el primer volumen académico dedicado al limitarismo: la idea de que el uso de los recursos económicos o de los ecosistemas no sobrepasen ciertos límites.
How Divine Images Became Art: Essays on the Rediscovery, Study and Collecting of Medieval Icons in the Belle Époque
Author: Oleg Tarasov
Translator: Stella Rock
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0378
How Divine Images Became Art tells the story of the parallel ‘discovery’ of Russian medieval art and of the Italian ‘primitives’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these two developments are well-known, they are usually studied in isolation. Tarasov’s study has the great merit of showing the connection between the art world in Russia and the West, and its impact in the cultural history of the continent in the pre-war period.
Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency
Editor: Constance Smith
Editor: Peter Lockwood
Editor: Tessa Diphoorn
Editor: Joost Fontein
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
The Kingdom and the Qur’an: Translating the Holy Book of Islam in Saudi Arabia
Author: Mykhaylo Yakubovych
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0381
This book presents a detailed analysis of the translation of the Qur’an in Saudi Arabia, the most important global actor in the promotion, production and dissemination of Qur’an translations. Mykhaylo Yakubovych provides a comprehensive historical overview of the debates surrounding the translatability of the Qur’an, as well as exploring the impact of the burgeoning translation and dissemination of the holy book upon Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam. Backed by meticulous research and drawing on a wealth of sources, this work illuminates an essential facet of global Islamic culture and scholarly discourse.
January 2024
Classical Music Futures: Practices of Innovation
Editor: Karoly Molina
Editor: Peter Peters
Editor: Neil Thomas Smith
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0353
This edited volume brings together contributions from a wide range of international academics and practitioners. It traces innovations within classical music practice, showing how these offer divergent visions for its future. The interdisciplinary contributions to the volume highlight the way contrasting ideas of the future can effect change in the present.
The Getty Fiend
Author: Ken White
Introduction by: Michael du Plessis
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Analogical City
Author: Cameron McEwan
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2024
Divine Style: Walt Whitman and the King James Bible
Author: F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0357
Dobbs-Allsopp, Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, explicitly approaches Whitman from the perspective of a biblical scholar. Utilising his wealth of expertise in this field, he constructs a compelling, erudite and methodical argument for the King James Bible’s importance in the evolution of Whitman’s style – from his signature long lines to the prevalence of parallelism and tendency towards parataxis in his works.
December 2023
Material Trajectories: Designing With Care?
Author: Emilia Tikka
Author: Maxie Schneider
Author: Charlett Wenig
Author: Susanne Witzgall
Author: Ebba Fransén Waldhör
Author: Sename Koffi Agbodjinou
Author: Viola S. Ahrensfeld
Author: Joanna Boehnert
Author: Jessica Bulling
Author: Michaela Büsse
Author: Emile De Visscher
Author: Roman Kirschner
Author: Manuel Kretzer
Author: Anupama Kundoo
Author: Martin Müller
Author: Fara Peluso
Author: Wolfgang Schäffner
Author: Lea Schmidt
Editor: Léa Perraudin
Editor: Clemens Winkler
Editor: Claudia Mareis
Editor: Matthias Held
Lüneburg: meson press, 2023
Material Trajectories: Designing With Care? turns towards material-driven design processes with the aim of relocating technoscientific trajectories. Concerned with new forms of caretaking, it combines positions from the extended fields of design research and humanities scholarship including practice-based approaches. The contributions explore current ecological conditions through multiple acts of making-with and seek to complicate questions of sustainability, livability, and cooperation. In reassessing the status quo in design and architecture as material practices, they provide outlines for a nuanced reading of these worldmaking processes and ask what different ways of designing with care and complicity might entail.
Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past
Author: Mila Turajlić
Author: Marie Sophie Beckmann
Author: Karola Gramann
Author: Ravi Vasudevan
Author: Ala Younis
Author: Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock
Author: Simone Venturini
Author: Clarissa Thieme
Author: Erika Balsom
Author: Gaby Babić
Author: Hadi Alipanah
Author: Añulika Agina
Author: Mareike Bernien
Author: Amrita Biswas
Author: Sema Çakmak
Author: Sonia Campanini
Author: Erica Carter
Author: Özge Çelikaslan
Author: Filipa César
Author: Didi Cheeka
Author: Vaginal Davis
Author: Madhusree Dutta
Author: Tamer El Said
Author: Almudena Escobar López
Author: Mariia Glazunova
Author: Ulrich Gregor
Author: Olena Goncharuk
Author: Veena Hariharan
Author: Mohammad Shawky Hassan
Author: Shai Heredia
Author: Tobias Hering
Author: Grazia Ingravalle
Author: Ritika Kaushik
Author: Philipp Dominik Keidl
Author: Julita Pratiwi
Author: Lisabona Rahman
Author: Ivanna Khitsinska
Author: Hieyoon Kim
Author: Laura Kloeckner
Author: Merle Kröger
Author: Asja Makarevic
Author: Nils Meyn
Author: Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Author: Rebecca Ohene-Asah
Author: Volker Pantenburg
Author: Nikolaus Perneczky
Author: Francesco Pitassio
Author: Constanze Ruhm
Author: Heide Schlüpmann
Author: Alexandra Schneider
Author: Girish Shambu
Author: Marc Siegel
Author: Can Sungu
Editor: Stefanie Schulte Strathaus
Editor: Vinzenz Hediger
Lüneburg: meson press, 2023
In the digital media ecology, archives are changing. Artists, curators, critics and scholars assume the role of accidental archivists. They shape cinema’s futures by salvaging precarious repositories and making them matter in new ways. In the process, the cinema’s public, a democratic body seemingly scattered about platforms and niches in a post-pandemic world, re-emerges as a political force.
Accidental Archivism brings together programmatic statements and proposals to explore an artistic space between archiving and activism, a space where remnants of the past become the building blocks of new ways of making, showing, teaching and thinking cinema.
Deine Kamera ist eine App: Über Medienverflechtungen des Applizierens und Appropriierens
Author: Simone Pfeifer
Author: Florian Krautkrämer
Author: Laura Katharina Mücke
Author: Nicole Braida
Author: Anne Ganzert
Author: Angela Jouini
Editor: Alena Strohmaier
Editor: Elisa Linseisen
Lüneburg: meson press, 2023
Der vorliegende Band untersucht systematisch das Verhältnis von digitalen Kameras und ihren softwaretechnischen Grundlagen, die wir unter „Apps“ zusammenfassen. Als konzeptuelles Framing in der Auseinandersetzung mit dieser medialen Verbindung aus Kamera/App wählen wir das ästhetische wie theoretische Spektrum aus Techniken des Appropriierens und Applizierens und damit verbundene Theorietraditionen der Filmwissenschaft sowie der Software, Platform und App Studies. Mit dem programmatischen Befund ‚Deine Kamera ist eine App‘ soll in vier dialogischen Textpaaren dem offenen Themenfeld zwischen Appropriation/Applikation und seiner zeitgenössischen Brisanz wie historischen Tiefe entlang übergreifender Konzepte wie Partizipation, Format und Widerstand nachgegangen werden. Dabei beleuchtet der Band die Verbindung von Ästhetik und Technik, Kunst und Software und wendet sich neben dem Film auch den sogenannten Medienkünsten, dokumentarischen Videoformaten, Selbstdokumentationen und dem Gaming zu.
‘Wit’s Wild Dancing Light’: Reading the Poems of Alexander Pope
Author: William Hutchings
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0372
The book is a chronological reading of Alexander Pope’s poems, from the Pastorals (1709) to the four-book Dunciad (1743). Each of the 26 chapters forming the volume selects examples for detailed scrutiny, demonstrating how close reading can generate understanding of a whole poem and how critical appraisal can build into a creative survey of an entire poetic career.
Synopses and Lists: Textual Practices in the Pre-Modern World
Editor: Teresa Bernheimer
Editor: Ronny Vollandt
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0375
Textual practices in pre-modern societies cover a great range of representations, from the literary to the pictorial. Among the most intriguing are synopses and lists. While lists provide a complete enumeration of ideas, people, events, or terms, synopses juxtapose one against the other. To understand how they were planned, produced, and consumed, is to gain insight into the practices of what one can call management of knowledge in a time before our own.
Dancing with Philoctetes: Reflections on Pain and Remembrance
Author: Abigail Akavia
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2023
Modelling Between Digital and Humanities: Thinking in Practice
Author: Arianna Ciula
Author: Øyvind Eide
Author: Cristina Marras
Author: Patrick Sahle
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0369
This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH?
Financing Investment in Times of High Public Debt: 2023 European Public Investment Outlook
Editor: Floriana Cerniglia
Editor: Francesco Saraceno
Editor: Andrew Watt
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0386
The fourth book in the ‘European Public Investment Outlook’ series focuses on the urgent issue of how to finance needed investment in critical tangible and intangible infrastructure given high levels of public debt, a thorny problem facing many governments across Europe. Drawing on expertise from academics, researchers at public policy institutes and international governance bodies, the contributors analyse the current situation and prospects and propose feasible solutions.
Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Postwork Society
Author: Tedd Siegel
Foreword by: Tyrus Miller
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2023
November 2023
Feminist Solidarities after Modulation
Author: Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2023
The Standard Language Ideology of the Hebrew and Arabic Grammarians of the ʿAbbasid Period
Author: Benjamin Paul Kantor
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0382
In the present book we survey six specific characteristics of a ‘standard language ideology’ that appear in both the writings of the Hebrew grammarians who wrote in Judeo-Arabic and the Arabic grammarians during the ʿAbbasid period. Such striking lines of linguistic-ideological similarity suggest that it may not have been only grammatical concepts or literary genres that the medieval Hebrew grammarians inherited from the Arabic grammatical tradition, but a way of thinking about language as well.
Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions
Editor: Cymene Howe
Editor: Jeff Diamanti
Editor: Amelia Moore
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2023
Health Care in the Information Society: Volume 1 - From Adventure of Ideas to Anarchy of Transition
Author: David Ingram
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0335
In this fascinating book David Ingram traces the history of information technology and health informatics from its pioneers in the middle of the twentieth century to its latest developments.
Health Care in the Information Society: Volume 2 - From Anarchy of Transition to Programme for Reform
Author: David Ingram
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0384
In this fascinating book David Ingram traces the history of information technology and health informatics from its pioneers in the middle of the twentieth century to its latest developments.
Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages
Author: Kayvan Tahmasebian
Author: Ida Klitgård
Author: Matthew Reynolds
Author: Andrés Claro
Author: Annmarie Drury
Author: Mary Frank
Author: Paola Gaudio
Author: Rebecca Ruth Gould
Author: Yunte Huang
Author: Eugenia Kelbert
Author: Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos
Author: Cláudia Pazos-Alonso
Author: Abhishek Jain
Author: Ulrich Timme Kragh
Author: Léa Rychen
Author: Madli Kütt
Author: Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
Author: Eleni Philippou
Author: Céline Sabiron
Author: Giovanni Pietro Vitali
Author: Jernej Habjan
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and first published in 1847, has been translated more than five hundred times into over sixty languages. Prismatic Jane Eyre argues that we should see these many re-writings, not as simple replications of the novel, but as a release of its multiple interpretative possibilities: in other words, as a prism.
The Pandemic Visual Regime: Visuality and Performativity in the Covid-19 Crisis
Editor: Julia Ramírez-Blanco
Editor: Francesco Spampinato
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2023
Misunderstandings: False Beliefs in Communication
Author: Georg Weizsäcker
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0367
What do we expect when we say something to someone, and what do they expect when they hear it? When is a conversation successful? The book considers a wide set of two-person conversations, and a bit of game theory, to show how conversational statements and their interpretations are governed by beliefs. Thinking about beliefs is suitable for communication analysis because beliefs are well-defined and measurable, allowing to differentiate between successful understandings and their less successful counterparts: misunderstandings.
Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer
Author: Judith May Fathallah
Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press, 2023
https://doi.org/10.32376/3f8575cb.c2702120
Killer Fandom, in the first long-form treatment, examines serial killer fandom through the lens of textual poaching, affective community, subcultural capital, and play—with close readings of fan posts, comments, and mashups on Tumblr, TikTok, and YouTube.
The Ethnographic Case
Editor: Emily Yates-Doerr
Editor: Christine Labuski
Manchester: Mattering Press, 2023
https://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729340
In 26 gripping and provocative installations, the new and updated volume showcases research from influential feminist and decolonial scholars. Where anthropology has long sought to identify patterns in culture, this volume makes space for inquiry focused on particularities and advocates for an intellectual politics where that which seemingly doesn’t fit is still allowed to matter.
October 2023
Artificial Earth: A Genealogy of Planetary Technicity
Author: J. Daniel Andersson
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2023
Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures
Editor: Laura Czerniewicz
Editor: Catherine Cronin
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0363
After decades of turbulence and acute crises in recent years, how can we build a better future for Higher Education?
Thoughtfully edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, this rich and diverse collection by academics and professionals from across 17 countries and many disciplines offers a variety of answers to this question. It addresses the need to set new values for universities, trapped today in narratives dominated by financial incentives and performance indicators, and examines those “wicked” problems which need multiple solutions, resolutions, experiments, and imaginaries.
The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing
Author: Amy Koerber
Author: Jesse C. Starkey
Author: Karin Ardon-Dryer
Author: R. Glenn Cummins
Author: Lyombe Eko
Author: Kerk F. Kee
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0364
In today’s ‘publish or perish’ academic setting, the institutional prizing of quantity over quality has given rise to and perpetuated the dilemma of predatory publishing. Upon a close examination, however, the definition of ‘predatory’ itself becomes slippery, evading neat boxes or lists which might seek to easily define and guard against it. This volume serves to foreground a nuanced representation of this multifaceted issue. In such a rapidly evolving landscape, this book becomes a field guide to its historical, political, and economic aspects, presenting thoughtful interviews, legal analysis and original research. Case studies from both European-American and non-European-American stakeholders emphasize the worldwide nature of the challenge faced by researchers of all levels.
Widening Scripts: Cultivating Feminist Care in Academic Labor
Author: Ellen Shaffner
Author: Lindsey MacCallum
Author: Michelle Forrest
Author: Ian Reilly
Author: Scott Stoneman
Author: Angela Henderson
Author: Mariana Prandini Assis
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2023
Transparent Minds in Science Fiction: An Introduction to Alien, AI and Post-Human Consciousness
Author: Paul Matthews
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0348
Transparent Minds explores the intersection between neuroscience and science fiction stories. Paul Matthews expertly analyses the narratives of humans and nonhumans from Mary Shelley to Kazuo Ishiguro across 200 years of the genre. In doing so he gives lucid insight into the meaning of existence and self-awareness. Rigorously researched and highly accessible, Matthews argues that psycho-emotional science fiction writers both imitate and inform alien and post-human consciousnesses through exploratory narratives and metaphor.
Boundary Images
Author: Giselle Beiguelman
Author: Melody Devries
Author: Winnie Soon
Author: Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver
Lüneburg: meson press, 2023
How are images made, and how should we understand the capacities of digital images? This book investigates images as well as the technologies that host them. Its three chapters discuss the boundaries that images cross and blur between humans, machines, and nature and the ways in which images are political, material, and visual. Exploring these boundaries of images, this book places itself at the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, understanding these as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world and its becomings.
Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading
Author: Bruce Stone
Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2023
Shépa: The Tibetan Oral Tradition in Choné
Author: Members of the Choné Tibetan Community
Author: Bendi Tso
Author: Marnyi Gyatso
Author: Mark Turin
Author: Naljor Tsering
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0312
This book contains a unique collection of Tibetan oral narrations and songs known as Shépa, as these have been performed, recorded and shared between generations of Choné Tibetans from Amdo living in the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Presented in trilingual format — in Tibetan, Chinese and English — the book reflects a sustained collaboration with and between members of the local community, including narrators, monks, and scholars, calling attention to the diversity inherent in all oral traditions, and the mutability of Shépa in particular.
African Science Granting Councils: Towards Sustainable Development in Africa
Author: Samuel Kehinde Okunade
Author: Teboho Moja
South Africa: African Minds, 2023
https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928502791
This book delves into the research-policy nexus as it relates to development in Africa. It does so by examining four country-cases – Botswana, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya and Zambia – while referring to South Africa as a possible exemplar case.
September 2023
Frictions: Inquiries into Cybernetic Thinking and Its Attempts towards Mate[real]ization
![cover for Frictions: Inquiries into Cybernetic Thinking and Its Attempts towards Mate[real]ization](https://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Cover_Frictions.jpg)
Author: Sebastian Vehlken
Author: Andrei Cretu
Author: Wolfgang Ernst
Author: Thomas Fischer
Author: Hans-Christian von Herrmann
Author: Stefan Höltgen
Author: Rolf F. Nohr
Author: Eva Schauerte
Author: Isabell Schrickel
Editor: Diego Gómez-Venegas
Lüneburg: meson press, 2023
Frictions is a collective invitation to embrace the space of difference that both connects and separates techno-scientific discourses from their actual implementations—or even, from their non-implementations. Through a series of case studies focused on cybernetics, systems research, and some of their more contemporary inheritors, this book argues that such a middle space, the topology of frictions, offers significant insights to assess the historical and epistemological relevance of these interconnected fields. Characterized here as cybernetic thinking, this broad area of theoretical and applied projects would conceal, precisely within its frictions, the operational principles of our present.
After the Miners’ Strike: A39 and Cornish Political Theatre versus Thatcher’s Britain: Volume 1
Author: Paul Farmer
Author: Mark Kilburn
Preface by: Rebecca Hillman
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0329
In this rich memoir, the first of two volumes, Paul Farmer traces the story of A39, the Cornish political theatre group he co-founded and ran from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Farmer offers a unique insight into A39’s creation, operation, and artistic practice during a period of convulsive political and social change.
Linguistic Theory and the Biblical Text
Editor: Elizabeth Robar
Editor: William A. Ross
Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0358
This volume is the result of the 2021 session of the Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group of the Institute for Biblical Research, which addresses the history, relevance, and prospects of broad theoretical linguistic frameworks in the field of biblical studies. Cognitive Linguistics, Functional Grammar, generative linguistics, historical linguistics, complexity theory, and computational analysis are each allotted a chapter, outlining the key theoretical commitments of each approach, their major concepts and/or methods, and their important contributions to contemporary study of the biblical text.