An avatar is an agent who serves as a vehicle or vessel for another’s consciousness and will. In spirit possession in India and elsewhere, possessed spirit mediums transform into avatars of divine will. In online roleplaying games like World of Warcraft, digital avatars do players’ bidding. Relevant to psychosocial well-being in these two contexts is […]
Whenever political and social decisions use categories of identity such as race, religion, social class, or nationality to distinguish groups of people, they risk holding certain groups as inferior and culturally “Other.” When people employ ideologies of imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, and classism, they position certain groups as superior or ideal/ized people. Such ideological positioning causes […]
The troubles of the cotemporary moment in history can be interpreted many different ways. Indeed, there has been no shortage of analysis and commentary on events like the attacks of September 11th, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring, the election of Donald Trump and the global pandemic. This book, however, argues that the most insightful […]
“Water is wise,” Matthew Cooperman writes, and his luminous book of poems, Wonder About The, generously bears forth this wisdom. Wonder About The is a work of revelatory ecopoetic wonder, a deep and flowing meditation on the Poudre River bioregion and its manifold worlds. In its expansive, intricate layering of riparian scenes and life forms, […]
In eleven fearless, wide-ranging stories, The Sexual Lives of Suburbanites offers us a sometimes absurdist, sometimes satirical but always fresh glimpse into the things that trouble us most. From materialism to regrets and everything in-between, Stenson dissects suburban milieu. Whether narrated by e-trading infants or drug addicts, the characters’ worlds unfold with energy and surprise. […]
This book provides a foundational look at social virtual worlds from the geographer’s perspective. How can the geographer’s craft be applied to social virtual worlds? This question is addressed through careful analysis of what social virtual worlds are, how interest in these worlds has waxed and waned during the twenty-first century, and the meaning of […]
In the southwestern corner of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on the border between Arizona and Mexico, one finds Quitobaquito, the second-largest oasis in the Sonoran Desert. There, with some effort, one might also find remnants of once-thriving O’odham communities and their predecessors with roots reaching back at least 12,000 years—along with evidence of their […]
Dan Beachy-Quick writes, “There are depths within the denotative life of Greek words that English seldom allows readers in translation to access. At some basic level, I wanted to offer a translation that traced out some of those complexities into an apprehendable substance in the poems themselves—sometimes by allowing an image to unfold more fully […]
A special quality about the medium of virtual reality is its immersive nature, allowing users to disengage from the physical world around them in order to fully interact with a digital environment. An Artistic Approach to Virtual Reality traces the lineage of artist/technologists who have worked with virtual reality in its infancy to the interactive […]
For three decades, Cape Town’s Magnet Theatre has served as a crucial space for theatre, education, performance and community throughout a turbulent period in South African history. Offering a dialogue between internal and external perspectives, this book analyses Magnet’s many productions and presents a rich compendium of their work. Cape Town’s Magnet Theatre has been […]
