The shortage of affordable housing in cities is one of the most significant global challenges. It affects 1.6 billion people ( one- third of urban population) and is a key priority for policy change identified by the United Nations in the New Urban Agenda ( Tsenkova, 2016). Globally, cities and central governments have championed housing strategies and action plans, with a strong…
The research project “Performing Interspaces: Social Fluidities in Contemporary Theatre”, whose primary output is this monograph, began as an imperative to account for spaces that are awkward, evade attention, or, when they receive it, rarely do so because they produce feelings of desirability, warmth, or contentment. These spaces are sometimes …
On March 1, 2020, Greece closed its borders, denying refugees the right to seek political asylum, a reaction to Turkey’s decision to strategically refuse its role as gatekeeper to the European Union. A few weeks later, Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain closed their borders as the global COVID-19 pandemic spread. China had already closed its borders a few wee…
This book came about as a major dissemination output of the BlueHealth Project (https://bluehealth2020.eu), a large, integrated interdisciplinary research project carried out under the European Union Horizon 2020 Research Frame-work Programme between 2016 and 2020. The project took an international and innovative, interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to heal…
Thinking sound is an activity. Thinking with sound; thinking about sound; thinking through sound: these are all modalities of living with sound as a physical, vibrating reality. Because sound is matter in motion — resonating and reverberating — it resists conceptualization as an object or as a static concept. It cannot be held in a container but rather …
Struggles over naming our epoch of climate change – Anthropocene? Capitalocene? – are symptomatic of the growing recognition that ecology and economy can no longer be separated: that indeed, they have always been impli-cated in one another. For flm studies, this recognition necessitates adding to early ecocritical concerns with what flm does, a renewed inquiry into how …
In the 1890s, the eccentric American businessman Franklin Webster Smith proposed grand new ‘National Galleries of History and Art’ for Washington, DC. A rendering of his imagined project has the vertigo-inducing scale of the architectural proposal that was destined from its inception to remain unrealized (Figure 1.1). Imagine that you stand at the he…
The composer Sir James MacMillan has called music ‘the most spiritual of the arts’, and for many people, both religious and non-religious alike, this rings true.1 But what do people mean by ‘music’ and ‘spiritual’ in this context, and what is the nature of their perceived relationship? Do certain kinds of music more readily afford spiritual experiences than others? What …
Questions of time and concepts of temporality have increasingly been moving into the focus of current research. A broad timeframe is covered in the publication Temporalität in Kunst und Kunsttheorie seit 1800 [Temporality in Art and Art Theory since 1800], ed-ited by Thomas Kisser in 2011. It reflects and discusses the problem of time in images across epochs – by analysing the role of time i…
In Sacred Music in Secular Society, Jonathan Arnold highlights a strange phenomenon: ‘the seeming paradox that, in today’s so-called secular society, sacred choral music is as powerful, compelling and popular as it has ever been’.1 The explosion of new media through the internet and digital technology has created a new, broader audience for ‘the creative art of Renaissance polyphony …