My experience with StarCraft could be mapped into three periods that represent the history of the game itself. I was introduced to real-time strat-egy (RTS) games when my cousin brought their copy of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (Blizzard Entertainment 1994) at my grandparents’ house. My brother and I got the game quickly after and, as most players from the early 1990s, I was playing es…
Within Western institutional thinking, the human is constituted through an abil-ity to speak, defined as the sole creature who holds language and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. Along with language comes the power of naming, of choreographing the semantic categories put in place, continually reproduced and negotiated to make sense…
Large?scale urban parks have been used as a concept for contemporary land?scape planning and design. These parks are intrinsically tied to the development ofcontemporary cities, the various conceptions of dynamic urban landscapes, and thesustainable, cost?effective, and process?oriented transformation of post?industrialsites.This book offers one of the first thorough analyses of contemporary la…
This report of a fire without serious casualties at Grenfell Tower in June 1979 assumes an entirely new and frightening meaning in the context of the tragic events of 14 June 2017, when a horrific cladding fire at the same tower caused the deaths of seventy- two people. Tucked into a folder of newspaper cuttings in the archives of the Royal Borough of Ken sington and Chelsea (RBKC), the articl…
Composer, pianist, editor, writer, and pedagogue Mario Lavista (1943-2021) was a central figure of the cultural and artistic scene in Mexico and one of the leading Ibero-American composers of his generation. His music is often described as evocative and poetic, noted for his meticulous attention to timbre and motivic permutation, and his creative trajectory was characterized by its intersection…
Empires are large. It is one of their signature qualities. As assemblages of different peoples and polities, empires link distant territories to each other by their very def inition: they are ‘large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space’; consequently, when studying empires, ‘[s]pace matters, size matters, and so does the character of space and size…
On March 1, 1954, the United States detonated its most power ful thermo-nuclear weapon, code- named “ Castle Bravo,” at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Situated to the southeast of Bikini, the populations of Rongelap Atoll, including people residing on Ailingnae and Utrik Atolls, watched in confusion as the sun seemed to rise in the west. On Utrik, Rijen Michael, eigh teen years ol…
The aim of this study was to pursue greater knowledge of vocal expressions in the borderland between speech and song through collaboration between researchers with different approaches, with a view to developing an interdisciplinary method for the analysis of such expressions. The research presented here is the outcome of the research project ‘In the Borderland between So…
The importance of music is difficult to overstate. As historian R W Malcolmson noted, it was the most accessible and democratic of the creative arts, with the ability to give expression to a range of fundamental emotions.4 From a different perspective, musicologist, Philip Tagg emphasised how music and dance are ‘particularly suited to expressing the affec…
Fox television show Glee (2009–15), a musical comedy about a crew of lov-able misfits and their high school glee club, was highly popular. The show had good ratings, attracted a large and intense fandom, enjoyed widespread merchandise sales—and produced huge music sales. Over the course of six seasons of cast recordings, Glee placed more than two hundred songs on the Billboard Hot 100, near…