New online technologies have brought with them a great promise of freedom. The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. Furthermore, lay people and amateurs have been enthusiastically greeted as heroes of the digital era. This thoughtful study casts a fresh light on the shaping of user participa…
The changes we have seen in recent years in the scholarly publishing world - including the growth of digital publishing and changes to the role and strategies of publishers and libraries alike - represent the most dramatic paradigm shift in scholarly communications in centuries. This volume brings together leading scholars from across the humanities to explore that transformation and consider t…
Taking media scholar Henry Jenkins’s concept of ‘convergence culture’ and the related notions of ‘participatory culture’ and ‘transmedia storytelling’ as points of departure, the essays compiled in the present volume provide terminological clarification, offer exemplary case studies, and discuss the broader implications of such developments for the humanities. Most of the contribu…
This open access book advocates for the Social Sciences and Humanities to be more involved in energy policymaking. It forms part of the European platform for energy-related Social Sciences and Humanities’ activities, and works on the premise that crossing disciplines is essential. All of its contributions are highly interdisciplinary, with each chapter grounded in at least three different Soc…
Continuity and Discontinuity in Learning Careers: Potentials for a Learning Space in a Changing World focuses on the continuities and discontinuities of the learning careers and identities of non-traditional adult students in diverse learning contexts. Readership: All those interested in adult education and the challenges facing adult education today such as researchers in education and social …
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instan…
This open access book is about public open spaces, about people, and about the relationship between them and the role of technology in this relationship. It is about different approaches, methods, empirical studies, and concerns about a phenomenon that is increasingly being in the centre of sciences and strategies – the penetration of digital technologies in the urban space. As the main outco…
This book presents a Facebook study on members of the Cusp Generation, or those born before the “great digital divide” of 1995. This delineation allows for a discussion on the possible socio-cultural implications of Facebook use for people of all ages. Members of the Cusp Generation are in a unique position as “part digital natives” to easily acquire and use new media technologies, whil…
This open access book introduces the theoretical frameworks and academic debates concerning sexual cultural practices and HIV/AIDS in Africa. It shows how these frameworks have been applied in a practical sense in Africa to investigate sexual cultural practices and their link with HIV/AIDS. The author provides an overview of both the field of study and the methods used during fieldwork. Finally…
Disability Studies and Spanish Culture is the first book to apply the tenets of Disability Studies to the Spanish context. In particular, this work is an important corrective to existing cultural studies of disability in Spain that tend to largely ignore intellectual disabilities. Taking on the representation of Down syndrome, autism, alexia/agnosia as well as childhood disability, its chapters…