Anxiety about non-human intelligent machines is a longstanding theme of cultural production and consumption. Examples range from tales of golems and Frankenstein's monster to the evil overlord scenarios of contemporary film and television franchises: Star Trek, the Alien series, and the Terminator sequence, as well as Her, Black Mirror, Blade Runner, Ex Machina, and many other less mainstream cultural artifacts.

The source of this anxiety is clear. Non-human conscious entities may turn out to be superior to any biological form of life, allowing a stride across human ambition in a moment dubbed "the Singularity" by AI insiders. This is the turning point when non-human entities advance and reproduce in a manner that surpasses and subjugates biological forms of intelligent life. Although today's artificial intelligences fall notably short of this level of sophistication, Mark Kingwell argues that we are already more than human in important ways, and likely to become more so as time goes on. In Singular Creatures Kingwell plumbs the depths of cultural and political meaning in the apparent transition to posthuman life. Our immersion in technology, now comprehensive to the point of invisibility, has altered forever what it means to be alive. The politics of posthumanism flow directly from our own situation, at once dependent on technology and afraid of its effects on current and future experiences.

More than a century after playwright Karel Capek coined the word robot - rooted in the Czech robota, meaning "servitude" or "drudgery" - in his 1920 allegory about the alienation of forced labour leading to a violent workers' revolt, Capek's central question continues to haunt us. Can humans and their own creations co-exist in a new cyberflesh world, or is a struggle for superiority inevitable? Singular Creatures is an attempt at sketching the field before any deadly battle is joined.

This book critically analyses the role of transnational interactions and cosmopolitan ideals in the science fiction cinemas of twenty-first century. It looks at how cosmopolitan concerns been used to address issues of dystopian societies, natural disasters, apocalyptic scenarios, aliens and monsters, time travel and teleportation, and supernatural abilities.

The book approaches cosmopolitanism as an imagination that places human rights, social and environmental responsibility, well-being, openness, and mobility at its center. It discusses themes like transnational science fiction film; contesting global neoliberalism; biopolitics of climate change; interplanetary romance and kinship; cosmopolitan potential of human networks; and ambivalent cosmopolitanism. This book not only draws attention to the multiple ways in which recent science fiction films use the cosmopolitan imagination to tackle contemporary challenges, but also questions the seeming cosmopolitanism of these narratives and exposes how they sometimes reproduce social hierarchies and exploitative practices.

Part of Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of film studies, English literature, cultural studies, media studies, post-colonial studies, political philosophy, and sociology of media.

Prehistoric human life is a common reference point in contemporary culture, inspiring attempts to become happier, healthier, or better people. Exploited by capitalism, overwhelmed by technology, and living in the shadow of environmental catastrophe, we call on the prehistoric to escape the present, and to model alternative ways of living our lives.

In Back to the Stone Age Ben Pitcher explores how ideas about race are tightly woven into the powerful origin stories we use to explain who we are, where we came from, and what we are like. Using a broad range of examples from popular culture - from everyday practices like lighting fires and walking in the woods to engagements with genetic technologies and Neanderthal DNA, from megaliths and museum mannequins to television shows and best-selling nonfiction - Pitcher demonstrates how prehistory is alive in the twenty-first century, and argues that popular flights back in time provide revealing insights into present-day anxieties, obsessions, and concerns.

Back to the Stone Age shows that the human past is not set in stone. By opening up the prehistoric to critical contestation, Pitcher places racial justice at the centre of questions about the existence and persistence of Homo sapiens in the contemporary world.

This book examines the American Sixties, and how that period's socio-political essence was reflected and refracted in certain forms of the period's music. Its five main chapters bear the names of familiar musical categories: 'Folk,' 'Rock,' 'Jazz,' 'Avant-Garde,' 'Classical.' But the book's real subject matter-treated at length in the Prologue and the Epilogue but spread throughout all that comes between-is the Sixties' tangled mess of hopes and frustrations, of hungers as much for self-identity as for self-indulgence, of crises of conscience that bothered Americans of almost all ages and regardless of political persuasion.

Does media history really start with a bang? More than just newspapers, television, and social networks, media are the means by which any information is communicated, from cosmic radiation traces to medieval church bells to modern identity documents. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths.

From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media - how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. Many media were invented as ways to store and share information, and many have served as powerful tools for administration and control. The concerns raised about media today, whether about privacy, piracy, or anxieties over declining cultural standards, preoccupied earlier generations too. In a playful style, accompanied by more than one hundred illustrations, the authors show us how every society has been a media society in its own way.

From antique graffiti to last year's viral YouTube clip, the past is only approachable through media. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history - and about human societies past and present.

The most intense hopes and fears of our collective lives centre around large-scale events - from competitions, celebrations and festivals to environmental disasters, pandemics and terror attacks. The media are a crucial part of this process: they enable the planning, resource allocation and circulation of the vital information needed to mount major events. They are also where traces of events are stored for history. In short, large-scale and collective events have been, and still are, mediated.

Starting from nineteenth-century industrialisation, Media and Events in History explains how contemporary life has become saturated with events. It discusses how they have come to involve extensive infrastructures, forms of control and anticipation, attention and participation, contingency and transformation, and articulations of the past and the future. Synthesising and developing insights from history, media studies, philosophy and the social sciences, Ytreberg surveys the rise of event-planning via mediation, and exposes the historical driving forces behind 'media events', global 'mega-events' and 'pseudo-events'.

Revealing the importance of events in history, this eye-opening book will be of interest to students of media studies, history, historical sociology and cultural history, as well as the general reader.

This book introduces the various aspects of international farm animal protection and wildlife conservation through the lenses of food safety and environmental protection law. Bite-sized chapters focus on a wide range of topics from agrobiodiversity, fishing, and aquaculture to pollinators and pesticides, soil management, industrial animal production, and transportation, as well as international food trade.

Animal welfare and biodiversity conservation sit at the core of the selected chapters, each one providing real-world examples to make the complex field easy to understand. Current developments including food safety modernization, blockchain, and COVID-19 considerations are addressed head-on.

Farm Animal Welfare Law provides a primer for law school courses and masters' programs, for practitioners, advocates, and animal enthusiasts alike. Through its emphasis on sustainable food production, this book offers a cutting-edge selection of evolving topics at the heart of the pertinent discourse.

When Canada hosted the 1976 Montreal Olympics, few Canadian spectators waved flags in the stands. By 2010, in the run-up to the Vancouver Olympics, thousands of Canadians wore red mittens with white maple leaves on the palms. In doing so, they turned their hands into miniature flags that flew with even a casual wave.

Red Mitten Nationalism investigates this shift in Canadians' displays of patriotism by exploring how common understandings of Canadian history and identity are shaped at the intersection of sport, commercialism, and nationalism. Through case studies of recent Canadian-hosted Olympic and Commonwealth Games, Estee Fresco argues that representations of Indigenous Peoples' cultures are central to the way everyday Canadians, corporations, and sport organizations remember the past and understand the present. Corporate sponsors and games organizers highlight selective ideas about the nation's identity, and unacknowledged truths about the history and persistence of Settler colonialism in Canada haunt the commercial and cultural features of these sporting events. Commodities that represent the nation - from disposable trinkets to carefully curated objects of nostalgia - are not uncomplicated symbols of national pride, but rather reminders that Canada is built on Indigenous land and Settlers profit from its natural resources.

Red Mitten Nationalism challenges readers to re-evaluate how Canadians use sport and commercial practices to express their patriotism and to understand the impact of this expression on the current state of Indigenous-Settler relations.

This open access book offers a rich and nuanced analysis of digitally networked socialities as culturally meaningful relationships of Touch. Focusing on the ways Touch is practised in everyday social interactions serves as a basis for how Touch is understood as multiply significant - physically, emotionally, intellectually and politically. Andreallo initiates a map of the fundamentals of Touch and how they can be considered for future research in considering digitally networked cultures. This map also serves as a basis for closely examining selfies and memes. Examining social networks of Touch, Andreallo focuses on a specific example of the PrettyGirlsUglyFaces meme and ugly selfies(uglies). Through this example, memes and selfies are mapped as Touch involving textures of both intimacy and violence. Andreallo also discusses technological seamlessness and cultural semefulness as conversations of social relationships of Touch, and proposes the term semeful sociabilities to describe how the everyday technological self engages in practices of Touch. This book is a compact, approachable insight into selfies and memes as everyday culturally networked Touch relationships that also offers a way forward in recognising technological relationships as culturally meaningful.

Throughout the 1920s, a remarkable number of young writers and artists lived and worked in Madrid, creating an atmosphere of effervescence and an upsurge in creativity that has rarely been equalled. These young people, acquainting themselves with one another within the span of only a few years, came together to form a tightly woven network of both personal and artistic relationships.

In Configurations of a Cultural Scene Andrew Anderson explores this growing community of artists and writers with a focus on how sites of face-to-face interaction in Madrid fostered creative work and forged young identities. Organizing locations into places of sociability, learning, and residence, Anderson offers five case studies that exemplify the significance of these three points of intersection: Rafael Barradas and his tertulia at the Cafe de Oriente; an artists' studio located on the Pasaje de la Alhambra; women art students at the Academia de San Fernando who lodged at the Residencia de Senoritas; the artist and writer Gabriel Garcia Maroto; and the close relationship between artist Maruja Mallo and poet Rafael Alberti.

Departing from conventional approaches that foreground the trajectories of individual careers, Anderson privileges the lived experience of artists and writers in his analysis of a rich cultural scene held together by cooperation, exchange, and interpersonal connections.

This is the first book in English to offer an overview of the development of the sport industry in Spain and Portugal, examining the social, economic, cultural, and political impact sport has had in this region and on world sport more broadly.

Drawing on sources in Spanish and Portuguese, the book presents important new perspectives and empirical material not previously available to English-speaking audiences. With a strong focus on management, development, economics, governance and law, set in a broader historical and socio-cultural context, the book explains the unique characteristics of the sport industry in the Iberian Peninsula. It takes a deep dive into Spanish and Portuguese football - in many ways the centre of gravity of Iberian sport - and into sport tourism, a hugely significant component of the broader economy of the region. The book also considers important emerging themes in Iberian sport, from the development of women's sport to the global profile of Cristiano Ronaldo and Rafael Nadal, and considers the wider influence of Iberian sport across the wider Hispanic diaspora.

This is fascinating and illuminating reading for anybody with an interest in sport business and management, global sporting cultures, international business, or Hispanic or Latin American studies.

*Winner of the North American Society for Sport History 2024 Anthology Book Award*

This is the first book to focus on race, sport, protest, and the Black Atlantic. It brings together innovative scholarship on African, African-American, Afro-European, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Caribbean sports in a manner that speaks effectively to the diversity of the African diaspora, its history, and culture.

The book explores the history of sports, including baseball, basketball, boxing, football, rugby, cricket, and track-and-field athletics to show athlete and fan protests in sport intersected with discourses of nationalism, self-fashioning, gender and masculinity, leisure and play, challenges of underdevelopment, and the idea of progress. It shows how sport in the African diaspora is a crucially important lens through which to understand the challenges, changes, and continuities of Black Atlantic history, the history of protest, and racism.

This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport history, social and cultural history, post-imperial history and decolonization, or the sociology of sport, race, and political protest.

The so-called land question dominates political discourse in British Columbia. Unstable Properties reverses the usual approach - investigating Aboriginal claims to Crown land - to reframe the issue as a history of Crown attempts to solidify claims to Indigenous territory. From the historical-geographic processes through which the BC polity became entrenched in its present territory to key events of the twenty-first century, the authors highlight the unstable ideological foundation of land and title arrangements. In the process, they demonstrate that only by understanding diverse interpretations of sovereignty, governance, territory, and property can we move toward meaningful reconciliation.

Northern Ireland presents a fundamental challenge for the sociology of religion - how do religious beliefs, attitudes and identities relate to practices, violence and conflict? In other words, what does religion do?

These interrogations are at the core of this book. It is the first critical and comprehensive review of the ways in which the social sciences have interpreted religion's significance in Northern Ireland. In particular, it examines the shortcomings of existing interpretations and, in turn, suggests alternative lines of thinking for more robust and compelling analyses of the role(s) religion might play in Northern Irish culture and politics.

At the turn of the millennium Canadian cinema appeared to have reached an apex of aesthetic and commercial transformation. Domestic filmmaking has since declined in visibility: the sense of celebrity once associated with independent directors has diminished, projects garner less critical attention, and concepts that made late-twentieth-century Canadian film legible have been reconsidered or displaced.

Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium examines this dramatic transformation and revitalizes our engagement with Canadian cinema in the contemporary moment, presenting focused case studies of films and filmmakers and contextual studies of Canadian film policy, labour, and film festivals. Contributors trace key developments since 2000, including the renouveau or Quebec New Wave, Indigenous filmmaking, i-docs, and diasporic experimental filmmaking. Reflecting the way film in Canada mediates multiple cultures, forging new affinities among anglophone, francophone, and Indigenous-language examples, this book engages familiar figures, such as Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan, Sarah Polley, and Guy Maddin, in the same breath as small-budget independent films, documentaries, and experimental works that have emerged in the Canadian scene.

Fuelled by close attention to the films themselves and a desire to develop new scholarly approaches, Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium models a renewed commitment to keeping the conversation about Canadian cinema vibrant and alive.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European settlers from diverse backgrounds transformed Ontario. By 1881, German speakers made up almost ten per cent of the province's population and the German language was spoken in businesses, public schools, churches, and homes. German speakers in Ontario - children, parents, teachers, and religious groups - used their everyday practices and community institutions to claim a space for bilingualism and religious diversity within Canadian society.

In The Boundaries of Ethnicity Benjamin Bryce considers what it meant to be German in Ontario between 1880 and 1930. He explores how the children of immigrants acquired and negotiated the German language and how religious communities relied on language to reinforce social networks. For the Germans who make up the core of this study, the distinction between insiders and outsiders was often unclear. Boundaries were crossed as often as they were respected. German ethnicity in this period was fluid, and increasingly interventionist government policies and the dynamics of generational change also shaped the boundaries of ethnicity.

German speakers, together with immigrants from other countries and Canadians of different ethnic backgrounds, created a framework that defined relationships between the state, the public sphere, ethnic spaces, family, and religion in Canada that would persist through the twentieth century. The Boundaries of Ethnicity uncovers some of the origins of Canadian multiculturalism and government attempts to manage this diversity.

In this book, author Helene Thiesen recounts her experience of being removed from her family in Greenland as a young Inuk child, to be 're-educated' in Denmark and an orphanage in Greenland.

The practice of forcible assimilation of Indigenous children into colonial societies through 'education' has echoes in North America and Australasia, and the painful legacy of these practices remains under-acknowledged. In this poignant book, Helene recounts in detail the process of being taken from her family in 1951, aged seven, along with twenty-one other children, in the attempt to re-make them into 'model Danish citizens', in a social 'experiment' led by the Danish government and Save the Children Denmark. When the children returned to Greenland a year and a half later, they were sent to live in a Danish Red Cross orphanage, where they were forbidden to speak their native languages, and were compelled to adopt Danish language, culture and customs. With a detailed introductory analysis from Dr Stephen James Minton, who also provides the translation, Helene's account serves as a compelling and powerful testimony of a devastating colonial experiment.

Richly illustrated with forty photos to help to situate the reader, this book provides an invaluable case study for researchers and students in the fields of Indigenous Studies, Critical Pedagogy and Education, Psychology, European History, and Cultural Studies.

Winner of the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award.

Digital-Native News and the Remaking of Latin American Mainstream and Alternative Journalism explores the rise of independent, digital-native news outlets in Latin America and their role in social change, protest participation, and the refinement of the concept of "alternative" media.

Drawing upon a decade of original research, including interviews, surveys, focus groups, and content analyses, this book questions how the emergence of online-native news sites in Latin America is redefining our understanding of what it means to be mainstream and what it means to be alternative. By analyzing a wide range of elements, from business models and audience behaviors to social media use and the role of gender, this text examines how these sites are challenging traditional, hegemonic mainstream news media and its service to political and economic elites. The result is a discerning investigation into the new brand of journalism these sites have innovated.

This insightful study will be of interest to journalism, communication, and Latin American scholars, particularly those interested in how technology is moulding journalistic practices and changing conceptions of journalism itself.

Love, Intimacy and Online Dating: How a Global Pandemic Redefined Romantic Relationships is an innovative work that explores the concept of intimacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book provides an overview of the online dating world and apps, the use of which gradually became common as the pandemic restricted people's interaction in the physical world. The author's extensive research conducted during the pandemic posits a comprehensive understanding of the individual's motivation to join a dating app and explores its varied aspects.

This thoroughly researched book explores the themes and elements of online dating and examines the users' motivation for joining a dating app, for seeking intimacy as well as for self-presentation on the app. Portolan examines the underlying politics and role of infrastructure of dating apps and describes how gender, power, and intimacy intersect to create new intimacy phenomena. She also utilises her research to put forth the key concept of "Jagged Love", which describes a user's cyclical relationship with dating apps during the pandemic, and the gap between a user's act to seek familiar romantic narratives and the app's inability to deliver against these ideas. The chapters further explore the differences between virtual and In Real Life (IRL) intimacy, the generation of gender and the emanation of stereotypical cultural ideals that the users sought through the apps. The book serves as an invaluable discussion on the pandemic's impact on modifying the definitions of romance and intimacy.

This book will be useful for highlighting the impact social factors can have on familiar concepts and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the definition of love and intimacy, making it fascinating for students, academics and professionals interested in relationships, digital media and gender. It will also be useful in enhancing the comprehension of love and romance in the fields of social science.

Are you an academic who struggles to know what to post on social media and how to disseminate your research effectively on different social media platforms?

Social media serves as a powerful communication tool, yet while most academics are aware of the benefits of social media, many are unsure of what to post, and how to do it in a way that is authentic, engaging, and above all, comfortable! This user-friendly practical guide is designed for all academics who aim to engage in social media platforms in an effective and productive way. This book explains how academics can build their reputation, develop networks, and disseminate their research. It includes 365 useful post prompts applicable to all mainstream social media platforms which help guide academics on what to post on the platforms they choose to engage with.

The book is designed for all academics at all levels and can be applied across various social media platforms including Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and Instagram.

This powerful new book looks at how private institutions governing and organising sport restrict political expression. Uniquely, it makes a case for the freedom of expression for athletes, spectators and audiences built upon philosophical foundations.

In the era of Colin Kaepernick and taking a knee, politics and protest in sport have never been more visible and immediate. Drawing on a wide range of international cases, including protest actions from athletes such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos, Naomi Osaka and Feyisa Lilesa, as well as the reactions from sport organisations including the IOC, FIFA, UEFA and the NFL, the book argues that the organisation of sport at the hands of associations and leagues and their transnational power to regulate, adjudicate and enforce matters according to their interests lead to the restriction of freedom of expression. Focusing on the individual, the book presents a framework for the defence of freedom of expression in sport on moral grounds and also explores the limits to freedom of expression, especially those arising from hate speech, that might better serve both the individual and sport as an institution.

This book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the ethics, philosophy or politics of sport, sport governance, the relationship between sport and wider society, or moral or political philosophy.