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From twentieth-century animations and comic strips to advertising, Animating the Science Fiction Imagination unearths a significant body of cartoon science fiction from the pre-World War II era that appeared at approximately the same time the genre was itself struggling to find an identity, an audience, and even a name.
Long before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded our movie screens in the 1950s, there was already a significant but overlooked body of cinematic science fiction. Through analyses of early twentieth-century animations, comic strips, and advertising, Animating the Science Fiction Imagination unearths a significant body of cartoon science fiction from the pre-World War II era that appeared at approximately the same time the genre was itself struggling to find an identity, an audience, and even a name. In this book, author J.P. Telotte argues that these films helped sediment the genre's attitudes and motifs into a popular culture that found many of those ideas unsettling, even threatening. By binding those ideas into funny and entertaining narratives, these cartoons also made them both familiar and non-threatening, clearing a space for visions of the future, of other worlds, and of change that could be readily embraced in the post-war period.
What science fiction can teach us about urban planning Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.
"For the contemporary film audience, science fiction has become a key locus for displaying-and imaginatively addressing-its most pressing concerns. Those concerns increasingly surface not just as displaced subjects, injected into conventional sf narratives, but as inflections in the very nature of the genre. We might describe these issues that bulk so large in our everyday world as angling into the world of science and technology, becoming a kind of slant presence in the genre, and in the process altering the thrust of our sf films and other screen media, resulting in what seems like a proliferation of sub-genre labels that mark off a substantially "new" group of sf cinemas. These cinemas challenge us to view or "read" them differently, from perspectives that are just coming into focus. Through an introductory overview and series of articles on various of these contemporary "slants" and the theories that drive them, this volume offers a guide to both what the new sf cinemas are about and how we have come to think about or "read" them differently. In the process, it also links these fragments of the constantly growing sf supertext to our changing sense of how genres function as a process, marked by consistent growth and evolution, and discussed in ways that reflect contemporary culture's own constant changes"--
What values should form the foundation of music education? And once we decide on those values, how do we ensure we are acting on them? In Values and Music Education, esteemed author Estelle R. Jorgensen explores how values apply to the practice of music education. We may declare values, but they can be hard to see in action. Jorgensen examines nine quartets of related values and offers readers a roadmap for thinking constructively and critically about the values they hold. In doing so, she takes a broad view of both music and education while drawing on a wide sweep of multidisciplinary literature. Not only does Jorgensen demonstrate an analytical and dialectical philosophical approach to examining values, but she also seeks to show how theoretical and practical issues are interconnected. An important addition to the field of music education, Values and Music Education highlights values that have been forgotten or marginalized, underscores those that seem perennial, and illustrates how values can be double-edged swords.
“Space opera charm in a modern kid–sized package.” – BCCB (starred review) Explore outer outer space where dastardly villains await in this hilarious and inventive illustrated middle grade novel. Brooklyn, Earth. 1949. Lily Lupino is going to be an astronaut when she grows up. For now, she’ll have to settle for listening to science fiction programs on the radio. But when certified Spacetronaut Kosmo Kidd crash lands his wind-up rocket ship in Lily’s kitchen, it’s a chance Lily can’t pass up! Mistaking Lily for a boy, Kosmo agrees to take her back to his floating treehouse in the stars, but it doesn’t take long for the other Spacetronauts to figure out that Lily is a girl. Kosmo has accidentally broken Spacetronaut Rule #1: NO WIMMEN ALOWD! Banished to the far reaches of Outer Outer Space, Lily and Kosmo explore exotic alien worlds, meet a menagerie of colorful creatures, and tangle with the vilest villain in space, The Mean-Man of Morgo. But Lily’s greatest challenge is proving to her new Spacetronaut peers that a girl from Brooklyn can hold her own among the galaxy’s unruliest rascals.
“Deftly shows how a seemingly frivolous film genre can guide us in shaping tomorrow’s world.” —Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, SETI Institute Artificial intelligence, gene manipulation, cloning, and interplanetary travel are all ideas that seemed like fairy tales but a few years ago. And now their possibilities are very much here. But are we ready to handle these advances? This book, by a physicist and expert on responsible technology development, reveals how science fiction movies can help us think about and prepare for the social consequences of technologies we don’t yet have, but that are coming faster than we imagine. Films from the Future looks at twelve movies that take us on a journey through the worlds of biological and genetic manipulation, human enhancement, cyber technologies, and nanotechnology. Readers will gain a broader understanding of the complex relationship between science and society. The movies mix old and new, and the familiar and unfamiliar, to provide a unique, entertaining, and ultimately transformative take on the power of emerging technologies, and the responsibilities they come with.
Brings together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art to reconnect the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips. Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged—Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai’s recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk.
Chapters 16 and 19 from this book are published open access and are free to read or download from Oxford Academic AI is now a global phenomenon. Yet Hollywood narratives dominate perceptions of AI in the English-speaking West and beyond, and much of the technology itself is shaped by a disproportionately white, male, US-based elite. However, different cultures have been imagining intelligent machines since long before we could build them, in visions that vary greatly across religious, philosophical, literary and cinematic traditions. This book aims to spotlight these alternative visions. Imagining AI draws attention to the range and variety of visions of a future with intelligent machines and their potential significance for the research, regulation, and implementation of AI. The book is structured geographically, with each chapter presenting insights into how a specific region or culture imagines intelligent machines. The contributors, leading experts from academia and the arts, explore how the encounters between local narratives, digital technologies, and mainstream Western narratives create new imaginaries and insights in different contexts across the globe. The narratives they analyse range from ancient philosophy to contemporary science fiction, and visual art to policy discourse. The book sheds new light on some of the most important themes in AI ethics, from the differences between Chinese and American visions of AI, to digital neo-colonialism. It is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand how different cultural contexts interplay with the most significant technology of our time.
How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.