Böcker utgivna av Amsterdam University Press

This book offers a unique methodological guide for social and marketing scholars interested in understanding and using digital methods to explore the processes of platformisation of consumer culture unfolding on digital media. The book introduces the reader to key digital methods concepts, strategies, and techniques through a set of ad hoc case studies focused on the most prominent digital platforms (such as Facebook, Spotify, or TripAdvisor) as well as emerging trends in digital consumer culture (such as, the consumption of nostalgia, the radicalisation of taste, or ephemeral consumption).

Following recent historiographical appeals on the need to study knowledge exchanges between European maritime rivals and their impact on overseas expansionist processes, this book makes this study for the Portuguese overseas empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the first European maritime power to systematically launch long-distance voyages, Portugal became a model worth emulation when Spain, France, England and the Dutch Republic started their own overseas enterprises. In different chapters that each adopt a case study relation (Portugal-Spain, Portugal-England, Portugal-France and Portugal-Dutch Republic), this book documents how Portuguese maritime knowledge was outsourced by its maritime rivals. The impact that Portuguese nautical knowledge had is evaluated, resorting particularly to a wide range of diplomatic and espionage documents. Finally, the book discusses the alleged Iberian secrecy policies regarding maritime knowledge, explaining why there is no serious reason to consider their success.

This book narrates how, beginning in 1936, bodies buried in mass graves during the Spanish War and subsequent dictatorship were turned into monuments. The book describes how the production of monuments evolved and what forms this process and these monuments took; it examines how the monuments were incorporated into society and used to influence public opinion; and it argues that this process was not simply based on the formal logic of tradition but instead reflected a conscious plan with a specific and rational end goal. As such, this book puts forward the idea that the monument as a material object became an expression of the historical consciousness of its producers, relating how different actors communicated their memories into meaningful gestures while limited by the material reality of integrating the bodies into a novel artefact. Finally, it contends that the people creating these monuments did not just bury their dead according to a funerary tradition but also sought to influence society.

This book is about cinema and the cultural Cold War in Asia, set against the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the US, Europe, and Asia at the height of the Cold War. From the popularity of CIA-sponsored espionage films in Hong Kong and South Korea to the enduring Cold War rhetoric of brotherly relations in contemporary Sino-Indian co-production, cinema has always been a focal point of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Historically, both the United States and the Soviet Union viewed cinema as a powerful weapon in the battle to win hearts and minds--not just in Europe, but also in Asia. The Cold War in Asia was, properly speaking, a hot war, with proxy military confrontations between the United States, on one side, and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Amid this political and military turbulence, cataclysmic shifts occurred in the culture and history of Asian cinemas as well as in the latitude of US cultural diplomacy in Asia. The collection of essays in this volume sheds light on the often-forgotten history of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Taken together, the volume's sixteen chapters examine film cultures and industries in Asia to showcase the magnitude and depth of the Cold War's impact on Asian cinemas, societies, and politics. By shifting the lens to Asia, the contributors to this volume re-examine the dominant narratives about the global Cold War and highlight the complex and unique ways in which Asian societies negotiated, contested, and adapted to the politics and cultural manifestations of the Cold War.

Schools of art represent one of the building blocks of art history. The notion of a school of art emerged in artistic discourse and disseminated across various countries in Europe during the early modern period. Whilst a school of art essentially denotes a group of artists or artworks, it came to be configured in multiple ways, encompassing different meanings of learning, origin, style, or nation, and mediated in various forms via academies, literature, collections, markets and galleries. Moreover, it contributed to competitive debate around the hierarchy of art and artists in Europe. The ensuing fundamental instability of the notion of a school of art helped to create a pluriform panorama of both distinct and interconnected artistic traditions within the European art world. This edited collection brings together 20 articles devoted to selected case studies from the Italian peninsula, the Low Countries, France, Spain, England, the German Empire, and Russia.

In 1611, the seventeen-year-old Gustav Adolf ascended the throne of Sweden. Before the new king could sit on his throne, however, he faced a disastrous war against Denmark, another conflict in Russia, and a rebellious nobility at home. Plus, Sweden itself had an arctic climate and a short growing season. Clearly Gustav II Adolf faced great difficulties even to survive. Yet by the end of the next decade, Gustav II Adolf's Sweden was a leading military power in continental Europe. In 1630 the king invaded the Holy Roman Empire and joined the Thirty Years War to defend the Protestant cause. How was this possible? Sweden had one major asset, the Stora Kopparberg, the largest copper mine in Europe. The king exploited the mine and used the revenue to finance his political and military ambitions. This is the story of Gustav II Adolf's efforts to improve efficiencies at the mine and control the marketing of its bounty.

Quantum Physics is the solid basis of most of our understanding of nature and has been the driver of many technological advances. The trilogy Power of the Invisible: Quintessence of Reality gives a coherent account of this huge domain of knowledge, which is linked to some fifty Nobel prizes and is one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century. This quantum story follows three lines in parallel: a pictorial, an explanatory and a mathematical one.

The Gulag remains one of the key symbols of twentieth-century mass political violence. Thanks to recent archive-based investigations, we now understand the scope of the system, variations between different camp complexes, and modalities of the use of forced labour of convicts. At the same time, the work of historicizing the Gulag and systematically evaluating its position within the global history of repression is still to be done. Exploring the emergence of this vast Soviet system of concentration camps in long-term perspective, this book aims to inscribe this process within global histories of coerced labour, forced displacement, and punishment. It highlights the inextricable interconnection of coerced labour and forced displacement as tools of punishment in the multitude of their historical forms.

This second collection of primary sources in English translation ranges across a gamut of places and moments in the early modern Spanish Pacific. It may be used in conjunction with Volume 1 or on its own. While its focus continues to be on the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific, it more strongly emphasizes the challenges faced by secular and ecclesiastical authorities in their attempts to control a distant colony and reshape its culture, from the complex forms of identify formation in the diverse world of the colonial Philippines to the complexities of inter-imperial rivalry in East and Southeast Asia as a whole. As with Volume 1, each document is introduced by a specialist in the field and includes a list of suggestions for further reading. An introductory essay surveys current work in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies and provides a lengthy bibliography.

Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe investigates visual cultural projects in Europe from the 1970s onwards in response to industrial closures, resultant unemployment, diminished social services and shattered identities. Typically, art and visual cultural creations at one-time thriving European heartlands strive to make the industrial past visible, negotiable, and re-imaginable. Authors discuss varied and multiple types of art and visual culture that remember the sometimes-invisible past, create community in the face of social disintegration, and navigate the dissonance between past and present material reality. They also examine art and visual objects at post-industrial European sites for their aesthetic, historical, and sociological role within official and unofficial, government and community regeneration and re-vitalisation efforts. Sites range from former coal and steel plants in Duisburg, through shipyards and harbours of Gdansk and Hamburg, a Moscow paper factory and textile factories in Albania, to still-functioning Croatian metalworks.

In putting extraterritoriality into practice in the treaty ports, the British state did not simply withdraw rights from the Chinese state; it inhabited the space made by extraterritoriality by building institutions and engaging in practices which had consequences for the development of the treaty ports, and which need to be at the forefront of any attempt to understand colonialism in China. Through a focus both on the creation of law and institutions, and also on the management of British 'problem populations' - violent Europeans and 'martial' Indians - this book provides a revision of the history of empire and colonialism in China, explaining important features which have to date been glossed over in studies of other aspects of treaty port colonialism. Colonialism in China casts a long shadow, but key aspects of the British state's central role in this history have before now been little understood.

In 1680, the poor cottager Mary Herring gave birth to conjoined twins. At two weeks of age, they were kidnapped to be shown for money, and their deaths shortly thereafter gave rise to a four-year legal battle over ownership and income. The Herring twins' microhistory weaves throughout this book, as the chapter structure alternates between the family's ordeal and the broader cultural context of how so-called 'monstrous births' (a contemporary term for deformed humans and animals) were discussed in cheap print, exhibited in London's pubs and coffeehouses, examined by the Royal Society, portrayed in visual culture, and litigated in London's legal courts. This book ties together social and medical history, Disability Studies, and Monster Studies to argue that people discussed unusual bodies in early modern England because they provided newsworthy entertainment, revealed the will of God, and demonstrated the internal workings of Nature.

Grand, extravagant, magnificent, scandalous, corrupt, political, personal, fractious; these are terms often associated with the medieval and early modern courts. Moreover, the court constituted a forceful nexus in the social world, which was central to the legitimacy and authority of rulership. As such, courts shaped European politics and culture: architecture, art, fashion, patronage, and cultural exchanges were integral to the spectacle of European courts. Researchers have convincingly emphasised the public nature of courtly events, procedures, and ceremonies. Nevertheless, court life also involved pockets of privacy, which have yet to be systematically addressed. This edited collection addresses this lacuna and offers interpretations that urge us to reassesses the public nature of European courts. Thus, the proposed publication will fertilise the grounds for a discussion of the past and future of court studies. Indeed, the contributions make us reconsider present-day understandings of privacy as a stable and uncontestable notion.

This book departs from the universalising and rescue narratives of poor children and technologies. It offers complex stories on how children's social identities (gender, caste, and religion), cultural norms, and personal aspirations influence their digital experiences. How do children challenge, circumvent, or reinforce the dominant sociocultural norms in their engagements with digital technologies? What can we learn about digital technologies and poor children's jugaad and aspirations in the urban sprawls of India? This book explores these questions ethnographically by focusing on how children in three urban slums in India access technologies, inhabit online spaces, and personalise their digital experiences, networks, and identity articulations based on their values and aspirations. It utilises insights from studies on jugaad, expression, and sociality to argue that poor children's material realities, community relations, and aspirations for leisure, class mobility, and belongingness profoundly shape their engagements with digital technologies.

Film has long been defined as a temporal art, most famously by André Bazin and Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet more fundamentally it has always been a spatial art, transporting its audiences imaginatively to spaces and places other than those they literally inhabit. In the digital era, this spatial illusion and paradox has been greatly expanded - by the predominance of domestic film viewing, along with new extra-terrestrial perspectives, and the promise of novel kinesthetic experiences with Virtual Reality and "immersion". The international authors in this collection address the history and aesthetics of screen media as spatial transposition, in a range of exemplary analyses that run from the landscapes of John Ford's westerns to Chantal Akerman's claustrophobic domestic spaces, from the conventions of the English country house film to Patrick Keiller's Robinson roaming a changed country, and from the experiences of Covid pandemic confinement to those of un-homed van-dwellers in Chloe Zhao's award-winning NOMADLAND.

For a long time, Europe's colonizing powers justified their urge for expansion with the conviction that they were 'bringing civilization to territories where civilization was lacking.' This doctrine of white superiority and indigenous inferiority was accompanied by a boundless exploitation of local labor. Under colonial rule, the ideology that later became known as neoliberalism was free to subject labor to a capitalism tainted by racialized policies. This political economy has now become dominant in the Western world, too, and has reversed the trend towards equality. In Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism, Jan Breman shows how racial favoritism is no longer contained to 'faraway, indigenous peoples, ' but has become a source of polarization within Western societies as well.

Over the past decade, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped the Chinese cultural landscape. With a focus on the creative agency of new media and online communities, this volume examines this development through the notion of the Sinocybersphere - the networked spaces across the globe that not only operate on the Chinese script, but also imaginatively negotiate the meanings of Chinese culture in the digital age. Instead of asking what makes the internet or new media "Chinese," the chapters situate contemporary entanglements of cultural and digital practices within specific historical, social, and discursive contexts. Covering topics as diverse as live-streaming, AI poetry, online literature, poetry memes, cyberpunk fiction, virtual art exhibitions, cooking videos, censorship, and viral translations, the collection as a whole not only engages with a wide range of Chinese new media phenomena, but also demonstrates their relevance to our understanding of contemporary digital culture.

Japan has risen in stature to become an important player not only in the Western Pacific, but the wider Indo-Pacific. From a defeated nation that adopted a pacifist constitution and demilitarization, Japan has been provoked by unwelcomed external events to ensure its security. It has faced a challenging security environment and specific threats that have transformed its domestic politics and given rise to debates about the relevance of its pacifist constitution. North Korea's nuclear and missile tests, and China's pressure in the maritime Southwest and the South China Sea, as well as its belligerence over Taiwan, have raised Japanese fears of instability and conflict. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has alarmed Japan that China would similarly resort to force. This present volume includes chapters by experts, Japanese as well as non-Japanese, who examine these issues and how Japan responds to a more threatening security environment while managing its domestic politics. They discuss the debate about the pacifist constitution, the alliance with the US, Japan's Quad partners, India and Australia and how Japan moves to maintain and protect a free and open regional and international order from which it has benefited.

This exciting collection of unpublished essays on Ernst Lubitsch addresses multiple gaps in scholarly and critical engagement with the director. His understudied early German films shed light on Jewish culture, on the relation of comedy to gender and the influence of theatre on his filmmaking. The popular historical epics brought Lubitsch an invitation to Hollywood in 1922. There, Lubitsch helped develop the film musical and notably contributed to the genre of Hollywood romantic comedy. The well-known scholars-film historians, archivists, and theorists-whose essays appear in this volume expand our knowledge of the set designers, actors, directors and members of the emigré community who contributed to Lubitsch's vibrant films. An emphasis on the role of material objects opens up a new dimension of critical engagement with the director. Light is shed on neglected films, and the antifascist dimension of his oeuvre brings his political stance clearly to light. As these essays make clear, Lubtisch's cinema is elusive and deserving of our close attention.

Centered on moral critiques of wealth and the unequal distribution of risks and rewards in the lengthy voyages required by the East Indies trade, this book examines the debates surrounding England's earliest global trading ventures. Arguments over the staggering loss of lives and national resources and struggles over control of the new trade in luxuries reveal the forging of rationales justifying the new capitalist inequalities. Yet Company servants traveling abroad to conduct the risky trade resisted this newly coalescing social formation through strategic disobedience to their masters' will, controlling information and promoting ignorance when it served their financial and sexual purposes. Conflicting Claims to East India Company Wealth, 1600-1650 interrogates the forces that shaped England's earliest forays into capitalist imperialism by tracing the battles over corporate control of men's finances, marriages, and bare survival at the dawn of its global trade.

What makes sounds "religious"? How are communities shaped by the things they hear, play, or listen to? This book foregrounds connections between sounds, bodies, and media in the private and public life of communities beyond the Global North, analyzing diverse configurations of the category of sound and various sonic ontologies to usher in a more inclusive global anthro-history of religious sounds. This edited volume implements a "sonic turn" in the study of religion by engaging with a diversity of auditory, musical, and embodied practices. Dislodging the Global North as the main point of reference for studies on religious sound, this volume proposes an acoustemology of the post-secular with an emphasis on Asia as method. Unsettling and expanding existing discussions on senses, media, and power, editors Carola E. Lorea and Rosalind I. J. Hackett present religious sounds as co-creating subjectivities and collectivities that coalesce around audible aesthetic formations. This volume demonstrates that religious sounds are not only produced by certain religious traditions but also produce communities, shaping the self and sensitivity of those who participate.

The Middle Dutch term schaec referred to abduction with marital intent. This book explores this phenomenon to understand wider attitudes towards marriage-making in the fifteenth-century Low Countries. Whilst exchanging words of consent was all that was required legally, making marriage was a social process that evoked public concern and familial scrutiny. Abductions embodied contrasting evaluations of what mattered when selecting a spouse and resulted in polarized trials in which narratives on consent, coercion, and family strategy coincided and competed. Abduction, Marriage, and Consent draws from a wide range of legal records to assess how men, women, families, and authorities used, navigated, and dealt with abductions during this period. It contributes to debates on consent, family involvement, and womenâEUR(TM)s access to justice and demonstrates that abduction should be approached as a comprehensive social phenomenon, one that is crucial in the history of marriage and womenâEUR(TM)s social and legal status.

The legal domain distinguishes between different types of data and attaches a different level of protection to each of them. Thus, non-personal data are left largely unregulated, while privacy and data protection rules apply to personal data or personal information. There are stricter rules for processing sensitive personal data than for 'ordinary' personal data, and metadata or communications data are regulated differently than content communications data. Technological developments challenge these legal categorisations on at least three fronts: First, the lines between the categories are becoming harder to draw and more fluid. Second, working with various categories of data works well when the category a datum or dataset falls into is relatively stable. However, this is less and less so. Third, scholars increasingly question the rationale behind the various legal categorisations. This book assesses to what extent either of these strategies is feasible and to what extent alternative approaches could be developed by combining insights from three fields: technology, practice and law.

Not since Edward Wood's Giants and Dwarfs published in 1868 has the subject been the focus of a scholarly study in English. Treating the topic afresh, this volume offers new insights into the vogue for giants and dwarfs that flourished in late-medieval and early modern Europe. From chapters dealing with the real dwarfs and giants in the royal and princely courts, to the imaginary giants and dwarfs that figured in the crafting of nationalistic and ancestral traditions, to giants and dwarfs used as metaphorical expression, scholars discuss their role in art, literature, and ephemeral display. Some essays examine giants and dwarfs as monsters and marvels and collectibles, while others show artists and writers emphasizing contrasts in scale to inspire awe or for comic effect. As these investigations reveal, not all court dwarfs functioned as jesters, and giant figures might equally be used to represent heroes, anti-heroes, and even a saint.

Algorithms have risen to become one, if not the central technology for producing, circulating, and evaluating knowledge in multiple societal arenas. In this book, scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and computer science argue that this shift has, and will continue to have, profound implications for how knowledge is produced and what and whose knowledge is valued and deemed valid. To attend to this fundamental change, the authors propose the concept of algorithmic regimes and demonstrate how they transform the epistemological, methodological, and political foundations of knowledge production, sensemaking, and decision-making in contemporary societies. Across sixteen chapters, the volume offers a diverse collection of contributions along three perspectives on algorithmic regimes: the methods necessary to research and design algorithmic regimes, the ways in which algorithmic regimes reconfigure sociotechnical interactions, and the politics engrained in algorithmic regimes.

Doing Digital Migration present a comprehensive entry point to the variety of theoretical debates, methodological interventions, political discussions and ethical debates around migrant forms of belonging as articulated through digital practices. Digital technologies impact upon everyday migrant lives, while vice versa migrants play a key role in technological developments - be it when negotiating the communicative affordances of platforms and devices, as consumers of particular commercial services such as sending remittances, as platform gig workers or test cases for new advanced surveillance technologies. With its international scope, this anthology invites scholars to pluralize understandings of 'the migrant' and 'the digital'. The anthology is organized in five different sections: Creative Practices; Digital Diasporas and Placemaking; Affect and Belonging; Visuality and digital media and Datafication, Infrastructuring, and Securitization. These sections are dedicated to emerging key topics and debates in digital migration studies, and sections are each introduced by international experts.

The understanding of what health is and how it can be maintained has changed through history. Questions like who can perform healing? and what sort of bodies are considered healthy? have elicited widely divergent responses in different societies. This volume explores how health was understood and practiced in the early modern Nordic region, with a focus on Sweden, including Finland. The chapters examine topics such as the dyslexia of Charles XI, lay perceptions of bodily and mental variability, and the health benefits attributed to using the sauna. Together, the essays give a holistic view of how practices of health evolved in close symmetry with societal institutions and localised worldviews. As such, the volume is a timely intervention into the social history of medicine, contributing to the historicisation of health as a concept and shedding light on developments in the Nordic world.