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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2026

        Understanding displacement aesthetics

        History, art and museums

        by Ana Carden-Coyne, Charles Green, Chrisoula Lionis, Angeliki Roussou

        Since the Second World War and the formalisation of the international refugee regime, forced displacement has been marked by a set of aesthetic, practical, and institutional concerns. Understanding Displacement Aesthetics examines how visual culture and art practice constructs and challenges ideas about forced displacement and refugees. The novel framework for 'displacement aesthetics' moves beyond conventional understandings of aesthetics as merely representational, demonstrating the entanglement of visual culture, art practices, and forced displacement in postmigrant contexts. Bringing together the fields of cultural history, art history, and curatorial studies, Understanding Displacement Aesthetics identifies four areas for consideration: visual tropes of refugeedom; language and identity; institutional and artistic responses to displacement; and lived experiences of artists with backgrounds of displacement. Through archival research, visual culture and art, interviews, and collaborative curatorship, Understanding Displacement Aesthetics offers new insight into overcoming the limitations that contexts of displacement can present for artists, art galleries and institutions addressing refugeedom and its legacies.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2026

        The art of decolonisation

        Dakar-Paris, 1950-70

        by Maureen Murphy

        The art of decolonisation examines how artists challenged colonial legacies and reconfigured power through transnational networks of art and diplomacy. Adopting a global and transhistorical perspective, it explores artistic, political, and institutional relations between France and Senegal during decolonisation and the Cold War. From the emergence of a national modern art in Senegal to contested cultural policies and high-profile exhibitions-such as those featuring Picasso and Soulages in Dakar, or contemporary Senegalese art in Paris-this book traces the circulation of artworks, ideas, and influence across borders. It reveals how visual artists and filmmakers shaped a new artistic geopolitics between 1950 and 1970. Reconsidering the accepted chronology of the 'global turn', The art of decolonisation shows that the roots of global art discourse run deeper than the 1990s, and were already forming during the era of independence struggles.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        March 2026

        Abnormal peripheries

        Slovak and Czech performance art in the 1960s and 70s

        by Sam Cermak

        This book traces an early history of performance art from the former Czechoslovakia, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of the Prague Spring and the subsequent policy of Normalization that brought on cultural censorship, prosecution, and state violence against artists. The book draws on Czech and Slovak scholarship as well as primary research in archives, interviews, and fieldwork to dispel misreadings of visual and cultural idioms in pre-existing Anglophone scholarship about the region. Although the former Soviet Bloc is often equated with repression and lack of experimental art in public spaces, performance artists within the former Socialist Czechoslovakia often used public, semi-public and clandestine spheres to create their performances. By analysing both works of established artists such as Aktual, Alex Mlynárcik, Petr Stembera, Jan Mlcoch, as well as under-theorised practitioners including Luba Lauffová, Karel Miler, Temporary Society of Intense Living, and Crusaders School of Pure Humour with no Joke, this book analyses how performance can survive and sometimes even thrive on the background of a politically oppressive regime. Cermak tells a unique story of localised resistance to a monolithic public sphere through artistic intervention, a closely knit community, artistic exchange, and agonistic reframing of socialism as a philosophy rather than state ideology.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2007

        The art of poverty

        Irony and ideal in sixteenth-century beggar imagery

        by Tom Nichols

        The art of poverty is the first book in English to analyse depictions of beggars in sixteenth-century European art. Featuring works from Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, France and Italy, it discusses a diverse body of imagery in many different media, from crude woodcuts to monumental church altarpieces. It develops a striking thesis, arguing that these works largely conformed to two paradoxical, though mutually supportive, representational approaches. The earlier chapters follow the emergence of a trenchantly negative approach in Northern art, in which beggars are shown as vagabonds, whose idleness and thievery threatened the values of sixteenth-century society (especially its growing emphasis on the need to work). In the other predominant visual mode, beggars are exalted as examples of sacred purity. In many Italian religious paintings, beggars are morally exalted with reference to sacred texts, and made formally beautiful with reference to revered artistic models. Though these approaches reflect the impact of religious reform, it is shown that, by the end of the century, they happily co-existed within Protestant and Catholic cultures. The final part of the book is concerned with the issue of artistic style and with the growing tendency of the beggar image to mediate and dissolve the didactic traditions through which it had originally been defined. The art of poverty will be of special interest to scholars and students of Renaissance art history, and its progressive approach and cross-disciplinary theme and perspective will also make it vital reading for those concerned with the development of early modern European culture. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2012

        Art, ethnography and the life of objects

        Paris, c.1925–35

        by Julia Kelly, Marsha Meskimmon, Shearer West, Tim Barringer

        In the 1920s and 1930s, anthropology and ethnography provided new and striking ways of rethinking what art could be and the forms which it could take. This book examines the impact of these emergent disciplines on the artistic avant-garde in Paris. The reception by European artists of objects arriving from colonial territories in the first half of the twentieth century is generally understood through the artistic appropriation of the forms of African or Oceanic sculpture. The author reveals how anthropological approaches to this intriguing material began to affect the ways in which artists, theorists, critics and curators thought about three-dimensional objects and their changing status as 'art', 'artefacts' or 'ethnographic evidence'. This book analyses texts, photographs and art works that cross disciplinary boundaries, through case studies including the Dakar to Djibouti expedition of 1931-33, the Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum, and the two art periodicals Documents and Minotaure. Through its interdisciplinary and contextual approach, it provides an important corrective to histories of modern art and the European avant-garde. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2008

        Intervention and state-building in the Pacific

        The legitimacy of 'cooperative intervention'

        by Peter Lawler, Greg Fry, Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, Emmanuel Pierre Guittet, Alan Rutter

        State-building intervention in weak, war-torn or failing states has become a priority for the international community. However, the question of how to legitimately engage in the shaping of national governance remains, at the very least, a vexed one. This book explores this key issue through a critical examination of a new model of state-building intervention which has recently emerged in relation to the Pacific 'arc of crisis'. Initiated by the Australian Government in 2003, this 'cooperative intervention' doctrine, built on declared principles of partnership and respect for sovereignty, seems to offer a legitimate way to engage in state-building intervention. Drawing on a group of distinguished Pacific specialists, this book mounts a critique of these claims, showing how international legitimacy does not automatically translate into political legitimacy among those in the affected societies; and how the attempt to legitimise the intervention internationally may actually work against such legitimacy in the recipient state. These insights will be of value to those interested in public policy studies, international law, development studies and international relations. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2026

        Borderline bodies in art and visual culture

        Unsettling identity and place since 1800

        by Keren Hammerschlag, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, Tania Anne Cleaves

        Borderline bodies offers original interpretations of visual representations of human bodies as bounded and unbounded, fortified and permeable, mobile and static-subject to borders and able to traverse and challenge them. It also takes as its focus images and objects that might be considered 'borderline' because they sit at the intersection of disciplines or sit outside accepted notions of what constitutes serious 'art.' By mapping the ways human bodies traverse borders and straddle-even dismantle-categories, this volume's essays approach afresh the relationship of bodies to traditional modes of representation, especially in art and medicine, and encourage us to think anew about how we understand the relationship between human corporeality, identity and place. Critical transdisciplinary and transnational analyses of objects and images from a range of geographies shed new light on the themes of: bodies and identity; typologies of the body; racialised bodies; 'normal' and 'abnormal' bodies; encounters between bodies; bodies in transition; bodies and mobility; and the bounded and unbounded human body. The outcome is a fresh approach to depictions of the human body produced for the purposes of artistic and medical education, aesthetic edification, and scientific and professional advancement, which disrupts assumptions about the normative human body perpetuated through Western image-making traditions.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2022

        "I am Jugoslovenka!"

        Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism

        by Jasmina Tumbas, Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

        "I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojic, Selma Selman and Helena Janecic, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redzepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Medicine

        Crisis Intervention in Nursing Settings

        Practice Book on Psychosocial Crisis Support for Nurses and Health Professionals

        by Manuela Fastner

        Critical experiences, the confrontation with critical life events and the trauma­tization of patients and relatives are among the stressful everyday experi­ences in nursing and health care profes­sions. With this practical book on crisis intervention in nursing, the author pre­sents a handbook for practitioners in nursing and health care professions.

      • Trusted Partner
        History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900
        August 2016

        Civilisation and nineteenth-century art

        A European concept in global context

        by O'Brien

        Over the course of the long nineteenth century, Civilisation was the subject of some of the most prominent public mural paintings and sculptures in Europe and the United States, especially those that speculated on the direction of history. It also underpinned Western depictions of non-Western societies and evaluations of social progress and artistic excellence. The essays in this volume explore the ways in which the idea of Civilisation acted as a lens through which Europeans and Americans represented themselves and others, how this concept reshaped understandings of historical and artistic development, and also how it changed and was put to new uses as the century progressed. This collection will prove invaluable to students and academics in both history and art history.

      • Trusted Partner
        Psychology

        Positive Psychology Intervention for Health and Hospital Psychology

        by Dora Gil, Claudia Hofheinz

        Illness and hospitalization of children occur suddenly andunpredictably,generating high levels of stress and anxiety intheir families. Therefore, it is essential that health andhospitalpsychologists know how to interfere properly in thissituation. The book provides techniques, application instructionsand practical examples for a quick and effective simplepsychological intervention.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2012

        Art and Literature of the Second Empire

        by David Baguley

        This volume explores the characteristics of the art and literature of the Second Empire in France; it examines the attitudes and positioning of artists and writers of the period in relation to a regime of dubious legitimacy, and the ways in which that regime exploited to its advantage the artistic capital available to it. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        2025

        Adverse reactions requiring urgent intervention

        Recognising risks, protecting patients

        by H. Dormann, R. Maas, B. Pfistermeister

        Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a frequent cause of patient hospitalisations. ADRs are often overlooked or not identified in time because the symptoms are not associated with the use of the medication. Precisely this challenge is addressed in this book: Using 34 real-life patient cases, the experienced team of authors demonstrates how ADRs can be promptly identified, treated and avoided. The concise case descriptions and compact ‘Lessons learned’ boxes provide an overview of common ADRs, their clinical presentation and pathophysiology. Clearly presented everyday situations impart practical knowledge to pharmaceutical and medical staff. The objec- tive is to raise awareness of ADRs and promote an open approach to dealing with errors. It is worth taking a closer look at medication to ensure safe usage. Target group: Pharmacists, pharmaceutical engineers, pharmaceutical technicians and trainees, pharmacy interns, students of pharmacy and medicine, physicians, nurses

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2026

        Caribbean eco-aesthetics

        Strategies of survival through contemporary art

        by Kate Keohane, Daniella Rose King, Giulia Smith

        This edited volume reframes the Caribbean as a paradigm of ecological resilience and creativity by bringing together the voices of contemporary artists and scholars who are at the forefront of environmental activism in the region and across its diasporas. While dominant narratives percolating from the environmental sciences to the mainstream press present the Caribbean as a frontier of planetary disaster, the contributors to this volume show how the region offers radical models for overcoming the environmental challenges of the present. At the heart of this argument lies the history of the Caribbean as a centre for grassroots forms of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance founded upon nature-centred cosmologies and practices. Caribbean Eco-Aesthetics shows how contemporary artists are mobilising this radical heritage in a bid to unlock alternative planetary futures.

      • The Arts
        March 1905

        Concerning the Spiritual in Art

        by Wassily Kandinsky

        A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art. Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings. This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting.

      • Trusted Partner

        Character Strengths Intervention Cards

        50 cards with instruction booklet

        by Matthijs Steeneveld, Anouk van den Berg

        Would you like to teach your clients what their character strengths are and how they can use them more? This set of cards helps you do just that. Endorsed with a foreword by Ryan M. Niemiec, VIA Institute 50 full color cards Individual cards for the VIA 24 character strengths and 6 virtues 16 intervention cards 16-page booklet provides practice tips The VIA character strengths look at what positive character traits help us lead fulfilling and happy lives, rather than looking at what is wrong with us. Research has shown that knowing your strengths and using them more often leads to greater well-being, better performance, and more resilience. With these cards, you can help clients learn about their character strengths.   For: • psychotherapists• clinical psychologists• counselors

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2025

        Empirical art

        Filmmaking for fieldwork in practice

        by Andy Lawrence, Martha-Cecilia Dietrich

        Empirical art: Filmmaking for fieldwork in practice is an insightful exploration of what the craft of filmmaking brings to social science research. Providing creative avenues on how to narrate encounters, relationships, and experiences during fieldwork, this comprehensive volume offers a rich tapestry of theoretical explorations and explorative methodologies. Skilfully connecting the worlds of ethnography, art and cinema, the contributors in this book act as a compass for filmmakers and researchers venturing to use a camera and microphone to relate and narrate their research collaborations and fieldsites. Drawing from the authors' extensive experience in disciplines like social anthropology, environmental humanities, and political science, "Empirical Art" breaks down the intricate process of crafting ethnographic films that departs from the researcher's subjectivity. Covering aspects of filmmaking from conceptualisation to production and distribution, readers are equipped with a treasure trove of collaborative techniques, innovative approaches, and ethical considerations necessary to generate and examine storytelling practices in contemporary fields of study. The authors discuss the significance of the multiple roles that technologies of filmmaking play in reflecting on cultural practices, social dynamics, and (beyond) human storytelling and their transformative potentials. Whether a seasoned filmmaker, an aspiring ethnographer, or an academic seeking new dimensions for their research, Empirical Art serves as a guide to integrating visual storytelling, cinema craft and empirical research.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        March 2026

        Surrealist women artists and mental illness

        by Jenny Anger

        Female mental illness has been a prominent and complicated theme in surrealist cultural traditions, including the idealization of women with mental illness in works such as André Breton's Nadja (1928). Art historians have examined this tendency before, but to date there has been no comprehensive study of the lived reality of women surrealist artists with mental illness. How did women's experience and their work intersect with this romanticized vision? Was the masculine dream of feminized, "mad" genius prohibitive or productive for these women artists? After establishing the ideological field within which these women worked, the book turns to case studies of well-known and some lesser-known artists, including Ángeles Santos, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Sonja Sekula, and Unica Zürn. This collection of essays contains a wide range of responses, revealing surrealism's generative as well as restrictive force.

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