Affirm Press is an independent publisher in Melbourne, Australia, dedicated to publishing great stories, big ideas, and the most engaging local and international authors. Our children's list was shortlisted for the 2020 BOP Bologna Best Children’s Publisher of the Year award.
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Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book's pages - human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible - collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript's material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.
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Medievalists have long taught that highly emotional Christian devotion, often called 'affective piety', appeared in Europe after the twelfth century and was primarily practiced by communities of mendicants, lay people and women. Emotional monasticism challenges this view. The first study of affective piety in an eleventh-century monastic context, it traces the early history of affective devotion through the life and works of the earliest known writer of emotional prayers, John of Fécamp, abbot of the Norman monastery of Fécamp from 1028-78. Exposing the early medieval monastic roots of later medieval affective piety, the book casts a new light on the devotional life of monks in Europe before the twelfth century and redefines how medievalists should teach the history of Christianity.
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This volume provides a novel platform to re-evaluate the notion of open-ended intimacies through the lens of affect theories. Contributors address the embodied, affective and psychic, sensorial and embodied aspects of their ongoing intimate entanglements across various timely phenomena. This fascinating collection asks how the study of affect enables us to rethink intimacies, what affect theories can do to the prevailing notion of intimacy and how do they renew and enrich theories of intimacy in a manner which also considers its normative and violent forms. Lively and thought-provoking, this collection contributes to timely topics across the social sciences, representing multiple disciplines from gender studies, sociology and cultural studies to anthropology and queer studies. By so doing, it advances the value of interdisciplinary perspectives and creative methodologies to understanding affective intimacies.
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Technology and consumerism are two characteristic phenomena in the history medicine and healthcare, yet the connections between them are rarely explored by scholars. In this edited volume, the authors address this disconnect, noting the ways in which a variety of technologies have shaped patients' roles as consumers since the early twentieth century. Chapters examine key issues, such as the changing nature of patient information and choice, patients' assessment of risk and reward, and matters of patient role and of patient demand as they relate to new and changing technologies. They simultaneously investigate how differences in access to care and in outcomes across various patient groups have been influenced by the advent of new technologies and consumer-based approaches to health. The volume spans the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spotlights an array of medical technologies and health products, and draws on examples from across the United States and United Kingdom.
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A fear of one’s own emotions can lead people to develop what has been termed emotion- or affect phobia. To deal with this specific kind of phobia, Affect Phobia Therapy (APT) has proven to be useful. In APT, psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, and experimental techniques are combined to help the patient to learn to accept and manage emotions again. Research shows that especially people suffering from anxiety or depression and people with avoidant or dependent personality disorders benefit from this method. This book offers a practical explanation of this evidence-based therapeutic method. The eight chapters focus on all different aspects of APT and the underlying theoretical concepts are illustrated with example patient-therapist dialogues. Target Group: psychologists, psychotherapists, students
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Since the early 1990s, economic exchanges between China and Taiwan have paved the way to migration across a previously closed border and to social and cultural interactions between the two populations. Despite these broader changes, the unresolved issue of Taiwan sovereignty has tainted not only the relations between the two governments but also the everyday life of those who move across the Taiwan Strait. In this politicised environment, intimate and affective practices linked to cross-border marriage and family formation are never just private. Instead, they are deeply entangled with the emotional and affective processes generated at the macro and meso level of political and social life and revolving around national interests. Tracing the intimate, emotional and affective practices linked to family creation, identity formation and integration with the local and national communities, this ethnographic study offers a subjective, dynamic, and complex picture of what it means to be a mainland spouse in Taiwan.
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Focusing particularly on historically oriented sagas, Saga emotions identifies and examines a range of emotions from across Old Norse-Icelandic saga literature. Each chapter begins with a discrete emotion term, such as reiði (anger), gleði (joy), or the peculiarly Old Norse víghugr (killing-mood), exploring its usages within the broad saga corpus, and focusing on its contextual meanings and narrative purposes. The contributions explore the specifics of the lexical terms used for different emotion states and offer in-depth case studies that consider how various emotions manifest within particular examples of saga literature. The book offers the emotional granularity lacking in current studies of Norse emotion and serves as an essential foundation for future research and study into emotional depiction in Old Norse-Icelandic saga literature.
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This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. Resisting the overly rationalist tendencies of political philosophy, it argues that critical theory actively cultivates a powerful connection between thinking and feeling, and rediscovers a range of often neglected concepts that were of vital importance to the first generation of critical theorists, including melancholia, hope, (un)happiness, objects and mimesis. In doing so, it brings the dynamic work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer into conversation with more recent debates around politics and affect. An important intervention in the fields of affect studies and social and political thought, Critical theory and feeling shows that sensuous experience is at the heart of the Frankfurt School's affective politics.
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Vibes as value explores the relationship between subjectivity, labour and value in the hospitality industry, and thereby how youth, gender, sexuality, race and social class are embodied and made productive in the service economy. It shows that the key product of hospitality labour is 'vibes', or moments of enjoyment and relationality co-produced through exploitative relationships amongst workers and consumers. In the process, the book theorises hospitality as a form of affective labour organised through the normative and structural relations of precarious service work. It shows how identity construction produces value within the highly unequal social terrain of the service economy, and how hospitality labour enacts hierarchies of value extending far beyond the limits of the industry itself.
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This volume of essays from a selection of distinguished international scholars is the first of its kind to explore in depth the emotional dimensions of liberal writing in Britain over the long nineteenth century. Addressing liberal writing in the public sphere rather than high political or parliamentary liberalism, it comprises a clear, context-setting introduction and eleven substantive chapters. The chapters analyse key texts and figures from the 1790s through to the 1920s and offer several different approaches to the central concern with the emotions and liberalism. These include examining the place of the emotions in the 'good life'; the social and political function of the emotions; emotional rhetoric in liberal writing; and liberal theories of the emotions. Both individually and as a collection, the essays provide an essential foundation for further scholarly work in this emerging field.
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Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
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