The Walkthrough Method

Nowadays the social scientists are called to integrate within their studies new tools that modify and innovate the scientist's typical toolbox. Digital platforms, media, and especially apps pose further challenges to social scientists today, as they are an important place of significant socio-cultural, economic, health, relationships, and entertainment transformations. When studying digital technologies, in fact, it's important to pay attention to both their socio-cultural representations and technological aspects – since even design and data outputs have social and cultural influences. In this context, new research questions arise; among all the possible tools in the digital method toolbox, the walkthrough method is a noteworthy way to answer them. Starting from these considerations, this chapter aims to analyze, through a review of the literature, the birth and development of the walkthrough method in its various meanings to identify the innovative aspects and fields of application.

Literary and cultural (re)productions of a utopian island: Performative geographies of colonial Shamian, Guangzhou in the latter half of the 19th century

In the second half of the 19th century, Shamian was established and developed as a colonial island enclave in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. Simultaneously, literary and cultural imaginations, depictions, and narrations of the place produced a discourse of Shamian as a utopian island: geographically insular and bounded, environmentally beautiful and peaceful, socially exclusive and harmonious, and technologically progressive and advantageous. This paper examines contemporaneous (predominantly English) literary and cultural representations of Shamian as a colonial utopia and their interrelations with the island’s spatial formation and evolution. These texts (primarily written and pictorial descriptive, non-fictional accounts) reflected the spatial reality but also promoted spatial practices that reinforced the physical utopian island. This process exemplifies the theories of performative geographies in island studies and intertextuality in geocriticism, showing how a place’s spatial representations and reality are mutually constructed. Adopting a conceptual model of intertextual performative geographies, this paper investigates the dynamic interplay of these literary and cultural texts with the spatial reality, arguing that literary and cultural representations of Shamian (re)produced the colonial enclave as a utopian island, both conceptually and practically.

Mujeres errantes: Cuerpo, género y política revolucionaria en el cine judío latinoamericano

This article focuses on the points of contact between Jewishness, gender, and revolutionary politics in Latin American films set in the 1960s and 1970s. The piece introduces the term “mujeres errantes” to explore how Latin American Jewish women filmmakers have crafted depictions of Jewish women who err from the norms with which they are expected to conform as they come into contact with pan-Latin American revolutionary political move­ments of the 1960s and 1970s. The study analyzes the specific representations of women- and Jewish-identified fictional protagonists in the films El amigo alemán and Novia que te vea. Through a discussion of how each film engages with the notion of “Mujeres errantes,” this article considers the place of revolutionary politics in film as cultural representations of Jewish Latin American women.

Pribumi di Mata Kolonial dalam Kumpulan Cerpen Teh dan Pengkhianat Karya Iksaka Banu

This research aims to discuss social and cultural aspects that are closely related to Indonesian history regarding events of colonialism in the collection of short stories entitled Teh dan Pengkhianat by applying new historicism. This is a descriptive qualitative research. The theory used to analyze the relevance of literary works as social documents is from new historicism, Stephen Greenblatt (1980). Besides, the theory used to investigate colonialist perspectives on indigenous peoples is form orientalism, Edward Said (1935). The results of this research are as follows. First, historical representations are marked by fear, restraint, compulsion, and counterforce of indigenous people in the colonial period before and after 1945. Second, social representation is marked by humanity, preparation, and persistence in dealing with the variola virus that occurred in 1644. Third, cultural representations are marked by the hard work of indigenous people for equal rights in clothing style until transportation. Data that demonstrates hard work is the existence (space, process, and object), identity (matching), and unity/multiplicity (merging) of indigenous peoples and colonialists.

Italy-Japan. Dialogues on Food

Italy and Japan are two of the countries where food has traditionally had greater symbolic value. They are two culinary realities now exported all over the world, for a long time representative of lifestyles, social and economic dynamics in many cases similar in the course of their respective histories. This volume, by the contributions offered by authorities and guests, managers, experts, journalists and scholars from Japan and Italy, presents a great number of implications of the cultural representations of Food Culture, analysed in a multi-perspective approach, underlying the value of food and cuisine in Japan and Italy nowadays as in the past, through a considerable transition between tradition and modernity.

GAMES OF HUNGER: THE POLITICS OF FAMINE, STATE-BUILDING PROCESSES AND CONTEMPORARY HUNGER STRIKES IN EUROPE – THE CASES OF NORTHERN IRELAND AND UKRAINE

The famines and periods of prolonged hunger that took place in Europe in the last centuries had a complex social dynamics and substantial transformative potential that still influence European politics. Dramatic cultural representations of hunger and starvation became deeply engaged in various modern nationalist narrations in order to open up new sources of political legitimacy for newly arising nation states. The periods of the Great Famine and Holodomor were at the same time moments of an extremely intense consolidation of Irish and Ukrainian national identities and the collective mindsets of multiple communities. Those identities became major political forces on the peripheries of the Old Continent. Hence, some strategies of transforming the experience of hunger into politically beneficial strategies of civic resistance were developed. Those tactics determined the future roles of both political and civil actors in sovereignty conflicts. Using a comparative approach, this paper explores the way in which the state-building processes in Ukraine and Northern Ireland in the 20th and 21st centuries were framed by famines, the raise of civic society, hunger strikes, and how the mindset of food scarcity grew into the nations’ characters. The mindset has turned into a serious drive for some political projects in Ukraine and Ireland to become modern nation states integrated with increasingly globalized European societies. The compelling and enchanting cultural narrations on hunger are profoundly up-to-date and political, as well as European phenomena, and as such should be analyzed – through the conceptual lens of modernity and postmodernity, and the international forms of political and economic coercions.

On Ice: Life and Lunch at Mercato di Rialto

Visitors consume Venice’s Mercato di Rialto most often with their eyes and cameras. Venetians, in contrast, consume it with their mouths. During the week they voice their orders gently, but on Saturday mornings shopping lists become full-volume announcements that compete against the market noise. By analysing the history and role of the Pescheria at Rialto Market and its culinary and cultural representations, this article considers the entanglement between seafood and people, ice and freshness, and life and lunch.

The Discursive Problematization of Death, Dehumanization and Sociocultural identity: An Analysis of 'The Walking Dead'

<p>The zombie is a significant cultural figure which is represented and produced as being symptomatic of and relevant to contemporary concerns about death and dehumanization. This thesis will focus on the ways that death and dehumanization are changing and being negotiated within popular cultural representations and discourses regarding zombies, particularly in Frank Darabont’s television series The Walking Dead. The thesis will consider the way in which the figure of the zombie is representative of issues and discourses that are indicative of a problematization of the category of the human, and the notion of the transcendental. This will involve an examination of the changing narratives of the body, with particular regard to consumerism and the insistence of the body as a major site of the truth and value of the self, in contrast to the horrifying bodily form of the zombie. The thesis will also examine the way that dehumanization is problematized in The Walking Dead, where the human/non-human distinction is shown to be increasingly precarious and difficult to sustain. Further, the thesis will examine how the zombie is represented as manifesting the collapse of identity, as agents become alienated from the social discourses, narratives and values which constitute and categorize the subject.</p>

The Discursive Problematization of Death, Dehumanization and Sociocultural identity: An Analysis of 'The Walking Dead'

<p>The zombie is a significant cultural figure which is represented and produced as being symptomatic of and relevant to contemporary concerns about death and dehumanization. This thesis will focus on the ways that death and dehumanization are changing and being negotiated within popular cultural representations and discourses regarding zombies, particularly in Frank Darabont’s television series The Walking Dead. The thesis will consider the way in which the figure of the zombie is representative of issues and discourses that are indicative of a problematization of the category of the human, and the notion of the transcendental. This will involve an examination of the changing narratives of the body, with particular regard to consumerism and the insistence of the body as a major site of the truth and value of the self, in contrast to the horrifying bodily form of the zombie. The thesis will also examine the way that dehumanization is problematized in The Walking Dead, where the human/non-human distinction is shown to be increasingly precarious and difficult to sustain. Further, the thesis will examine how the zombie is represented as manifesting the collapse of identity, as agents become alienated from the social discourses, narratives and values which constitute and categorize the subject.</p>

Conclusion

This concluding chapter uses British free-to-air television broadcasting network Channel 4’s “Superhumans Return” advertising campaign for its coverage of the 2016 Paralympic Games as a case study with which to explore the overlaps between nineteenth-century and contemporary cultural representations of prosthesis users. It highlights the way that contemporary sources, including Channel 4’s campaign, interrogate a privileging of normalcy while remaining encoded by ableist inclinations. The chapter draws together the various strands of the book’s argument to make the case that the literary history of prosthesis is rich, complicated, and conflicted.