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Sports Semiotics applies semiotics (and other disciplines, secondarily) to analyse the social, cultural, economic and psychological significance of sports. It includes a primer on semiotic theory, sections on the analysis of wrestling by Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies, as well as sections on football and the sacred, the Super Bowl, and the semiotics of televised baseball.
In The Struggle for Development and Democracy Alessandro Olsaretti argues that we need significantly new theories of development and democracy to answer the problem posed by neoliberalism and the populist backlash, namely, uneven development and divisive politics heightened by the 9/11 attacks. This volume proposes a general theory of development and democracy, as part of a unified theory of power, emphasizing that development needs markets, civil society, and the state, and also the proper networks and interactions amongst markets, civil society, and the state. Imperialism undermines these interactions, and turns countries into providers of cheap land or labour. This book begins to sketch the mechanisms at work, and to answer one question: how did imperialist elites build their power?
Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England explores a seldom-studied trove of English veterinary manuals, illuminating how the daily care of horses they describe reshapes our understanding of equine representation in the popular romance of late medieval England. A saint removes a horse’s leg the more easily to shoe him; a wild horse transforms spur wounds into the self-healing practice of bleeding; a messenger calculates time through his horse’s body. Such are the rich and conflicted visions of horse/human connection in the period. Exploring this imagined relation, Francine McGregor reveals a cultural undercurrent in which medieval England is so reliant on equine bodies that human anxieties, desires, and very orientation in daily life are often figured through them. This book illuminates the complex and contradictory yearnings shaping medieval perceptions of the horse, the self, and the identities born of their affinity.
Media constitute a privileged field of analysis as it interferes dynamically with the current popular ideas and myths (myths which narrate, explain and often justify social realities – such as games of power, economic and financial inequalities, drug dealing, disasters, diseases or pandemic threats). In this frame, the archetypal dimensions of the imaginary, of gossiping and of storytelling also seem to play an important role even in the frame of the (so called) “rational discourse”. Media Narratives is an effort to analyze ongoing narratives (either political or fictional) in Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Mexico or United States, expressing interpretations of contemporary events (such as crimes, scandals, diseases or political activism), but also presenting common beliefs and desires revealed by the popular artistic creations. These narratives compose the mythical background of the contemporary globalized world, the “spirit of the time” as Edgar Morin had named it, a spirit which is expressed in current ideas and mentalities. This effort can be characterized as a representative survey of popular beliefs of the 21st Century represented in storytelling. The articles collected in this book will reveal some important facets of the contemporary mythologies.

Contributors are: Lucia Acuña-Pedro, Graziela Ares, Eduardo Barbabela, Mercedes Calzado, Omar Cerrillo Garnica, Christiana Constantopoulou, Mariana Fernández, Humberto Fernandes, Jaqueline García Cordero, Enrique García Romero, Leda Maria Caira Gitahy, Yamila Gómez, Vanesa Lio, Melina Meimaridis, José A. Ruiz San Román, Pedro Paulo Martins Serra, Hara Stratoudaki, Leandro R. Tessler, and Gabriela Villen.
Often identified as one of the most genuine and enduring American film genres, the road movie has never been explored in the context of experimental filmmaking. To fill this gap, Lost Highways, Embodied Travels provides the first book-length study of over eighty unique and often obscure films and videos and situates them within the corporeal turn in American avant-garde cinema, so far mostly associated with body genres and sexually explicit films. Drawing on unpublished archival materials, the book offers a fresh take on both past and current practices of the experimental film community for scholars, students, makers and film buffs.