Digital technologies have rapidly become integral to communities and societies, bringing both significant benefits and serious concerns. Issues such as misinformation, disinformation, online polarization, discrimination, and widening inequalities have prompted a critical and urgent debate: Can digital societies stil...

The lifetime of Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was marked by dramatic transformations in Europe. Cityscapes, aesthetic codes, social orders, political cultures, international travel and means of warfare developed beyond recognition; entire catalogues of hopes and fears were torn asunder and replaced by new ones during n...

In recent political and legal history, scholars seldom specify how and why they use the concept of territory. In research on state-formation processes and nation building, for instance, the term mostly designates an enclosed geographical area ruled by a central government. Inspired by ideas from political geographer...

Flows and Frictions in Trans-Himalayan Spaces traces movements and connections in a region known for its formidable obstacles to mobility. Eight original essays and a conceptual introduction engage with questions of networks and interconnection between people across a bordered landscape. Mobility among the extremely...

This book, full of quantitative evidence and limited-circulation archives, details manufacturing and the beginnings of industrialisation in China from 1644 to 1911. It thoroughly examines the interior organisation of public craft production and the complementary activities of the private sector. It offers detailed k...

There is a tension between the requirements of theoretical abstraction and the capacities of the film medium, where everything that we see on screen is concrete: A train arriving at a station, a tree, bodies, faces. Since the complex theories of montage in Soviet cinema, however, there have continuously been attempt...

What do scholars do when they talk about virtues (impartiality, accuracy) or vices (dogmatism, prejudice)? Against the common view that such high-minded talk is largely irrelevant to actual scholarly practice, this volume proposes to treat it as a practice in its own right. Drawing on case studies from the nineteent...

In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the ...

The Maritime Silk Road foregrounds the numerous networks that have been woven across oceanic geographies, tying world regions together often far more extensively than land-based routes. On the strength of the new data which has emerged in the last two decades in the form of archaeological findings, as well as new te...

As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practic...

When rock star Bono told Oprah Winfrey that America is an ideal that is supposed to be contagious, the talk show host was moved to tears. Such an imagined America, rather than the nation-state USA, is the topic of Fabricating the Absolute Fake. Pop and politics become intertwined, as Hollywood, television, and celeb...

Language teaching and learning were crucial to Europeans’ colonial, national, and individual enterprises in the Levant, and in these processes, “Oriental language teachers” – as they were termed prior to the Second World War – were fundamental. European state nationalisms influenced and increasingly competed with ea...

We live in an era of screens. No longer just the place where we view movies, or watch TV at night, screens are now ubiquitous, the source of the majority of information we consume daily, and a crucial component of our basic interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. This transformation has happened almost wi...

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 kn...

What fresh perspectives can viewing copyright law through a humanities' looking glass bring to key notions of tomorrow's copyright law? Technological and economic concerns have long been the drivers of debate about copyright. But diverse disciplines in the humanities - including literary studies, aesthetics, film st...

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), prominent astronomer and world-renowned socialist theorist, stood at the nexus of the revolutions in politics, science and the arts of the early twentieth century. His astronomy was uniquely visual and highly innovative, while his politics were radical. Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing S...