Books in the Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress series

This book challenges the Western contemporary ¿praise for Nature¿. From food to body practices, from ecological discourses to the Covid-19 pandemic, contemporary imaginaries abound with representations of an ideal ¿pure Nature¿, essentially defined according to a logic of denial of any artificial, modified, manipulated ¿ in short, cultural ¿ aspect.How should we contextualise and understand such an opposition, especially in light of the rich semantic scope of the term ¿nature¿ and its variability over time? And how can we ¿ if we actually can ¿ envisage alternative models and approaches capable of better accounting for such richness and variability? The author addresses these fundamental issues, combining an initial theoretical problematisation of the concept of nature and its evolution ¿ from classical philosophy to the crucial changes occurred through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism and the modern era, finally considering recent insights in philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology and semiotics ¿ with the analysis of its discursivisation ¿ from the iconography of Mother Nature between the past and the present to the representation of catastrophic events in fictional and non-fictional texts, from clean eating and other popular food trends to the ambivalence of the naked body between its supposed natural ascription and its multiple cultural characterisations. Thus she introduces a critique of pure Nature, providing a systematic study of the way nature is attributed meaning and value in some of today¿s most relevant discourses and practices, and finally tracing a possible path towards an ¿internatural turn¿.

This ambitious text is a monograph about human experiences concerning the potentialities, capacities, and features of humankind from the wholeness of the collective mind body spirit. The purpose in reframing human endeavors is for enhanced alignment for livability and sustainability. This book departs from the concept and practice of ¿design and technology¿ and argues that most crises that endanger and destruct our ecological livability and sustainability come from our way of thinking and doing with ¿design and technology¿ based on the necessity for control. It is the control for overcoming the fear of scarcity, starvation, and the unknown. This book is rather an attempt to find alternate way of decision-making thru holistic methods. It appeals to researchers working in design, sustainability, architecture and urban studies.

This book reveals the core features of digital culture, examined by means of semiotic models and theories. It positions commercial and market principles in the center of the digital semiosphere, avoiding the need to force the new cultural reality into the established textualist or pragmatist paradigms. The theoretic insights and case studies presented here argue for new semiotic models of inquiry that include working with big data, user experience and nethnography, along with conventional approaches.The book develops a new concept of identity in the digital age, analyzing the digital flows of recognition and value, which led to the tremendous success of Social Media and the Web 2.0 era. Self-expression, entertainment and consumerism are seen as the major drivers of identity formation in the post-truth era, where the self can no longer be considered independently of a given person¿s communication devices, where a substantial part of it is stored and actualized. It will be of interest to semioticians and researchers working on digital culture.

This book provides a multifaceted view on the relation between the old and the new in music, between tradition and innovation. This is a much-debated issue, generating various ideas and theories, which rarely come to unanimous conclusions. Therefore, the book offers diverse perspectives on topics such as national identities, narrative strategies, the question of musical performance and musical meaning. Alongside themes of general interest, such as classical repertoire, the music of well-established composers and musical topics, the chapters of the book also touch on specific, but equally interesting subjects, like Brazilian traditions, Serbian and Romanian composers and the lullaby. While the book is mostly addressed to researchers, it can also be recommended to students in musicology, ethnomusicology, musical performance, and musical semiotics.

This book positions itself at the intersection of the key areas of the modern humanities. Different authors from a variety of countries take innovative approaches to investigating multimodal communication, adapting pedagogical design to digital environments and enhancing cognitive skills through transformations in teaching and learning practices. The eclectic forms under study require eclectic approaches and methodologies, and the authors cross disciplinary boundaries drawing on philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, computational linguistics, mathematics, cognitive studies and neuroaesthetics. Part I presents methods of analysing multimodal communication in its different displays, covering promotional video in crowdfunding project presentations, multimodal public signs of prohibition and visuals as arguments. Part II explores varied teaching methodologies that have emerged as a result of and in response to modern technological changes and contains some practical hints for educators. It demonstrates the pedagogical potential of video games, virtual worlds, linguistic corpora and online dictionaries. Part III focuses on psychological and cognitive factors influencing success in the classroom, primarily, ways of developing students' and teachers' personalities. The volume sits at the intersection between Communication Studies, Digital Humanities, Discourse Analysis, Education Theory and Cognitive Studies and is useful to scholars and students of communication, languages, education and other areas of the humanities. This book should trigger scholarly discussions as well as stimulating practitioners' interest in these fields.

Phenomenologically speaking, the task of the study is to excavate, listen to, unfold, divulge, and reconstruct the socio-culturally, environmentally, and historically constructed relationship between people and their built environment that build, develop, and elaborate the system of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics.

The volume sits at the intersection between Communication Studies, Digital Humanities, Discourse Analysis, Education Theory and Cognitive Studies and is useful to scholars and students of communication, languages, education and other areas of the humanities.

The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to an overcoming of the traditional separation between humanties and life sciences which, according to the authors, is required today both by the developments of these disciplines and by the social problems they have to face.

This book transforms phenomenology, music, technology, and the cultural arts from within. This book will be of considerable interest to readers from the fields of sound studies, science and technology studies, phenomenology, cultural studies, media studies, and sound art theory.

This highly readable book develops a numanistic, and specifically semiotic approach to multiculturalism.

This book provides new theoretical approaches to the subject of virtuality. The respective chapters share new insights on art, media, psychic systems and technology, while also presenting new ways of articulating the concept of the virtual with regard to the main premises of Western thought.

Offering a profound discussion of topics such as human identity, our relationship with animals and the environment, and our culture, the author channels the vibrant Italian traditions of humanism, materialism, and speculative philosophy. The research presents a dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences.

The book aims to introduce a research concept called "Numanities", as one possible attempt to overcome the current scientific, social and institutional crisis of the humanities. Such crisis involves their impact on, and role within, society;

This edited book covers many topics in musicological literature, gathering various approaches to music studies that encapsulate the vivid relation music has to society. Depending on the type of society, music may have a certain "meaning" or "function" (music does not mean the same thing everywhere in the world).

This book examines the problem of relationships between culture and space. Highlighting the use of semiotics of culture as a basic concept of research, it describes the power of the cultural landscape in the context of culture philosophical research. Opening with a discussion of the existence of culture in space, it establishes basic concepts such as noosphere and pneumatosphere. The author acknowledges the early contributions of thinkers like Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who first observed that human activity has become a geological force.Introducing time and space to the discussion, the author then describes the nature of mythological time, eternity versus timelessness, and the semantics of sacred landscapes, space and ritual. These concepts are further developed in discussions of the metaphorical nature of cultural landscape, and the city as metaphor.The book explores semiotics in the cultural landscape, examining the genesis of concepts from geographical images to signs and the axiological dimension of geographical images. In her approach to the idea of cultural landscape as text, she provides detailed examples, including the Russian landscape as agent provocateur of the text, and the culture philosophical aspects and semantics of travel.It establishes the cultural landscape as a phenomenon of culture that is fixed in geographical space with the help of semiotic mechanisms-a specific area of culture of life possessing functional and ontological self-sufficiency.This book appeals readers and researchers interested in the philosophy of culture, semiotics of space, and the philosophical dimensions of culture and geography.