Books published by John Hunt Publishing

The Lives Around Us is a series of short meditations for individuals or groups. It can serve as a Lent book or at any time of the year. Its purpose is to tap into the present public interest in nature connection and encourage this to be formed in concert with Bible reading and regular (daily or weekly) prayer. Each chapter begins with descriptive reflection on a specific creature (animal, plant, fungus, mineral) followed by one or two thoughts about what we can do for them practically. There is a Bible reading and then a section that encourages prayer and sometimes a prayerful activity.

This book takes its starting point in a rare experiment, that of an academic researcher attempting to learn to do circus. What happens to the knowledge of the performance theoretician when physically engaging with the circus arts? One of the (im)material outcomes of this experiment is what the author calls homemade academic circus' - a series of lecture-performances on performance-related academic questions, presented and discussed through circus disciplines. The interest of homemade academic circus, and the analysis of it presented in this book, lies not only in the fact that it is a form of curiosity within academic research. It is also worth noting that the main character in this experiment (sometimes known as the ';professional amateur' or the ';academic freak', the alter egos of the researcher) goes through the opposite process of what many artists within artistic and practice-based research experience today. What happens if, rather than going from art to academia, one would go from academia to art? Which cultural and paradigmatic shocks would that produce, and how would that influence the researcher's understanding of knowledge and thinking?