bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
In Search of Marietta Tintoretta
Authors: Echols Robert , Ilchman Frederick
Published: January 2025

Marietta Tintoretta (ca. 1552-ca. 1590), daughter of the great Jacopo Tintoretto, was herself a renowned artist, admired by her contemporaries, especially for her portraits, and sought after as court painter by rulers including King Philip II of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. Despite early acclaim and a biography by Carlo Ridolfi (1648), today not a single painting can be securely identified as by her hand. This chapter addresses this conundrum, reviewing the documentary evidence of Marietta’s life (including important documents discovered within the last two decades), revisiting the scholarly literature, and evaluating works that could potentially be attributed to her, based on an ongoing reconsideration of the oeuvre of Jacopo Tintoretto and his circle.
Artemisia Gentileschi in Venice: Facts and Suppositions
Authors: Gasparotto Davide
Published: January 2025

In the last twenty years our knowledge of the life and work of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-ca. 1654), the most celebrated woman painter of the seventeenth century, has been considerably enhanced by new archival research and the discovery of new paintings. The Venetian period of the artist (about 1627-1630), however, remains one of the least known segments of her extraordinary career. The recent acquisition by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles of a painting depicting Lucretia, the legendary Roman heroine, may help shed new light on Artemisia’s sojourn in Venice. This essay will explore evidence of Artemisia’s life, work, and reputation in the Serenissima, including her association with the renowned Accademia degli Incogniti.
Rosalba Carriera Unframed
Authors: Salomon Xavier F.
Published: January 2025

Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) was the most celebrated woman artist in eighteenth-century Europe. Working in the inherently fragile medium of pastel she was always concerned for the well-being of her creations. The 350th anniversary of her birth (2023) created an opportunity to celebrate her life and work. Together with the substantial documentation of her career, the study of many of her pastels unframed has allowed a focus on Rosalba’s technique and enabled new conclusions about her working practice. This essay will follow Rosalba’s footsteps, from her Venetian residence to the European courts for which her pastels were destined.
Cultural Analysis as Reportage
Authors: de Bloois Joost
Published: January 2025

In the footsteps of Michel Foucault, cultural analysis has branded itself as a “history of the present.” In my contribution to this volume, I argue that such a “history of the present” can take the form of “reportage.” Reportage implies a certain form of research and writing, generated by a sense of urgency, of participating in the contemporary. To conceive of cultural analysis as reportage is to situate it in-between the humanities and the social sciences, in-between close reading and fieldwork. Reportage can constitute a valuable alternative to the “inward turn” in cultural analysis. To report means to take the analysis back into the unfinished business of the everyday and the contemporary.
Institutional Travels: Spaces for Cultural Analysis
Authors: Roei Noa
Published: January 2025

This chapter probes alternate spaces for practicing cultural analysis, both materially and discursively. Departing from Clifford Geertz’s understanding of thick description, and following Lauren Berlant’s call for infrastructural analysis, I narrate my inter-institutional travels into an artistic research project in the emergency department of a major hospital in Amsterdam. Tracing the initial phases of the project, involving burnout, collaboration, administrative hassles, and conceptual transla¬tions, I underscore the lifeworlds of the project that do not necessarily resonate discursively. Attending to infrastructural protocols, concepts, and practices that solidify forms of engagement in cultural analysis, I argue, are necessary in order to address the procedural as it takes shape and loosen up taxing or confining forms of investment.
Introduction: Cultural Analysis, circa 2034
Authors: Roei Noa , Aydemir Murat , Kuryel Aylin
Published: January 2025

Cultural analysis gained its shape in the late 1990s. This introduction proposes to reassess its relevance to the immediate present as well as the near future. After a brief genealogical sketch, we address the current situation, alternating between successful institutionalization, slow scholarly attrition, and intensified threat, as well as reflect on a discussion in cultural studies at large on the field’s methodological standardization versus its improvisational openness. Finally, we address the present historicity of the main aspects of cultural analysis as suggested by Mieke Bal—including object analysis, a heuristic use of concepts, interdisciplinarity, and social relevance—and introduce the volume’s contributions under those headings.
Coerced Labour, Forced Displacement, and the Soviet Gulag, 1880s-1930s
Authors: Popova Zhanna
Published: January 2025

The Gulag remains one of the key symbols of twentieth-century mass political violence. Thanks to recent archive-based investigations, we now understand the scope of the system, variations between different camp complexes, and modalities of the use of forced labour of convicts. At the same time, the work of historicizing the Gulag and systematically evaluating its position within the global history of repression is still to be done. Exploring the emergence of this vast Soviet system of concentration camps in long-term perspective, this book aims to inscribe this process within global histories of coerced labour, forced displacement, and punishment. It highlights the inextricable interconnection of coerced labour and forced displacement as tools of punishment in the multitude of their historical forms.
A Versatile Island: The Role of São Tomé in the Slave Trade During the Period of WIC Occupation, 1641-1649
Authors: Herrendorf Florian
Published: January 2025

Despite their acknowledgement of São Tomé’s position as the principal market for Dutch slaves in 1646–1648, historians have largely neglected to investigate the nature of the slave trade with and via this island during the period of occupation by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), 1641–1649. Likewise, they have failed to address the importance of São Tomé for the activities of Dutch, foreign, and interloper slavers and how this island was incorporated into the already existing slave trade networks of the WIC. This article attempts to fill this historiographical void by examining São Tomé’s involvement in the slave trade during the period of WIC occupation. By using a large variety of primary sources, we can paint a picture of a versatile island that not only functioned as an entrepôt for the re-export of slaves and a market for the sale of captives, but also as a victualling station for passing slavers and a haven for foreign crews and local merchants alike.
The Middle Passages of the Geertruyda & Christina (1783-1785) and Zeemercuur (1787-1789): A Comparison
Authors: de Koning Camilla
Published: January 2025

This article focuses on the experiences of the crew and enslaved people aboard two slave ships contracted by the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (MCC) in the late eighteenth century on their respective seventh and first journey: the Geertruyda en Christina (GC7) and the Zeemercuur (ZM1). Middle Passages are understudied and underrepresented in historical research, while the experiences of those on board were a profound part of the workings of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. The GC7 and ZM1 had notably high mortality rates of thirty-six and sixty-four per cent, while the average of all MCC journeys was twenty per cent. This article aims to explore the question of “what happened aboard these ships?” by analyzing qualitative sources such as journals and financial documents of the MCC and other companies involved in the transatlantic slave trade and reading these sources “against the grain” to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of those on board.
The Significance of Shipboard Insurrections During the Slave Ship Captaincies of Jan Menkenveld and His Former Officers: David Mulders, Daniel Pruijmelaar and Willem de Molder, 1754-1767
Authors: Meijboom Luc
Published: January 2025

This article investigates the surprising number of shipboard insurrections during the transatlantic slaving voyages of captain Jan Menkenveld and his former officers: David Mulders, Daniel Pruijmelaar and Willem de Molder. Compared to the other registered insurrections on Dutch slave ships in the TSTD, these MCC captains appear to have experienced the most insurrections on their triangular voyages. By carefully interplaying the muster rolls, ships’ journals and correspondence of their voyages on which insurrections occurred, this article traces the surrounding conditions and answers to what extent the captaincies kindled shipboard insurrections. This article suggests the interconnectedness between MCC slave ship captains and shipboard insurrections and encourages the discussion about the quantity of slave ship resistance to be reignited.
Shroud Waving Self-determination: A Qualitative Analysis of the Moral and Epistemic Dimensions of Obstetric Violence in the Netherlands
Authors: van der Waal Rodante , van Nistelrooij Inge
Published: January 2025

The objective of the qualitative research presented in this chapter is to gain insight into the normalization of obstetric violence by focusing on the moral and epistemic injustices that both facilitate obstetric violence and make it look acceptable. We elaborate on two groups of results. First, we discuss the forms of obstetric violence most commonly mentioned by the participants, which were vaginal examinations, episiotomies, and pelvic floor support. Second, we demonstrate two major themes that concern practices related to moral and epistemic injustice: 1) “playing the dead baby card,” with the subthemes of “shroud waving,” “hidden agenda,” and “normalizing obstetric violence”; and 2) “troubling consent,” with subthemes of “not being asked for consent,” “saying ‘yes,’” “saying “no,’” and “giving up resistance.”
The “Dead Baby Card” and the Early Modern Accusation of Infanticide: Situating Obstetric Violence in the Bio- and Necropolitics of Reproduction
Authors: van der Waal Rodante
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, I argue that playing the dead baby card echoes the accusation of infanticide, which was prominent in the early modern witch hunts as the most common verdict for which women and midwives were executed, and, since then, has run through the whole of Western modernity. The playing of the dead baby card can similarly be understood to have the negation of the pregnant person as its effect, so that the maternal subject cannot be conceptualized as part of the biopolitical production of subjects. This chapter differentiates the playing of the dead baby card from both bio- and necropolitics as a form of matricide as the condition of the biopolitical project of the accumulation of life.
Obstetric Violence: An Intersectional Refraction through Abolition Feminism
Authors: van der Waal Rodante , Mayra Kaveri , Horn Anna , Chadwick Rachelle
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we argue that “obstetric violence” as an activist and critical feminist concept can only be effective for change when it is clearly understood as institutionalized intersectional violence. Therefore, we propose an abolitionist framework for further study. Through this lens, we refract the concept of obstetric violence as institutionalized, intersectional, and racializing violence by (1) making an abolitionist historiography of the obstetric institution, and (2) centering anti-Black obstetric racism as the anchor point of obstetric violence, where the afterlife of slavery, racial capitalism, the impact of systemic racism, and the consequences of patriarchal biopolitics come together. We locate the abolitionist futures of maternity care in Black, indigenous, and independent doula and midwifery practices.
Undercommoning Anthrogenesis: Abolitionist Care for Reproductive Justice
Authors: van der Waal Rodante
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, I differentiate between two strategies at play in the contemporary Marxist reimagination of reproduction: 1) a communist approach whose focus is primarily on fundamentally restructuring the commons of reproductive care on a grand societal scale; and 2) an “undercommoning” approach that aims to fugitively abolish public institutions through small-scale mutual aid and radical care practices which are already constituting otherworlds of reproductive justice through transnational coalitions. Highlighting abortion and birth networks in the Netherlands, the second strategy is proposed as the more promising one for the anthrogenesis of human beings otherwise.
Specter(s) of Care: A Symposium on Midwifery, Relationality, and Reproductive Justice to-Come
Authors: van der Waal Rodante
Published: January 2025

Nearly 2500 years ago, Plato wrote of a symposium about love. This symposium was attended by Socrates, the founder of “maieutic” philosophy, a name owing to the comparison of his profession to that of his mother, a maia, meaning midwife in ancient Greek. The kind of relational continuity of care that midwifery could have represented in ancient times is something that we have long lost. The symposium below, written 2500 years later, is an attempt to reconceive of care for fertility, abortion, pregnancy, and parenthood. Through a combination of hauntology, critical fabulation, and decolonial empirical methodology, a specter of care is staged in the figure of midwife Phaenarete, Socrates’s mother, who engages in dialogue with current day midwives and mothers.
Somatophilic Reproductive Justice: On Technology, Feminist Biological Materialism, and Midwifery Thinking
Authors: van der Waal Rodante , van Nistelrooij Inge , Fox Deborah , Newnham Elizabeth
Published: January 2025

One of the major strands of feminism concerned with reproduction, represented in this chapter by Shulamith Firestone, is tied to a belief in technology as the means to achieve reproductive justice. We offer a perspective on achieving reproductive justice from a different position based on another age-old materialist doctrine, but one that is largely neglected by feminism: that of midwifery. Midwifery’s epistemological standpoint can be characterized as a somatophilic techne that aims to think with the body rather than fix it. There is, however, a tendency in midwifery towards anti-technological essentialism. This essay aims to redirect this tendency to the more promising materialist doctrine of midwifery as well as Firestonian feminism, reimagining this materialist stance as somatophilic “midwifery thinking.”
The Anatomical Atlas
Authors: Li Weixuan , Deijl Lucas van der
Published: January 2025

In 1685, Govert Bidloo and Gerard de Lairesse published their Anatomia Humani Corporis, an impressive anatomical atlas with 105 engravings of dissected bodies and body parts. It was published in a culture in which medical professors performed dissections in anatomical theatres, while regular theatres became spaces for knowledge transfer about human passions. Engaged in both sorts of theatres, Bidloo and Lairesse exemplify the interconnectedness of art, theatre, medicine and publishing in early modern Amsterdam. In this essay, we use the materiality of Anatomia as a key to unravel the entanglement of the city’s cultural industries, tracing the social, intellectual, aesthetic and commercial connections linking Bidloo, Lairesse, the theatre, and the publishers involved in the production of the atlas.
A Baluster
Authors: Beranek Saskia
Published: January 2025

This essay examines the lacquer baluster of Amalia van Solms (now in the Rijksmuseum) as it moved from Japan to the Dutch Republic and the role it played in the interiors of Huis ten Bosch. Previous scholarship has alternately portrayed it as both gift and commission, obfuscating Amalia’s direct involvement. Reconsidering the global trade in luxury goods and the practical role played by the baluster reveals the complex dynamics shaping art patronage. In addition, the lacquer quite literally divided space and restricted audiences: artworks shown ‘beyond the balustrade’ functioned more dynamically than those with more accessible, public-facing installations. Discussions of architectural theory and social etiquette demonstrate how objects and images constructed the princess’s identity for multiple audiences.
Multispecies Dialogues
Authors: Meijer Eva
Published: January 2025

In ‘Multispecies Dialogues’ Eva Meijer develops a new understanding of the concept ‘dialogue’, which includes embodied, material and spatial interaction. Meijer does not do this alone: each chapter of the book is devoted to a dialogue, or set of dialogues – with street dog Olli, a community of former lab mice, amphibian neighbours, the North Sea, and many other beings. Taking multispecies dialogues seriously is a way to do justice to more-than-human agency and to become more worldly in a time dominated by humans. Rethinking the model of the dialogue also opens up new ways of doing philosophy in multispecies world, which is urgently needed to address the ecological, political and philosophical problems of our time.
More than Decoration: The Map in Frans Hals’s Regents of St Elisabeth’s Hospital*
Authors: Abraham Liesbeth , Halm Koos Levy-van
Published: January 2025

This paper discusses the map on the wall in Frans Hals’s Regents of St Elisabeth’s Hospital of 1640-41. The first part identifies it as an existing map of Flanders, published in 1633, while the second part explores its presence in the regents’ room with reference to the special relationship between the hospital and Stadtholder Fredrik Hendrik’s States army, which was still active in Flanders at the time.
The New York Malle Babbe: Original, Studio Work, or Forgery?*
Authors: Tummers Anna , Wallert Arie , Erdmann Robert G. , Kleinert Katja , Hartwieg Babette , Mahon Dorothy , Centeno Silvia , Groves Roger , Anisimov Andrei , Dik Joris
Published: January 2025

Quite a few of the most innovative and best-known paintings by Frans Hals exist in several variants. Attributing some of these versions or imitations is a notoriously difficult challenge. A case in point is the Malle Babbe painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which has a rich attribution history: it has been called an original Frans Hals, a work by one of his sons, an early imitation with a forged signature, and even a modern forgery. This case study sheds new light on its attribution by comparing its style, technique and materials in depth to the well-known original by Frans Hals in Berlin and to the Malle Babbe forgery created by Han van Meegeren at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and by relating it to relevant primary sources and seventeenth-century art theory. New technical research was done on all three paintings specifically for this study, including infrared reflectography (IRR), macro X-ray fluorescence scanning (MA-XRF), hyperspectral imaging or reflectance imaging spectroscopy (HI/RIS) and lead isotope analysis. Advanced digital tools were developed to aid the comparison.
Looking at Frans Hals in the Digital Age: The Benefits of Detailed Comparisons
Authors: Grimm Claus
Published: January 2025

Modern imaging techniques and the increasing availability of high-resolution image files enable a new kind of precise recording of the entire tradition of visual design, especially drawings, prints, and paintings. Detailed comparisons allow us to distinguish the artistic execution of various hands, identifying the characteristics of masters and their assistants. This is especially true where typical aspects of the master’s handiwork can be identified, as in the case of Frans Hals.
‘Because you simply cannot argue about art with a chemist’: Scientific Research on Frans Hals’s Paintings in the Netherlands during the 1920s
Authors: Franken Michiel
Published: January 2025

This article focuses on three early examples of scientific examination of paintings in the Netherlands in the 1920s using work by Frans Hals. The reason for such research differed in each instance. The first case involved the restoration of Hals’s group portraits in Haarlem. The second example related to whether a newly surfaced painting was by Frans Hals or was a forgery. Finally, scientific examination of a heavily overpainted painting in Edinburgh revealed a work by Frans Hals previously believed to have been lost.
Gender and Family Networks in Early Modern Italy
Authors: Moran Megan
Published: January 2025

Women from the Ricasoli and Spinelli families formed a wide variety of social networks within and beyond Florence through their letters as they negotiated interpersonal relationships and lineage concerns to actively contribute to their families in early modern Italy. Women were located at the center of social networks through their work in bridging their natal and marital families, cultivating commercial contacts, negotiating family obligations and the demands of religious institutions, facilitating introductions for family and friends, and forming political patronage ties. This book argues that a network model offers a framework of analysis in which to deconstruct patriarchy as a single system of institutionalized dominance in early modern Italy. Networks account for female agency as an interactive force that shaped the kinships ties, affective relationships, material connections, and political positions of these elite families as women constructed their own narratives and negotiated their own positions in family life.
The Codex Borbonicus Veintena Imagery
Authors: DiCesare Catherine R.
Published: January 2025

The sixteenth-century pictorial manuscript known as the Codex Borbonicus contains a remarkable record of the eighteen Mexica (or “Aztec”) festival periods of twenty days, known as veintenas, celebrated during the 365-day solar year. Because its indigenous artists framed the Borbonicus veintenas with historical year dates, this volume situates the annually recurring rituals within the march of linear, reckoned time, in the singular year “2 Reed” (1507), during the reign of Moteuczoma II. DiCesare attends to the historical dimensions of several unusual scenes, proposing that the veintenas probably varied significantly from year to year in response to historical concerns. She considers particularly whether the Borbonicus veintenas document the confluence of solar year ceremonies with a second set of ritual feast days, governed by the 260-day cycle known as the tonalpohualli, or “count of days.” In this way, DiCesare analyzes how linear and cyclical conceptions of time intersected in Mexica ritual performance.
The Art of Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782)
Authors: Lindeman Christina K.
Published: January 2025

The Art of Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782) is the first English-language monograph on this exceptional German artist that critically examines Therbusch’s artworks and career as a history and mythological painter, portraitist, and maker of synthetic pigments within the German and international milieu that both condemned and celebrated her accomplishments. Adding to the excellent scholarship on French, British, Italian, and Swiss eighteenth-century women painters, this book showcases the social and cultural practices of court cultures beyond France, with a focus on German-speaking Europe and how a provocative woman painter navigated within them. Meticulous archival and literary research sheds new light on the importance of the family atelier as a place of networking, collaboration, and experimentation in the eighteenth century and provides a fresh perspective on the growing Prussian intellectual and mercantilist cultures and their impact on Therbusch’s artistic production and the unavoidable fluency between painting, the minor or luxury arts, and the laboratory. Therbusch's life and art enriches our understanding of female artistic agency and the complexities of pursuing a career in the male- and academy-dominated art world of the eighteenth century.
Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe
Authors: Bendall Sarah A. , Dyer Serena
Published: January 2025

Processes of making in early modern Europe were both tacit and embodied. Whether making pottery, food, or textiles, the processes of manual production rested on an intersensory connection between mind, body, and object. This volume focuses on the body of the maker to ask how processes of making, experimenting, experiencing, and reconstructing illuminate early modern assumptions and understandings around manual labour and material life. Answers can be gleaned through both recapturing past skills and knowledge of making and by reconstructing past bodies and bodily experiences using recreative and experimental approaches.

In drawing attention to the body, this collection underlines the importance of embodied knowledge and sensory experiences associated with the making practices of historically marginalised groups, such as craftspeople, women, domestic servants, and those who were colonised, to confront biases in the written archive. The history of making is found not only in technological and economic innovations which drove ‘progress’ but also in the hands, minds, and creations of makers themselves.
The Aesthetics of Digital Montage
Authors: Furstenau Marc
Published: January 2025

Tracing the recent changes to the technology of film editing, this book offers an account of the aesthetics of digital montage. It is commonly argued that the changes to the technical apparatus of editing, the emergence of new systems for digital editing, have altered the basic identity or ontology of the cinema as an art. Such claims, it is argued in this book, are based on a misunderstanding of the relation between technology and technique, and more generally between the technical and the aesthetic. Applying recent theories of art, and employing specific concepts from philosophical aesthetics, an account of cinematic art is offered that can better accommodate the kinds of technical changes that have occurred in recent decades, with the advent of computer technology in the cinema. An aesthetics of digital montage is presented as part of a more general proposal for a theory of technical change in the cinema.
Neurobiological Measures
Authors: Hopp Frederic R. , Bakker Bert N.
Published: January 2025

We discuss what neurobiological measures can (and cannot) reveal about media exposure (section 8.2), followed by a discussion of recurrent validity and reliability issues and attempts towards their mitigation (section 8.3). In the end, we briefly discuss how technological advancements and rising societal questions may shape the future of psychophysiological media research.
Jiaohua (Education for Transformation) and Self-refashioning in Chinese Individuals’ Confucian Learning
Authors: Wang Canglong
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines the shifting connotations of a traditional Chinese keyword—jiaohua (education for transformation)—in the contemporary Chinese grassroots Confucian revival. It first concentrates on the field of Confucian dujing (reading the classics) education, exploring how individuals educate themselves and others through the technique of reading the classics. It then investigates how jiaohua is applied to moral self-refashioning among the broader population beyond the dujing education community (e.g. businesspeople and government staff). This chapter is concluded with a discussion on the implications of jiaohua discourse for present-day China’s general social and moral landscape.
Documentary Filmmaking in Postwar Germany, 1945–55
Authors: Goergen Jeanpaul , Hoffmann Kay
Published: January 2025

Documentaries developed in different directions in divided Germany after WWII. The 35 mm film technology used was the same and the short films and newsreels had a permanent place as a supporting program of the cinemas. In both states, only a few full-length documentaries were made, most of which were shown in matinee events. In the GDR, documentaries were primarily used as a political tool. In the Federal Republic numerous information films tried to influence public opinion. Jeanpaul Goergen describes the film technology and the distribution channels of the documentaries, and Kay Hoffmann concentrates on the production conditions of the newsreels and their political orientation.
Coproducing Postwar Socialist (Re)construction
Authors: Siefert Marsha
Published: January 2025

The emergence of the Eastern Bloc significantly affected how postwar reconstruction was conceived and portrayed in the early Cold War years. The East European film industries became a new battleground, with postwar reconstruction requiring political assessment of personnel and film themes. This chapter discusses Soviet films coproduced between 1948 and 1950 with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany and awarded Stalin Prizes, along with the first of many collective Eastern European films by Joris Ivens. This chapter has two aims: first, to explore how Soviet and socialist-linked filmmakers formed arrangements to visualize postwar reconstruction as socialist construction in Eastern Europe and second, to articulate how Soviet film partnerships were used to enlist sympathetic film personnel in the transformation of domestic film industries.
(De)constructing the Architect
Authors: Val Perrine , Villa Paolo
Published: January 2025

As a powerful tool for education, popularization, and criticism, postwar non-fiction cinema has often intertwined with architecture and urban planning, directly involving architects and planners as experts, commissioners, or protagonists in what could be called “architectural documentary.” In a time of major changes for European cities, the architect became a key public figure. Based on a comparison between French and Italian examples of such architectural documentaries, this chapter aims at analyzing the cinematographic representation of the architectural and urban renovation and of the architects themselves. “Deconstructing” the architects’ images allows to articulate the layers and transitions of the public discourses around architecture, while highlighting the role that cinema played in shaping these perceptions, swinging between celebration and criticism.
Restructuring (Post)colonial Relationships
Authors: Mancosu Gianmarco
Published: January 2025

At the end of World War II, newsreels and documentaries played a crucial role in somatizing the trauma of the loss of power caused by the end of the empire, whilst at the same time representing the restructuring of (post)colonial relationship like the Commonwealth, the Union Française, and various forms of trusteeship administrations under the aegis of the UN. This contribution sheds a comparative light on how some European countries (UK in Togoland, 1946–56; France in Cameroun, 1946–59; Italy in Somalia, 1950–60) envisioned their new political presence. I highlight common patterns in the representation mechanism of the former colonial world, thus conceiving the images of trusteeship administrations as a means to rearticulate a hegemony over the newly independent states.
Virtual Topographies of Memory
Authors: Ebbrecht-Hartmann Tobias , Schmidt Fabian
Published: January 2025

The films and footage, which the Allies recorded in the liberated concentration and extermination camps as well as at other atrocity sites, shaped the future iconography of the camps. Using imagery from various camps, later film compilations created “virtual” sites that served as typifying representations of “the” concentration camp. This chapter intends to review atrocity footage and its later use as constitutive elements of such virtual topographies. By analyzing the raw footage as it is preserved in archives dispersed around the world, early atrocity films, documentary compilations, virtual models, video games, digital tours, and online platforms, we demonstrate how the historical visual evidence of the camps turned into mobile virtual models of destroyed or lost visible traces of former concentration camps.
Curating Reconstruction in the Digital Realm
Authors: Catanese Rossella , Průchová Hrůzová Andrea
Published: January 2025

The chapter reflects upon the importance, challenges, and opportunities of a digital presentation of cultural heritage with a specific focus on a representation of audiovisual materials. It provides a complex insight into theoretical, conceptual, and curatorial strategies applied in the multimedia virtual exhibition Frames of Reconstruction. Thus, it serves as an analytical examination of one unique case study, but it also asks general questions which are relevant and significant for ways we think, act, and curate film heritage in the digital age.
Festival as Ritual and Ritual in Festival
Authors: Hsin-chun Lu Tasaw
Published: January 2025

This chapter looks at the ways in which a diverse Yunnan community in Northern Taiwan tactically uses music, dance, and rituals to embody a cross-border culture and boost local tourism. This group comprises people of different ethnicities, cultures, religions, and linguistic traditions from the Thai-Myanmar borderlands who have come into contact at the political, economic, social, and cultural margins. In recent years, they have drawn from peculiar religious components from the Thai-Myanmar borderlands in order to turn their marginality to advantage. Using artistically and technologically creative devices, they have successfully developed a spectacular commercial zone named “Enchanted Golden Triangle” (meili ginsanjiao). It has also been termed an “exotic borderland” (yiyu) and has become a sought-after destination for cultural tourism.
Introduction: South Asia on the Move
Authors: Linder Benjamin
Published: January 2025

The “new mobilities paradigm” (or “mobilities turn”) has been one of the most fertile attempts at trans-/post-disciplinary scholarship in recent social theory. Yet notwithstanding its strides towards topical and geographical diversity, there remains a relative lacuna of studies about non-Western lifeworlds and contexts. South Asia-home to nearly one-fourth of the world’s population, and with a diaspora spanning the entire world-has a particular experience of mobility that calls out for such a project. A special focus on mobilities, particularly from an ethnographic perspective, enables a more encompassing, intimate, and socially thick understanding of the region. Moreover, given the turn’s roots, primarily in the United Kingdom and Northern Europe, a perspective on and from South Asia helps to provincialize Western approaches to (im)mobility. After briefly charting the rise of the mobilities turn, this introductory chapter makes the case for precisely this sort of regional approach to South Asian mobilities and briefly introduces the chapters that follow it.
After Eat, Pray, Love: Tourism, Orientalism, and Cartographies of Salvation
Authors: Putcha Rumya S.
Published: January 2025

This chapter examines certain kinds of travel and tourism as extensions of colonialism and examples of neocolonial forms of Orientalist engagement between the Global North and Global South. Focusing on areas that border the Indian Ocean, and the South Asian context in particular, I interrogate the gendered, racial, and geopolitical attachments that have historically drawn and continue to draw travelers to the region for tourism. I refer to these attachments as cartographies of salvation. In connecting the history and representations of travel to the area to the forms of leisure and spiritual tourism popularized by the 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, I argue that the Indian Ocean region remains for many a paternalistic endeavor or an exotic playground, where one can project a sense of purpose or indulge in an escapist fantasy. This chapter combines critical tourism studies, feminist ethnography and theory, and critical race studies.
Sometimes She Stands Like a Statue: Immobility in the Archives of Colonial Psychiatry
Authors: Pinto Sarah
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers the way the body, especially the still and silent body, has elicited theorizations on the nature of the social and its relationship to selves and bodies. Asking how diagnosing was the site of tacit theorization in early twentieth-century India, it considers connections between psychiatry, colonial rule, documentary knowledge, and politics of knowing. In late colonial India, psychiatrists, often working in carceral institutions, used interlinked concepts such as hysteria, melancholic stupor, and psychocoma to ask how bodies respond to the world. Their diagnostic efforts reinscribed, and in some instances resisted, racialized and gendered moral categories.
Disability on the Move: Disabled Mobilities in Contemporary India
Authors: Friedner Michele , Staples James
Published: January 2025

In this chapter, we explore multiple constellations of disability to challenge the binary opposition drawn between stasis and mobility, and to document the complex ways in which the two are entangled. We draw on multi-sited fieldwork with people affected by leprosy in coastal South India; Indian Sign Language (ISL)-speaking deaf young adults in urban locations across India; and others identified by themselves or others as disabled in Hyderabad, to document the journeys-for treatment, education, work, and activism-taken by disabled people across their life courses. While these movements should not be conflated with progress, we argue, they do create particular creative opportunities for people to transcend identities and life projects and to forge new ones that are not always open to their nondisabled peers.
Noble Maternity in Castile, 1400–1650
Authors: Coolidge Grace E.
Published: January 2025

Women who played maternal roles were crucial to the success of the Castilian nobility. Mothers ensured the survival of noble children, assisted with their education, and transmitted resources that prepared these children to play their part in the dynastic strategies of the noble family. While many mothers of nobles were noble themselves, the high rates of illegitimacy in the noble family meant that women further down the social scale (including townswomen, vassals, maids, ladies-in-waiting, and enslaved women) also had children with nobility. A close look at how women from enslaved wet nurses to duchesses cooperated to protect and nurture noble children, reveals the complicated hierarchy of the noble family.
Maternity in the Portraits of Spanish Queens: Mariana of Habsburg
Authors: Llorente Mercedes
Published: January 2025

An important role of a queen was that of mater familias and bearer of the successor to the monarchy. Thus, she had an important political and institutional part to play as the generating source of a lineage. Having many children was a sign of God’s favor, and it also allowed the queen to secure dynastic succession, which in turn could increase her influence. Despite the importance of maternity for the Spanish Habsburg queen, their maternity moves between the private and the public spheres, this is precisely why portraits of a pregnant Mariana are scarce.
“Urinating on Lettuce and Throwing Your Hands Up”: Infertility in Early Modern Spain
Authors: Alarcón Carolina
Published: January 2025

During the early modern period, women’s generative abilities were seen as the key to unlocking the secrets of nature and medical publications often included new discoveries or remedies in this area. These proto-gynecological publications were written in the vernacular and either directly addressed women or had women in mind as part of their prospective audiences. However, despite the prevalence of treatments and texts, infertility is rarely discussed in early modern scholarship, far less in early modern Iberian Studies. Looking at medical texts, their readers and the images that accompanied them, this paper examines the gaps in the historical record that deal with infertility, its causes, its cures and ultimately its impact on its sufferers.
‘Para retener la criatura’: Miscarriage in Early Modern Spain
Authors: Kuffner Emily
Published: January 2025

Although it must have been a common experience of reproductive life, miscarriage is nearly absent from the historical and literary record of early modern Spain. This chapter examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish sources on miscarriage, giving precedence to female-authored sources to uncover early modern women’s lived experience. Conduct manuals, theological texts and midwifery manuals tend to blame the pregnant woman for miscarriage, while female-authored sources such as domestic remedy manuals, letters, and poetry focus on external, often supernatural, forces. By combining literary and non-literary sources, we can see that midwives, early modern pregnant women, and those who cared for them took an active role in miscarriage prevention and formed networks of agency to overcome fear and anxiety regarding pregnancy loss.
Cruel or Prudent Mothers? Troubled Relationships, Disobedient Daughters, and Social Risk (Eighteenth-Century Barcelona)1
Authors: Mariela Fargas Peñarrocha
Published: January 2025

Being a good or bad mother, having or not having authority in the home, achieving or not achieving peace with all the members of the house, managing family conflicts. Women who were alone faced these challenges on a daily basis, especially due to their status as widows with subsistence problems in eighteenth-century Barcelona. And one of the most public consequences was the conflict with their daughters that concluded with confinement in the city’s Casa de Misericordia. An analysis of these files and requests reaveal many nuances of the mother–daughter relationship, of their shared expectations, as well as about the job of mothering.
Making a Difference: The Epistemic Value of Collaborative Research in a Datafied Society
Authors: Schäfer Mirko Tobias , van Es Karin , Lauriault Tracey P.
Published: January 2025

This chapter addresses the evolving role of academia amidst budget constraints and neoliberal policies, highlighting the growing need for its work to be more socially relevant, especially in the humanities. It argues that academia can actually benefit from moving beyond its institutional walls, engaging with diverse community and civil society stakeholders. Such collaboration enables universities to respond to pressing societal challenges. The chapter explores three primary motivations for increased academic engagement with societal sectors, identified by researchers and university administrators: vocational, educational, and societal impetus, and advocates for a fourth motivation: the epistemic impetus. Collaborative research allows researchers to gather evidence and generate insights to produce knowledge with communities and in context, enriching academic research and allowing interventions and the application of findings.
Performing Critical Data Studies from the Inside: Working with Government to Change Data Regimes
Authors: Kitchin Rob
Published: January 2025

This chapter considers the role of academics in society and to what extent they should seek not simply to produce knowledge about the world but to change it. The chapter argues that academics should operate beyond the academy, proactively engaging state, industry, and civic society organizations to enact progressive interventions. It contends that the most effective way to achieve such interventions is to occupy insider positions that directly contribute to the formulation of policy and the development of programs and infrastructures. The case is made by reflecting on nearly two decades of applied action research, working with state agencies and government departments to try to change data policies and practices and to build data infrastructures.
Data Against Feminicide: The Process and Impact of Co-designing Digital Research Tools
Authors: Val Helena Suárez , D’Ignazio Catherine , Fumega Silvana
Published: January 2025

Data Against Feminicide is an action-research collaboration that aims to foster an international community of practice around feminicide data. In this chapter, we present two tools we have co-designed and piloted with activists to facilitate their work and alleviate the burdens of workflow. Data Against Feminicide Email Alerts is an AI-based system that detects cases of feminicide from media sources; Data Against Feminicide Highlighter is a browser plug-in that helps activists scan media articles for specific data. By outlining the process and impacts of this work, we aim to motivate others to fully utilize feminist participatory approaches that place technology development and data science in the service of activists, movements, and changemakers who are making a difference in the world.
The Fairwork Project: Promoting Good Labor Practices in the Digital Platform Economy through Action Research
Authors: López Tatiana , Ustek-Spilda Funda , Feuerstein Patrick , Ferrari Fabian , Graham Mark
Published: January 2025

Though the digital platform economy in some contexts has created new employment opportunities, work in the platform economy has been widely criticized for its often precarious and exploitative character. One central mechanism through which digital platforms construct and conceal exploitative employment relations are information asymmetries among platforms, workers, and consumers. These information asymmetries are created through, among other things, a lack of transparency on how platforms allocate work, calculate payments, and use customer reviews for incentive structures and other rating-based work outcomes. Against this backdrop, the Fairwork project conducts action research to tackle these information asymmetries. In this chapter we introduce the Fairwork project and provide critical insights into our engagement with platforms as an action research strategy.
Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Vernacular Medieval Literature in Bohemia
Authors: Turek Matouš
Published: January 2025

I highlight the roles that Jerusalem played in Czech literary texts in the later Middle Ages. The first part concerns the first narrative literary texts composed in German and Czech. It focuses on the ways in which they represent Jerusalem in a historical perspective as authors attempt to link Bohemia with the memory of the Holy Land. The second part analyzes texts that treat Jerusalem as a destination for personal pilgrimage. The closing section deals with texts that rethink the city as an imagined entity. The refocusing in Czech literature, from Jerusalem as a real place towards the notion of the Heavenly City as a goal yet achieved through individual piety and morality, is put into its social and intellectual context.
An Immersion Campus Simulation Protection and Safety Improvement System using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Authors: Xing Ella , Delinois Laurie
Published: January 2025

This project addresses the critical need for immersive crisisresponse training to enhance individuals' ability to act effectively under high-stress conditions, such as fires and active shooter events [1]. Traditional training methods often lack the depth and adaptability required for effective skill retention. To bridge this gap, we developed a virtual reality (VR) program that simulates realistic crisis environments using Unity’s physics, collider interactions, and coroutines for dynamic fire propagation and evasive maneuvers [2]. Key components include scenario selection, interactive obstacle navigation, and outcome evaluation, all designed to offer users an engaging training experience. Initial challenges, such as optimizing control responsiveness, were resolved by incorporating an FPS controller, ensuring accurate and responsive movement [3]. Experimental trials across scenarios demonstrated notable improvements in userresponse accuracy and engagement, with FPS controllers outperforming standard simulators. This VR training tool offers substantial benefits to schools, workplaces, and communities by providing accessible, impactful training that strengthens emergency preparedness.