bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Solah Somwar and Conjugal Dharma
Authors: Ortegren Jennifer D.
Published: April 2023

This chapter analyzes how ritual and dharmic relationships between husbands and wives are changing in the context of emerging middle-class nuclear families in Pulan. It focuses on one married couple’s decision to take up the popular ritual practices of the Solah Somwar vrat (16 Monday fast), a four-month ritual period dedicated to the deity Shiva. Solah Somwar is increasingly observed by young married couples who perform weekly fasts and rituals together at the temple to jointly maintain the ritual purity of the home. This chapter show how these shared, public performances sanction an emerging dharma of conjugality in which husbands and wives in nuclear families become committed, and obligated, to one another as their desires for middle-class lifestyles merge. It highlights the emergence of a kind of purushadharma, or male/husband dharma, whereby men develop desires and orientations toward the home and their wives—in their capacity as husbands—that operates similarly to stridharma.
New Neighborhood, New Dharma
Authors: Ortegren Jennifer D.
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines how dharma shifts when families move into new neighborhoods. It focuses on the experiences of one woman, Shubha, whose family moved out of Pulan into a more elite middle-class neighborhood and her difficulty to embody a new dharmic identity even as the decisions she makes regarding how to raise her daughters with different bodily practices will enable them to do so. It revisits themes of education, marriage, and work, but emphasizes nonritual aspects of middle-class dharma, such as fashion, food, leisure, and hospitality, and the role of the body in reflecting and producing classed dharmic identities.
Transgressing Boundaries
Authors: Malnig Julie
Published: April 2023

Chapter 2 explores some of the most popular televised teen dance programs (and the best documented) of the 1950s. These included American Bandstand, The Big Beat, The Buddy Deane Show, The Milt Grant Show, and The Art Laboe Show. The chapter explains the rise and importance of the hundreds of local teen dance shows that popped up around the country. It also describes how although American Bandstand is one of the best-remembered of these shows, there were many others across the country that featured local youth from the city and surrounding area with whom studio and home audiences could identify. The chapter details what the programs looked like, how they were produced, and how they recruited both participants and musical guests. It also explores how the notions of family and ideas about 1950s “containment” ideology filtered into the shows.
Conclusion
Authors: Jensen Helle Strandgaard
Published: April 2023

The conclusion offers a critical discussion of Sesame Street’s legacy. It juxtaposes findings from the book as well as more contemporary research on Sesame Workshop’s international endeavors with literature from the Workshop itself. Comparing the differences in these two strands of literature and the diverging histories of the organization they narrate, this chapter explores how the Workshop’s use of a narrow and very particular version of its international business and history has affected its ability to reflect critically on its own historical practices. The conclusion links the Workshop’s persistence in maintaining an idea of a universal view of children’s needs to broader criticism of how the ignorance of US-led international liberalism works to maintain the power of an elitist US worldview.
In the palace doghouse
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

In December, 69 CE, on one of the last days in a calendar like no other, only a mattress and a wooden door stood between the pale winter light and the panting body of that year’s third emperor of Rome. The mattress smelt of dogs but most of the dogs had gone. This was a small room in a palace of large rooms but even its smallest rooms looked large to Aulus Vitellius when there was no one anywhere left behind.
Care for what we eat
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Poisoning was not easy. Like so much else, from putting on a toga in the morning to preparing for bed, it required trusted staff, some four or five slaves for the toga alone. Few could ever be trusted enough. It was never certain that Augustus’s wife, Livia, was a poisoner. She had a luxurious garden of rare herbs and a decorated dining room which reminded her guests of her opportunities to poison them as they ate. Food was part of an individual’s character and the character of a whole people. A tongue was for talking and for eating. In street language, poetry and the farces of the stage, it was for sex. The Latin tongue was as special for the Romans as their land. The flatterer and the glutton, the names already beginning their life on the Palatine, were extremes of the same use of the lingua Latina.
A wolf by its ears
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

For the servants of the Palatine the hereditary succession of a new head was in one way as normal as death itself: a son replaced a father and the house went on, upwards or downwards. So it was with the Vitellii. It was novel for this process to apply to everywhere. Rome had been ruled by autocrats before, appointed for emergencies; never in the five hundred years since it expelled its kings had it experienced autocrats in a dynastic succession. Even early in his reign Tiberius spoke of returning Rome from his one-man rule to rule by the few and the many. But he was ‘holding a wolf by its ears’, he sighed. Was it safer to keep holding the wolf and endure its struggle or to let the wolf go and risk the jaws of civil war? He could not let it go.
Between the emperor and his heir
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Back in Rome, the Vitellii brothers were an ever more contrasted pair. Publius, the elder, was a traditional politician of the army, his younger, Lucius, a courtier of the new administration. Publius had linked himself closely to Tiberius’s heir, Germanicus. He was looking to the future. It was common in eastern courts for ourtiers to look far ahead, sometimes too far, to back the next leader while the current leader was still alive. The danger came from seeing inevitability where the incumbent saw a threat. Publius may not have had much choice than to join the new heir in the north of the empire. Or he may have seen the move as his main chance. It had quickly almost cost him his life before his life in politics could begin.
Who killed the prince?
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Four years after the near catastrophe on the northern German shore, Publius was a lucky man with a career still on the rise. He was back in Rome and in the service of Germanicus again. The difference this time was that Germanicus was dead, last seen on duty in distant Antioch, and Publius was prosecuting the man accused as his killer, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a close friend of Tiberius. To have won the brief was already a sign of his status; it was an honour to champion the heir who, even more so after his mysterious end, was a popular hero. It was also an assignment that could be the ruin of himself, and maybe his family too, as surely as if he had lost his legions in the sea.
Hercules the herdsman
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

For four hundred years, food and politics had been indissoluble at Rome. Hercules was a herdsman before he was a hero. The Forum was a food market before it was a centre for politics. There were many early fora, for fish and vegetables. Fora for wine and luxuries followed quickly on. Cooking used to be done by the lowest orders but soon it came to be looked upon as art, divided among specialists who saw themselves as proudly distinctive as members of an orchestra: the man who made the white bread would no more make the brown than a flautist would play the drums. These changes happened very quickly. At the feast to mark Julius Caesar’s third consulship in 46 BCE, two years before his assassination, he for the first time presented four different wines at every table.
Care for cucumbers
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

The gastronomic rules of the court were unpredictable. It was pious to praise the people of Italy for living modestly on corn and vegetables even when these were soon to become merely a banquet’s ‘first course’. It was prudent to eat the second and third courses if the emperor was doing the same. As the heir to the throne Tiberius had feasted the people but also curbed excess in his dining rooms. He claimed his luxury was a cucumber. As emperor he would have legislated to ban excess at banquets if he had not feared derision. One man’s excess was another’s proof of power. To be known as a gourmand at court might be a good thing. It showed discernment. A glutton simply wanted to stay the longest at table. That was a crime.
Water on dust
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

When Sejanus persuaded Tiberius to retire to the island of Capri, Aulus Vitellius, at the beginning of his teenage years, was an early arrival at the new court. To gossips who weren’t there he was one of the emperor’s playmates for princes, an object for sexual pursuit. He was one of many, it was said, no one special. Lucius Vitellius bought a house on Capri of his own. As a rising man of palace administration he needed to stay in touch. His brother, Publius, undamaged by either his near disaster in the sea marshes of Germany or his defence work for Agrippina, was close to Sejanus. Young Aulus, son of a third generation of servants, discouraged from an army career by the auguries at his birth, was deemed ideal to be a spintria, a brothel boy for sexual entertainments.
Death of the damned
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Sejanus might have seen the signs but he did not. He was tricked into returning to Rome and replaced. Tiberius stayed in Capri. The man who had so long flattered Tiberius’s judgement died far from his former master’s sight. On the Groaning Steps it was an easy execution for the executioner, a slow fall to death. Sejanus’s financial fortune swelled the emperor’s funds. The following months were golden times for treasury receipts. Tiberius took emergency measures to stop economic recession. Sejanus’s children followed their father down the Steps. Hardly a man of virtue, Sejanus was merely one of many concerned whether the empire would survive, who should be its emperor and how. He played the game, succeeded for more than a decade and lost. By losing he became remembered as a seducer, a pimp and traitor, with a glutton’s love of food too, that common code for monstrous behaviour.
Goat worship
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Gaius Caligula was not as glamorous as he wanted to seem. He was tall, heavy-bellied, thin-legged, hairier on his body than his head, a somewhat goatish figure, although to use the word goat in his presence was perilous accuracy. Caligula’s brief reign, marked by fantasies of his own divinity, was notoriously hard for those nearby to understand. It helped to know how during six years on Capri he had himself been so extremely adept at surviving. Never, it was said, was there a better servant or a worse master. The maker of that judgement, Passienus Crispus, an autocratic senator in his own house, was adept at walking in the emperor’s train, eating massively or serving at table, flattering beyond the rules of normal reason and answering questions with tact. ‘Have you had sex with your sister?’, Caligula asked Crispus. ‘Not yet’, came the careful reply.
Lucius rules the world
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Two years into his reign Claudius divided the senior men of Rome into three groups, those whom he needed for the conquest of Britain, the island of dogs, slaves, oysters and possibly gold, the task in which even Julius Caesar had failed. There were those whom he needed with him to stop them exploiting his absence by a coup, and those whom he trusted to run the city and empire while the emperor was away. The leader of the third group, consul in 43 CE for the second time, was Lucius Vitellius. This was the highest position that the Vitellii had reached so far.
Ashes of a swallow
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Much banqueting marked Claudius’s return from his conquest of Britain. His doctor, Scribonius Largu, had new experiences from his trip to improve his text book of medicine, useful thoughts on damp and cold, snake bites and yew tree juice. Back home his more valuable expertise was once again in cosmetic toothpaste, breath-fresheners, earache, vomiting and the cure of those whose excrement signalled their excess. Largus used rare ingredients because his patients could afford them – and maybe because his rivals could not. His recipe book of drugs showed a man keen to assault the reputations of others while promoting his own Time with the emperor brought a doctor profit. If a drug was popular with the imperial family, it was saleable beyond the Palatine. Largus mixed celery seeds, cinnamon, myrrh and the ashes of an overcooked swallow to calm the throat of the emperor’s mother, Antonia. Her satisfaction was a profitable sign for others.
A bedroom slipper
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Polybius controlled the letters but Pallas controlled the money. Pallas was the most powerful freedman at Claudius’s court, vastly wealthy, proud of his reputation for virtue, prickly about any contradiction suggested between these two. Pallas was increasingly a person of suspicion to Messalina, too close, she thought, to Agrippina, the most direct descendent of Augustus still alive. Agrippina and the former slave were lovers, it was also said, a smear against each of them, the same smear by which the empress had put Seneca on a beach in Corsica. Lucius took the contrary side, the side of the established power. That was his way. There was never a suggestion that Messalina and Lucius were lovers although her slipper was often in his hand, ostentatiously kissed, to show whose side he was on – until Messalina’s fall and murder.
Of unshakable loyalty to his emperor
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Claudius would at some point need a new wife. The issue was who it should be, the kind of question where senior freed slaves, intimates of the family, had a stronger responsibility than those, like Lucius, who had their own families. The whole household needed clarity on who would succeed to the throne. The prospects of Messalina’s son, Britannicus, were dimming with the demise of his mother. Three men, Narcissus, Callistus and Pallas, played the main parts in a marital selection story that became both theatrical and mythical in its retellings. Lucius was weakened too by Messalina’s fall but died a natural death and received a bust of himself in the Forum to show Claudius’s gratitude.
Aulus the educator
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

In October, 54 CE, the household was not united in accepting Nero. Although Pallas remained strongly in support of Agrippina and her sixteen-year old son, Narcissus led a faction which preferred Britannicus, aged only thirteen but with the potent claim that he was the grandson of Germanicus. Either boy would need guidance. Nero had his mother while Britannicus did not. Agrippina, even to her greatest critics, was a woman determined to educate her son. Seneca returned to teach rhetoric but Aulus was the educator in princely play. Nero needed his mother’s praise, his tutors’ praise and most of all his playmates’ praise. He was not drawn to gladiatorial shows. He wanted stages on which to tread, not an imperial box to sit in. He wanted flatterers to clap him not just friends who would join him in applause.
Tutor in vice
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

The last time that an emperor had left Italy was when Claudius went to Britain in 43 CE, leaving Lucius Vitellius to manage Rome. Almost a quarter of a century later, when Nero left for a singing tour of Greece, Aulus did not get the chance to match his father. Every member of Nero’s entourage was in the wrong place to sense events that would bring Nero’s suicide and the year when four men were emperors, none of them an heir of Julius Caesar. The planners’ focus was instead that all the main Greek festivals should be rearranged. Nero had to win every possible prize in the shortest time. There were also Nero’s sexual needs. Poppaea had survived only three years. He was taking to Greece a boy castrato, Sporus, who had to be dressed like Poppaea, also his African ‘mistress of the Imperial wardrobe’, Calvia Crispinilla, known as Nero’s ‘tutor in vice’.
Mr Stingy
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

The news of Nero’s death was at first uncertain. Not everyone believed that Nero was gone. Household members, few of whom were ever popular, took much of the blame. The dead emperor still retained respect on the streets he knew so well. There was hunger for food but not necessarily for a new Caesar. Nero’s nurse, Claudia Ecloge, and his long-time lover, Claudia Acte, arranged a suitable funeral pyre, dressing him in white robes embroidered with gold, laying him in a white crystal coffin in the tomb of his fathers. The most likely new emperor, an aged general called Galba, seemed certain to repudiate Nero, his friends and his works. Aulus Vitellius slipped into obscurity as best he could.
Brother behind the lines
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Lucius Vitellius was the younger brother of Rome’s new emperor in Cologne, heir to his father’s name, but that did not make him necessarily an enemy to Otho in Rome. When the stakes were the rule of the whole empire, it was not obvious to Lucius that his brother was the right man to back, or that Aulus would win if he fought Otho or even that he would fight at all. Lucius knew enough about Aulus to think that he might prefer doing nothing to doing anything. Otho marched north from Rome with Lucius as a hostage. Caecina and Valens marched south. The two sides clashed at Bedriacum, just north of the river Po. Otho’s force was the loser. Otho committed suicide. Aulus Vitellius summoned his generals to Lugdunum, modern Lyons, in Gaul.
In Augustus’s temple
Authors: Stothard Peter
Published: April 2023

Vespasian’s brother, Sabinus, agreed to talk surrender terms in Augustus’s Palatine temple. Aulus brought there two of his most trusted friends, Cluvius Rufus, a historian and Silius Italicus who had been consul in the previous year. He needed a deal. This was not an occasion for freedmen trained to say no. His court was a shadow of that which had had run the empire for so long. Cluvius was already writing a history of the Caesars. Silius was younger, richer and a would-be poet. Together they stood with Aulus. Observers looked for signs. Aulus, tired and limping seemed dejected, maybe humbled. Sabinus looked out more compassionate than triumphant. The outcome was surely an abdication. Vitellius’s troops did not agree. They killed Sabinus on the Groaning Steps.
Introduction
Authors: Stone Nora
Published: April 2023

The introduction sets up the question that the book will answer: how did documentary films go from the margins to the mainstream in the media industry? It points out that most histories of documentary film deal with specific filmmakers and film movements. This book, however, explores how changes in industry, institutions, and film culture affected documentary's popularity and profitability. The Introduction lays out the three core tensions that recur in this history of documentary film: television vs. cinema, the organized institution vs. isolated entrepreneur, and documentary as commodity vs. documentary as public service.
Direct Cinema Blossoms, but Little Support for Documentary Films in Theaters (1960 to 1977)
Authors: Stone Nora
Published: April 2023

Chapter 1 covers 1960 to 1977, a time when the commercial possibilities for documentary film were being redefined. Television networks funded the production of documentaries, but Direct Cinema documentarian Robert Drew and his associates had ambitions beyond the scope of broadcast and the limits of journalism. They looked for a new context and new audiences for their work, and found it at film festivals, in experimental film culture, and, marginally, within the art house film market. More successful on the art house circuit were touristic documentaries like Mondo Cane (1963), which were marketed like the foreign films that dominated the art house box office. Direct Cinema filmmakers finally hit upon a winning formula by making documentaries about popular music and youth culture, like Dont Look Back (1967) and The Endless Summer (1966). Simultaneously, politically committed filmmakers sought to circumvent the existing commercial infrastructure by creating their own collectives for producing and distributing alternative documentaries.
Fighting for a Place on Public Television
Authors: Stone Nora
Published: April 2023

Chapter 3 traces how documentary filmmakers lobbied for access to PBS funding and airtime. While PBS had some mechanisms for supporting documentary production, there was no regular broadcast of independent documentaries on the network. One reason for this exclusion is the strong point of view present in many independent documentaries, which contravene expectations of journalistic objectivity and risk controversy. Independent documentarians used the community and institutions formed through the American indie cinema movement to fight for more production funding and a national broadcast. The result was funding through the Independent Television Service and regular airtime through P.O.V., both of which persist to this day.
The Docbuster Era (2000 to 2007)
Authors: Stone Nora
Published: April 2023

Chapter 5 details the “docbuster” era, a time of heightened visibility and popularity for documentary films. The years 2000 to 2007 saw a higher concentration of documentaries succeeding in theaters than ever before, with standouts like Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), March of the Penguins (2005), and Capturing the Friedmans (2003). At the same time, the growth of the DVD market provided a new ancillary market for documentary films, and more cable television channels began funding the production of documentaries. While film festivals are often seen as a haven from the hypercommercial concerns of Hollywood, major film festivals became more imbricated with the industry than ever during this time.
Streaming Video Drives Documentary Production Trends and Private Investment (2008 to 2022)
Authors: Stone Nora
Published: April 2023

The trend toward commercialization in the “docbuster” years intensified in the streaming era. Chapter 6 covers the contemporary moment, beginning in 2008. That year Netflix founded its streaming service and made documentary films a key part of its brand identity. This chapter explores how Netflix’s strategy around documentary shifted between 2008 and 2020. These shifts profoundly affected the documentary film industry—they drove production trends, caused filmmakers to adjust their mode of production, sent small theatrical distributors into a tailspin, and inspired numerous other streamers and portals to imitate Netflix’s strategy. With more outlets eager to acquire documentaries, the risk of investment lowered substantially, and companies began large-scale private investing in documentary projects for the first time ever.
Do sweat the small stuff
Authors: McTernan Emily
Published: April 2023

This chapter defends the significance of social standing and the desirability of taking offence at affronts to one’s standing against a background of social inequality. First, the chapter answers the persistent challenge to relational egalitarians that they tell us too little about what it is to live as social equals. It offers an account of the social dimension of social equality in terms of five features of the patterns in social interactions between groups, along with the power to negotiate the terms of one’s interactions. Second, drawing on feminist defences of emotions, offence is defended as a valuable and distinct way to resist inequality. Where members of one group are commonly attributed less social standing than members of another, taking offence not only resists that patterning of social relations but is also an act of insubordination against a social hierarchy, of value even where it fails to revise the underlying norms.
Only joking!
Authors: McTernan Emily
Published: April 2023

People often take offence at jokes or other humour. Yet the fact that a remark or act was intended as a joke or as humorous is often offered as a reason not to take offence. So, the next time that you cause offence, would “but I was joking” be a good response to offer and a reason for others to take less offence? Conversely, is there something that explains why humour so often offends? This chapter resolves this tension, examining the role of humour in sustaining unequal social standing. Jokes and other humorous remarks often do present more serious affronts to standing than would equivalent but nonhumorous utterances, on all three of the main theories of humour. But the chapter argues that taking offence can be an effective remedy to an offensive joke.
Thomas Lindsay
Authors: Gumprecht Blake
Published: April 2023

Tells the life history of Thomas Lindsay, one of tens of thousands of Black people who moved to Boston from the South during the Great Migration, transforming the city. Lindsay moved to Boston from Birmingham, Alabama, in 1951. He is one of ten people featured in a book that explores the Great Migration by examining the lives of individual migrants. Each is the focus of one chapter. Their stories bring to life the history of the Great Migration. They reveal a hidden aspect of Boston’s history and shine a spotlight on a singularly important event in the making of Black Boston. They also provide a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary people living in one city’s Black community.
Ollie Sumrall Jr.
Authors: Gumprecht Blake
Published: April 2023

Tells the life history of Ollie Sumrall Jr., one of tens of thousands of Black people who moved to Boston from the South during the Great Migration, transforming the city. Sumrall moved to Boston from Quitman, Mississippi, in 1959. He is one of ten people featured in a book that explores the Great Migration by examining the lives of individual migrants. Each is the focus of one chapter. Their stories bring to life the history of the Great Migration. They reveal a hidden aspect of Boston’s history and shine a spotlight on a singularly important event in the making of Black Boston. They also provide a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary people living in one city’s Black community.
Who Believes Our Pain?
Authors: Ray Keisha
Published: April 2023

The research tells us that Black people’s pain is perceived, diagnosed, and treated differently than White people’s pain; Black people’s pain is dismissed and diminished, and they are not treated with compassion and concern. Using narratives from Black people who tell their stories of pain, this chapter identifies clinicians’ racial biases about Black people’s bodily and mental characteristics (e.g., a belief in their “hardiness”), the racist behaviors these biases encourage, and their experiences with institutional racism as the main social determinants of poor pain management. In this chapter it will be a given that (1) racism is a social determinant of health, (2) Black people have poor pain management because of racist behaviors and practices, and (3) leaving Black people in pain is incredibly cruel.
Panoramic Views, Planetary Visions
Authors: de Luca Tiago
Published: April 2023

This chapter looks at two artists’ films, Medium Earth (2013), by the British duo the Otolith Group, and Walden (2018), by the Swiss artist Daniel Zimmermann. They are bound together through their allegiance to the panoramic shot, in both 360-degree and 180-degree versions, as a mode of Earth-seeing. I argue that the circular shot in these films is utilised to make visible planetary phenomena: the Earth as a geological landmass in the former and the global trading routes subtending the economic world system in the latter. By situating both films within a wider panoramic lineage via a media-archaeology approach, the chapter argues that both are uniquely suited case studies to demonstrate the way in which they update the panoramic gaze in the context of contemporary globalising processes, including the Earth’s environmental breakdown and the so-called Anthropocene. At the same time, both films are indicative of the dissolution of the physical spaces of cinema as the medium morphs into installations and migrates to art galleries, thus reinstituting the ambulatory character of the panorama into the cinematic experience.
Intermedial Voices
Authors: Holdsworth Claire M.
Published: April 2023

This chapter explores the intermedial dynamics of feminist music and artists’ moving image in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s. Through discussion of the Feminist Improvising Group and the use of their music in Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s AMY! (1980), the chapter focuses on sound and the use of voice. It examines how intersecting artistic practices have complex intermedial dynamics, a situation which is, at once, enhanced by feminist reexamination of mediums and history. It observes how the sounded and recorded voice enables us to reenter narratives in/of feminist creativity, forging new connections between the past and the present.
Entanglements of Intermediality
Authors: Bignell Jonathan
Published: April 2023

Working on intermediality from a historical and comparative perspective, this chapter analyses codependency and cross-fertilisation between examples drawn from screen culture, the stage, and broadcasting. It derives from an intermedial research project, “Pinter Histories and Legacies,” that documented Harold Pinter’s work on the stage, radio, and television and in cinema, thus tracing historiographic connections between media, across chronologies, between Pinter’s life and his work, and between Pinter and numerous other creative figures and their output. The chapter uses Pinter as the common thread between Roman Polanski’s film Cul de Sac, Pinter’s play The Birthday Party, and the BBC TV sitcom Steptoe and Son. This investigation leads to a methodological debate about the limits of intermedial methodologies and argues for historicisation in intermedial studies.
Theatrical Flourishing
Authors: Young Harvey
Published: April 2023

Theater and Human Flourishing centers on theater studies informed by recent work in positive psychology with the aim of interrogating both the social good of theater and the personally restorative work of a range of live embodied performances. The contributors to this collection, all established or emerging performance scholars, build bridges toward psychology even as they center their investigations in theatrical and performance events: community theater productions, actor training, performance art, and more. It provides an introductory overview of Aristotle’s perspectives on human flourishing and theater; a review of contemporary theories of well-being within theater and performance studies, particularly the research of Jill Dolan, Susan Bennett, Martin Seligman; and brief, introductory summaries of the eleven chapters.
Actors as Surrogate Sufferers?
Authors: Magelssen Scott
Published: April 2023

Audiences have long admired actors who undergo particularly punishing psychological preparation for their roles. And acting students often internalize this expectation, plumbing the depths of despair—at times endangering their health and safety—in order to create ever more compelling roles onstage. But is it responsible for us to expect our actors to endure emotional distress in order that we may be emotionally moved in the theater? This essay examines some of the historical factors that have perpetuated the idea that actors should suffer for their (and our) art, and offers some best practices for working with actors to create emotionally resonant material while promoting their well-being.
Braver Angels
Authors: Fletcher John
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines Braver Angels, a grassroots organization aiming to “depolarize America.” The group’s facilitated workshops operate through a series of quasi-theatrical exercises designed to dissolve the mutual animosity between “reds” (conservatives) and “blues” (liberals). By practicing roleplay and affect management, participants are encouraged to step back from the thrill of righteous indignation, fear, and outrage in favor of the risky and sometimes unpleasant experience of listening to and learning their opponent’s worldview. They learn to perform civic comity, allowing “accurate disagreement” to replace stereotyping and dismissal in red-blue encounters. The civic performance style that Braver Angels teaches may contribute to human flourishing by breaking the lethal spiral of affective polarization in American politics. But, as critics of depolarization note, prioritizing civility can sometimes protect oppressive systems from criticism. An honest confrontation with injustice and inequality may require something other than comity. This chapter sets Braver Angels in the context of such larger debates about the best way to imagine and enact political conflict.
Beyond Survival
Authors: Howe Kelly
Published: April 2023

In this essay, Kelly Howe offers a brief overview of the core branches of its oft-referenced tree. Furthermore, she provides examples of groups using Theatre of the Oppressed practices toward the causes of health and well-being. These examples constitute a concrete point of departure for what becomes a theoretical examination of some key moments in which happiness, well-being, and pleasure are addressed within the foundational texts of Theatre of the Oppressed, especially the writings of Augusto Boal.
On Laughter and the Bonds of Community
Authors: Young Harvey
Published: April 2023

This chapter centers on the community-forming potential of live embodied performance and focuses on the visceral impact of theater as well as the negotiations that audience members make in the regulation of their own emotional responses. It spotlights the power of laughter among other forms of cathartic release and explores the appropriateness of such reactions. It asks whether the expression of pure, heartfelt emotion by an attendee can be ill-timed or inappropriate. Along the way, this chapter examines the composition of theater audiences, attending to the integration of spectators, and explores how the ability or freedom to respond can structure a person’s sense of belonging, membership in a community, and sense of well-being.
Touching Theater
Authors: Ferguson Marcia
Published: April 2023

This chapter liberates the subject of touch in theater from its reputation as a site of potential danger (in its ability to trigger, dominate, [re]traumatize, or otherwise adversely affect students, practitioners, and audiences) and from its position as a key player in numerous therapies (such as psychotherapy, dance/movement therapy, and drama therapy, to name a few). Drawing on diverse approaches in this exploration, ranging from attachment theory and haptic geography to rehearsal experiences, it explores other dimensions of theatrical touch, specifically its function as a vibrant vehicle of language-less expression, one providing insights into the mechanics and aesthetics of positive theatrical experience.
Theater, Performance, and Community Cultural Development for Human Thriving
Authors: Etheridge Woodson Stephani
Published: April 2023

This chapter explores the intersection of an ambitious community-engaged arts and design program at Arizona State University (ASU) with a socio-ecological public health model positioning arts and design as essential components of a healthy and democratic society. ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts is the largest comprehensive arts and design school in the United States, with approximately six thousand students. The chapter reflects on the process of creating a curricular requirement which provides students with a deep experience in community-engaged arts or design along with a curriculum focusing on cultural competency, democratic processes, reflective practice and community cultural development.
Introduction
Authors: Sundstrom Beth , Delay Cara
Published: April 2023

The introduction asserts that the women’s health activist movement in Ireland has been essential in effecting national change. It introduces the Irish healthcare reformers, organizations, social media contributors, and campaigners who have worked to address the wrongs of the past and improve Irish women’s access to essential healthcare services. It lays out the specific topics that the book will cover, including contraception, abortion, cervical cancer, symphysiotomy and hysterectomy, pregnancy, and childbirth. The introduction also explains the authors’ methods and approaches, and it outlines the intersectional reproductive justice framework that the authors utilize in the book. Lastly, the introduction summarizes the essential links between the past and the present that underscore the authors’ arguments.
Pregnancy
Authors: Sundstrom Beth , Delay Cara
Published: April 2023

Chapter 4 turns to an examination of pregnancy, explicating how medicalization has impacted the embodied experience of pregnancy in Ireland. Through a study of the National Maternity Strategy and current maternity practices, this chapter explores how calls for woman-centered care intersect with practices of midwifery and the biomedical obstetric paradigm. The In Our Shoes—Covid Pregnancy social media campaign shared anonymous narratives from women impacted by COVID-19 restrictions in Ireland. An analysis of this campaign uncovers gender inequity in government policies during a time of crisis to reveal the need for systemic change to ensure every woman’s human right to high-quality, respectful maternity care in all circumstances. Current debates on pregnancy rights and activism, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, reveal how medicalization of women’s bodies and the institutionalization of maternity services continue to regulate women’s reproductive lives and create systematic repression during labor and childbirth.
CDC and Outbreak Response
Authors: Jaffe Harold W.
Published: April 2023

The history of the CDC, its role in disease prevention, detection, and response, and its unique assets including the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the agency’s cadre of public health advisors, and the MMWR are presented—setting the scene for CDC’s early actions to determine the cause of the unexplained illnesses occurring in the United States that would become known as AIDS.
Heterosexual Men and Women and Injection Drug Users
Authors: Jaffe Harold W.
Published: April 2023

This chapter explores efforts to identify a known sexually transmitted infection (STI) that might serve as a model for the spread of the unidentified agent likely causing Kaposi’s sarcoma and opportunistic infections (KS/OI). The best model for KS/OI appeared to be hepatitis B virus (HBV). If this model were correct, KS/OI would be expected to occur in heterosexual men and women as well as in injection drug users (IDUs). Beginning in the summer of 1981, CDC began receiving reports of KS/OI in both heterosexuals and IDUs. Individual case investigations and epidemiologic studies indicated that the infectious agent was being transmitted by needle sharing between IDUs and sexually from bisexual and IDU men to their female partners. The epidemiology of KS/OI appeared to be like that of hepatitis B and suggested that KS/OI would spread to other populations.
Haitian Americans and Haiti
Authors: Jaffe Harold W.
Published: April 2023

This chapter describes reports of Kaposi’s sarcoma and opportunistic infections (KS/OI) in Haitians residing in the United States, primarily Miami, Florida, and Brooklyn, New York, which CDC began receiving in 1982. An unusual clinical feature was a high prevalence of toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection, which can involve the brain. Most patients were men who denied homosexual activity and injection drug use. Additional studies done by CDC and others research groups found that KS/OI was also occurring in Haiti. Because studies of Haitians with KS/OI failed to find clear risk factors for the disease, Haitian entrants to the United States were designated as a “risk group” and, like homosexual men and IDUs, were not allowed to donate blood. Although probably justified for public health purposes, this designation undoubtedly led to unintended discrimination against Haitian Americans.
HIV-2 and Projet RETRO-CI in Cote d’Ivoire
Authors: De Cock Kevin M.
Published: April 2023

This chapter describes the establishment of CDC’s second international AIDS site in 1998: Projet RETRO-CI in Cote d’Ivoire. The project was designed to study the epidemiology and natural history of a second AIDS virus, HIV-2, that was circulating in West Africa and to ensure accurate laboratory diagnosis. Controversy existed concerning HIV-2’s pathogenicity and transmissibility, including its potential for global spread and contamination of the blood supply. Early studies demonstrated a severe, heterosexual HIV/AIDS epidemic that was likely initiated by a thriving commercial sex industry. HIV-2 was present but at relatively low prevalence; HIV-1 predominated; and dual infections were frequent. HIV-2 epidemiology resembled that of HIV-1, but the virus was less transmissible until late stages of infection, which limited its spread. Clinical and autopsy studies showed that advanced HIV-2 disease resembled HIV-1-associated AIDS. Clinical trials showed efficacy of short course zidovudine to prevent vertical transmission and of cotrimoxazole reducing AIDS deaths.
The HIV/AIDS Collaboration in Thailand
Authors: De Cock Kevin M.
Published: April 2023

This chapter describes CDC’s HIV collaboration in Thailand, which grew from an existing field epidemiology training program. Extensive commercial sex and injection drug use in the region prompted concerns for widespread HIV transmission. Early studies showed sequential “waves” of HIV infection, first in injection drug users and then in female sex workers, their male clients, and women in the general population. Men who have sex with men were shown to have been infected early but were not an initial study population. Studies examined the efficiency of sexual and drug injection-associated HIV transmission, molecular epidemiology of HIV subtypes, and viral load as a risk factor for mother-to-child transmission. Clinical trials showed efficacy of short-course zidovudine to prevent perinatal HIV transmission and lack of efficacy of Carraguard® as a female microbicide and of the AIDSVAX B/E vaccine. Generalized HIV spread in Thailand has not occurred, with HIV largely restricted to key populations.
Advances in Science and Public Health
Authors: De Cock Kevin M.
Published: April 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the scientific and programmatic advances following the elucidation of the cause of AIDS and of HIV epidemiology, including major treatment and prevention developments and growing global response. Studies showed HIV’s nonhuman primate origin, clarifying the importance of molecular epidemiology and phylogenetics in understanding viral emergence and spread. The most important advance in the pandemic was introduction in the mid-1990s of effective antiretroviral therapy rendering HIV/AIDS a treatable disease. Other advances include introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and the protective efficacy of male circumcision. Important response developments were the creation of UNAIDS and regular revision by WHO of global technical guidance on HIV treatment and prevention. CDC modified its surveillance and prevention approaches for the new era of treatment and took on a lead role in PEPFAR, the dominant provider of global treatment and prevention.
Origins
Authors: De Cock Kevin M.
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines the origins of HIV and its pandemic spread. Like most emerging infectious diseases, HIV had its origins in animals. Multidisciplinary research involving phylogenetics and animal ecology showed links between HIV-1 in humans and simian viruses in apes and monkeys from Africa. HIV-1 is divided into four groups, the pandemic group M, and the less common N, O, and P. Groups M and N viruses resulted from cross-species transmission from West-Central African chimpanzees, while O and P viruses were transferred from gorillas. Molecular evolution studies suggest these transmissions occurred early in the twentieth century. Diffusion of the epidemic was likely driven by socioeconomic factors, with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) especially important. Different lines of evidence refute an alternate hypothesis proposing HIV-1 was spread through contaminated polio vaccines administered in DRC in the 1950s. HIV-2 in West Africa resulted from cross-species transmission to humans of a sooty mangabey virus.
CDC in the Modern AIDS Era
Authors: De Cock Kevin M.
Published: April 2023

This chapter describes CDC’s evolving response to HIV/AIDS in the United States in the modern era. Early AIDS investigations required a specific case definition and a national surveillance system. The AIDS case definition was expanded multiple times as understanding of the spectrum of HIV disease and affected populations improved. A controversial aspect of a 1993 revision was inclusion of a CD4 cell count threshold (<200 cells/cu mm), which greatly increased the number of people considered to have AIDS. Introduction of antiretroviral therapy in the mid-1990s interrupted HIV’s previously predictable natural history, obscuring interpretation of trends and disease estimates. In 1999, CDC recommended name-based HIV reporting, after much controversy on which identifier to use to ensure confidentiality. In 2019, a national plan for ending the US epidemic was announced, emphasizing early HIV diagnosis and treatment, access to PrEP, detection of clusters based on phylogenetic analyses, and focus on most heavily affected populations and locations.
WHO and the Evolving AIDS Pandemic
Authors: De Cock Kevin M.
Published: April 2023

This chapter describes changing organizational roles in the global AIDS response. Michael Merson was appointed to head the World Health Organization (WHO) Global AIDS Programme after Jonathan Mann’s resignation in 1990. Widespread concerns about the pandemic led the United Nations to establish UNAIDS, a program coordinating the HIV/AIDS work of multiple agencies, with Peter Piot its first Director. Important UNAIDS contributions have included improved global HIV estimates, advocacy, and access to generic medications. WHO retreated from AIDS work until the early 2000s when access to ART began to dominate discussions. WHO issued AIDS treatment guidelines, launched an initiative aiming to treat 3 million persons with ART by 2005, and then committed to “universal access.” WHO leads the health sector response to HIV/AIDS, using its authority to issue guidance on issues such as provider-initiated and other HIV testing, male circumcision, prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and use of antiretrovirals for treatment and prevention.