Comunicación y cultura

Es una edición especial que contiene una selección de textos publicados en CIESPAL entre 1982 y 2109. Con la publicación se reconoce el determinante papel académico y político de Luis Ramiro BELTRÁN, no solo como pionero de la Escuela Latinoamericana de Comunicación, sino como un pensador, como lo cita el director general Dr. Francisco SIERRA CABALLERO, “incómodo e intempestivo que supo despejar el horizonte intelectual del pensamiento emancipatorio disolviendo malentendidos o lugares comunes a fin de alumbrar lecturas disidentes del bagaje con el que el pensamiento latino en comunicación ha ido transitando los cambios históricos acontecidos a lo largo del último siglo”.

Current digital processes of production, reproduction and distribution of information affect the perception of time, space, matter, senses and identity. This book explores the research question: what are the psycho-physiological dimensions of the ways people experience their presence in the world and the world’s presence in them? Because they deal principally with issues of perception and sentience, with a particular emphasis on art, there is in all chapters an invitation to experience a shift of perception. An embodied sensation of the world and a re-sensorialization of the environment are described to complement the visually-biased perspective with a renewed sense of humans’ relationship to their spatial and material surrounding. As such, this book presents the topological reunion of sensation and cognition, of sense and sensibility and of body, self and world. The perception of the “Point of Being”, to which the various chapters of this book invite the reader, proposes an alternative to the “Point of View” inherited from the Renaissance; it offers a way to situate the sense of self through the physical, digital and electronic domains that shape physical, social, cultural, economic and spiritual conditions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nine authors explore different ways in which the paradigm of the Point of Being can bridge the interval, the discontinuity, between subjects and objects that began with the diffusion of the phonetic alphabet. The Point of Being is a signpost on that journey.

Popular and Visual Culture: Design, Circulation and Consumption is a transnational project that fosters a dialogue with multiple origins, both in geographical and academic terms. From the onset, this book questions the concepts of visual and popular culture, terms which are currently applied both to describe scientific fields, as operative concepts in theoretical discourse, and to characterize specific cultural contexts. The book’s analysis and categorization of visual and popular culture pursues discourses and practices which mark different historical eras and shape social orders. Because popular iconic and written productions are the outcome of a network of political, economic, ideological and social circumstances that are often hardly detectable and too taken for granted to be critically recognized, even by those who draw, paint or write (and live) under their influence. That is why visual figurations of popular culture should be studied as the support of a deeply motivated symbolic discourse on the values shared by a community. This book deals, in a way or another, with how popular and visual artefacts and sceneries are socially built, preserved and/or contested. The volume brings together, not only different disciplinary perspectives, but also diverse empirical phenomena, while approaching the wide subject of visuality and popular culture.

This book provides a timely reappraisal of youth cultures in contemporary times. From the Birmingham School to the youthscapes of South Korea, this unique collection explores the impact of globalization and new technologies on youth cultures in contrasting geographic locations. Drawing on international examples of youth cultural formations in the UK, the USA, Russia, Spain, South Korea and India, the book profiles the best of new research in youth studies written by leading scholars in the field. Acknowledging the past to explore the present, the book is a landmark publication in the rich history of research on the expressive cultures of young people, reframing 'resistance' and 'ritual' to offer fresh insights into the meaning and significance of youth cultures on a global stage.

The 'architecture of the mind' consists of both the biological brain coupled with the technologies that we have developed to extend our cognition. From the moment that we started storing our thoughts in permanent symbolic form outside of our bodies via Venus figures, body paint markings and cave paintings, humans have 'offloaded' cognition onto symbols outside of the brain. These external, materialized symbols have allowed us to extend our cognitive abilities beyond the limits of our biological brains. Far from 'making us stupid', the Internet represents merely the next great extension of this 'external symbolic storage system'. For all the dramatic and disruptive change that the Internet surely represents, placing it in this long term historical context renders this change more familiar, perhaps even less jarring. Understanding that there has been a deep history of intimacy between humans and their cognitive tools provides a framework for thinking about the possible futures of the brain-Internet interface: the future of the architecture of the mind.

Since the early 1971s, film, media, and cultural theorists have appealed to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to discern processes of subjectivization, representation, and ideological interpellation. However, beginning with the work of theorists such as Jacqueline Rose, Joan Copjec, and Slavoj Žižek, a new approach to Lacan has been advanced, one which pays closer attention to concepts such as sexual difference, the 'objet petit a' (the object-cause of desire), fantasy, the Real, enjoyment, and the drive. Žižek in particular has advanced a political-philosophical re-interpretation of Lacan that has spawned a whole new wave of film, media, and cultural theory that shows a marked difference from an early Lacanian approach. The contributors in this book take up a specifically Žižekian approach to studies of cinema and media, both old and new, raising questions about power, ideology, sexual difference, and enjoyment. Including chapters written by key figures in Žižekian film, media, and cultural theory such as Jodi Dean, Todd McGowan, Paul A. Taylor, and Fabio Vighi, it concludes with a response from Žižek himself.

Cada vez es más común establecer paralelismos entre los inicios del siglo pasado y del actual. Fenómenos como la globalización, los estragos de la codicia capitalista o la crisis económica parecen justificarlo.Pero ¿ y en el plano político?. El inicio del siglo XX vio la instauración de la democracia de masas con sus rasgos característicos: entre ellos una ampliación del derecho al voto aparentemente acompañada de cierto deterioro de la ciudadanía activa.

En estos comienzos del siglo XXI, se viene reclamando en cambio un modelo más abierto y participativo: la democracia deliberativa.¿Se trata de un anhelo pasajero fruto del descontento?¿Contamos con medios para implementarlo?¿Resolvería algunas de las limitaciones de la democracia en sociedades masivas y complejas? El texto busca arrojar luz sobre dichos cambios centrándose en dos fenómenos de movilización social particularmente importantes en estos últimos años en España.

Por un lado los que siguieran a los atentados terroristas del 11 de marzo de 2104 en Madrid; por otro, las movilizaciones surgidas en las plazas de las principales ciudades españolas el 15 de mayo de 2011

Slapstick comedy has been entertaining audiences for centuries. Within slapstick, comic pain and comic violence are performed to provoke laughter. This book explores just how and why the performance of pain and violence can make us laugh. It examines the centrality of the double act, the importance of morality and the techniques used by slapstick performers.

In this engaging new book, Louise Peacock provides a detailed consideration of the ways in which slapstick is structured and performed, exploring a range of examples drawn from theatre, film and television including Commedia dell'Arte, Punch and Judy, Circus Clowns, television sitcoms like Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and a wide range of films from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times to The Hangover.

The Sounds of Silent Films comprises up-to-date research on silent film sound, providing a particular focus on historical performance practices combined with detailed theoretical case studies. The contributions by eminent scholars in the fields of musicology, film studies and media studies, as well as by curators and archivists, explore crucial notions such as the historicity of interpretations of silent film music and the diverse acoustic manifestations of film exhibition. The volume stands among the first to integrate a large number of texts that cover a variety of cultural and historical sites and their particular regional and local historical
performance practices in, for example, Swedish, Polish, British, Italian, Austrian and Indian silent cinema. The contextualizations of silent film sound production are confronted with their reception in the United States and form a unique comparative perspective for the welldocumented North American literature.

Media and the Ecological Crisis is a collaborative work of interdisciplinary writers engaged in mapping, understanding and addressing the complex contribution of media to the current ecological crisis. The book is informed by a fusion of scholarly, practitioner, and activist interests to inform, educate, and advocate for real, environmentally sound changes in design, policy, industrial, and consumer practices. Aligned with an emerging area of scholarship devoted to identifying and analysing the material physical links of media technologies, cultural production, and environment, it contributes to the project of greening media studies by raising awareness of media technology’s concrete environmental effects.