Libros

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.