The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of modernist architects. Brokers of Modernity reveals how East Central Europe turned into one of the pre-eminent testing grounds of the new belief system of modernism. By combining the internationalism of the CIAM organization and the modernising aspirations of the new states built after 1918, the reach of modernist architects extended far beyond their established fields. Yet, these architects paid a price when Europe’s age of extre...

Futures of the Contemporary explores different notions and manifestations of “the contemporary” in music, visual arts, art theory, and philosophy. In particular, the authors in this collection of essays scrutinise the role of artistic research in critical and creative expressions of contemporaneity. When distinguished from “the contemporaneous” of a given historical time, “the contemporary” becomes a crucial concept, promoting or excluding objects and practices according to their ...

French colonisers of the Third Republic claimed not to oppress but to liberate, imagining they were spreading republican ideals to the colonies to make a Greater France. In this book Simon Dell explores the various roles played by portraiture in this colonial imaginary.

Anyone interested in the history of colonial Africa will have encountered innumerable portraits of African elites produced during the first half of the twentieth century, yet no book to date has focused on these ubiquitous ima...

The willingness to migrate in search of employment is in itself insufficient to compel anyone to move. The dynamics of labour mobility are heavily influenced by the opportunities perceived and the imaginaries held by both employers and regulating authorities in relation to migrant labour. This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the structures and imaginaries underlying various forms of mobility. Based on research conducted in different geographical contexts, including ...

From its invention to the internet age, photography has been considered universal, pervasive, and omnipresent. This anthology of essays posits how the question of when photography came to be everywhere shapes our understanding of all manner of photographic media. Whether looking at a portrait image on the polished silver surface of the daguerreotype, or a viral image on the reflective glass of the smartphone, the experience of looking at photographs and thinking with photography is inseparabl...

Climate change in the Andes is affecting the relation between urban development and the landscape. Design-led explorations are reframing landscape logics and urbanisation patterns within the Cachi River Basin of Ayacucho, Peru. A co-production of students, researchers and designers, the book suggests alternative futures, crossing scales of landscape systems to new settlement typologies.

Urban Andes marks the start of the new series LAP on innovative design research in architecture, urbanism, ...

In 2022, the Belgian parliament made a landmark decision by approving the decriminalisation of sex work. This move positioned the small nation as the first country in Europe – and the second globally – to abandon the hypocrisy of tolerance. Yet this was not the first time paid sex in Belgium gained international notoriety. The bathhouses of the fifteenth-century ‘frows of Flanders’ were well-known throughout Europe. In the nineteenth century, Belgium faced international outrage as the...

“In groups the most contradictory ideas can exist side by side and tolerate each other, without any conflict arising from the logical contradiction between them”, wrote Freud in his 1921 book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. One hundred years later, in an age of war, social networks, and ubiquitous threats to democracy, the questions raised by Freud are as relevant as ever. In today’s mass and group formations, psychological processes and mechanisms can be recognized as the...

Boredom and melancholy in the experience of reading.

Contemporary graphic novels show an interesting shift from the extraordinary to the ordinary in slice-of-life stories in which nothing happens. Present-day graphic accounts are inhabited by melancholic characters whining about the lack of meaning in life. This book examines this intriguing transition and brings a historical, aesthetical and narratological approach to comics in which boredom is not only a topic, but also awakens a deliberate...