“Truth happens to an idea.” So wrote William James in 1907; and twenty-four years later John Dewey argued that artistic experience entailed a process of “doing and undergoing.” But what do these ideas have to do with music, or with research conducted in and through music—that is, with “artistic research”? In this collection of essays, fourteen very different authors respond with distinct and challenging perspectives. Some report on their own experiments and experiences; some off...

The Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings, compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the 20th century. Recorded on shellac are stories and songs, personal testimonies and poems, glossaries and numbers. This book engages with the archive by consistently focusing on the colonial conditions under which the recordings were produced.

With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive is a hist...

Democratic societies are being challenged to look for new ways of doing politics that involve different stakeholders, particularly citizens. This book looks at public authorities' attempts to put society at the core of public policies in the form of collaborative governance. It provides a full account of a major case from the provincial council of Gipuzkoa (Basque Country, Spain): 150 projects, more than 900 organisations, and 50.000 participants and beneficiaries. ‘Pracademic’ lessons le...

“L’Étrurie est à la mode”, French archaeologist Salomon Reinach bluntly stated in 1927. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Etruria had not only been attracting the attention of archaeologists and specialists of all sorts, but it had also been a fascinating and, in some cases, captivating destination for poets, novelists, painters and sculptors from all over Europe. This volume deals with the impact of the constantly expanding knowledge on the Etruscans and their mysterious...

On 24 March 1980, Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated while celebrating mass in San Salvador. During the last years of his life, Romero had become an outspoken opponent of the oppression by El Salvador’s dictatorial regime and a beacon of peace and hope in a country torn by injustice, inequality and violence. His assassination sparked global outrage and converged with a growing international awareness of the plight of Latin America. To this day, Romero continues to inspire ...

We are no strangers today to visual representations of human suffering at sea: the refugee crisis that continues to play out in the seascape between Europe and Africa (and not only there) yields an ever-growing archive of humanitarian tragedy. As both a visual backdrop and a lethal medium of unequal mobility, maritime space and landscape play a significant role in mediating the ethical demands of this crisis. Yet there has been little exploration of the longer history of morality’s role in ...

Exploring experimental attitudes in music.

Experimental Affinities in Music brings together diverse artistic, musicological, historical, and philosophical essays, enhancing a broad discourse on artistic experimentation, and exploring various experimental attitudes in music composed between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries.

The golden thread running through the different chapters is the quest for inherently experimental musical practices, a quest pursued from interrogating, descriptive, ...

Religion and science on paranormal events.

Described as 'the hand of God', as 'pathological' or even as 'a clever trick', exceptional corporeal phenomena such as miraculous cures, stigmata, and incorrupt corpses have triggered heated debates in the past. Depending on their definition as either 'supernatural', 'psycho-somatic' or 'fraudulent', different authorities have sought to explain these enigmatic occurrences by stimulating inquiries and claiming jurisdiction over them. As a consequence,...

‘Dora’ is one the most important and interesting case studies Sigmund Freud conducted and later described. It constitutes a key text in his oeuvre and finds itself at the crossroads of his studies in hysteria, the theory of sexuality and dream interpretation. The Dora case is both a literary and theoretically ground-breaking text and an account of a ‘failed’ treatment. In Dora, Hysteria and Gender renowned Freud scholars reflect on the Dora case, presenting various innovative and cont...

In 1790, between the birth of America (1776) and the creation of the French National Assembly (1789), nine provinces nestled between the French and Dutch borders declared themselves a new free and independent country: the United States of Belgium. Before then, the provinces had been part of the vast Austrian Habsburg Empire ruled by Joseph II. In 1789 revolutionaries from Brussels to Ghent to Namur recruited a grass-roots army that, to the surprise of many, successfully chased imperial forces...