The history of filmmaking demonstrates that the form and content of films need not be restricted to prevailing patterns founded on the ubiquitous Hollywood style. It also demonstrates that there are perfectly viable, interesting and challenging ways of communicating stories and ideas using alternative cinematic means, which are often provocative and revealing. In his study of American cinema of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Robert Philip Kölker, considering the films of a group of filmmakers which included Penn, Altman, and Scorsese, identified them as filmmakers who were, refusing the classical American approach to film. Scorsese has been called 'the only director in Hollywood whose devotion to cinema justifies everyone's notions of popular art'. Breaking the Waves marked the return of Danish film director Lars von Trier to the cinema screen after a period of making The Kingdom, a hospitaldrama series for television.

This chapter contextualises the book’s scholarly contribution. The chapter begins with a critical survey of the complex historical relationship between Islam and homosexuality, with attention to the work of Scott Kugle, Samar Habib, and Khaled El-Rouayheb. The chapter establishes that the current Islamist dismissal of homosexuality does not hold when considering Islam’s deeply embedded cultural homoeroticism. In dialogue with Joseph Massad and Habib, the chapter furthers a blended model of sexuality which strategically adopts constructionist and essentialist perspectives. This is aided by the elasticity and multivalence of the term queer, which is offered as an anti-normative positioning against the strictures of both Western homosexual ethnocentrism and Muslim homophobia. Inspired by the work of Gayatri Gopinath, Sara Ahmed, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this chapter coins the term queer micropolitical disorientation, arguing that queer Muslims in the diaspora disorganise both nationalist and diasporic ideologies with their dissenting sexualities. The chapter proposes an antithetical methodology, via the work of Edward Said, Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, which ‘writes back to power’ and which is attentive to cultural and political specificity.

This chapter aims at studying John Burton's human needs theory and locating his version of theory in a wider tradition of thinking. The assumptive basis of needs thinking as it relates to the analysis of behaviour and motives is examined in the chapter in order to lay the foundations for an understanding of the rationale of Burton's workshop theory. The human needs narrative of Burton postulates a version of the alienation thesis. The thesis consists of the idea of human needs as something original which cannot be suppressed. Human needs thinking often includes a form of biological determinism. The notion of determinism as it relates to the explanation of human behaviour is complex. Since determinism is the thesis that every event has a cause, belief in determinism often embraces the claim that all human behaviour is causally explicable.

This chapter reflects upon the lessons learned through an experiment in pragmatic social research conducted in east London in the UK in 2015. The project drew upon the pragmatism of the Chicago School of Sociologists and the work of Ernest Burgess, Robert Park and G.H. Mead as well as the earlier work of William James and John Dewey. The E14 expedition tried to test whether, and if so, how, university researchers could work with a range of citizens to address public problems in a genuinely open way, listening to the full range of opinion and ideas. The project exposed the extent to which academic social scientists are often deaf to political opinions that are believed to be misguided, confused and/or incorrect. It also exposed the role played by the social infrastructure of pre-existing relationships, trust, shared interests and identity in underpinning and enabling effective collective action. The chapter advocates paying greater academic and political attention to the things that make public action and problem-solving possible, including being open to different ideas and beliefs, and nurturing the social relationships that enable democratic behaviour and practice.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book develops a non-totalist understanding of international conflict resolution in general, and of problem-solving conflict resolution in particular. It seeks a non-totalist understanding by studying conflict and conflict resolution in the light of constructionist ideas of the social world. The book examines John Burton's conflict and conflict resolution theory and its relation to his human needs theory. By applying phenomenological concepts, an understanding of conflict and conflict resolution can be gained which differs in many respects from Burton's theories. The most important point of departure is the account of culture, which Alfred Schutz's theories provide for conflict and conflict resolution theory. The book concludes with practical suggestions for international problem-solving conflict resolution.

This chapter constructs a relationship between the autobiographical writing of queer lesbian Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa and queer southern writer Dorothy Allison, two queer feminist authors who have not been read alongside each other, despite their work having much in common. Reading these two authors together allows us to begin the recovery of an as-yet unwritten history of radical queer feminism in the twentieth century, mapping linked networks of influence that suggest a burgeoning strand of intersectional feminism that has not yet been examined in existing literary histories of the movement. More broadly, by exposing tangible connections between the experiences of civic marginalisation faced by Chicana and ‘white trash’ communities, this chapter reads Anzaldúa and Allison as having separately but equally theorised feminist spaces and communities for a queered citizenship.

Chapter 2 considers the introduction of modernist aesthetics in Sweden in the early 1930s in the image communities of marketing and visual art. The main focus is the Stockholm Exhibition held in 1930 in which marketing and advertising played an integral part in the presentation of modern architecture, design and visual art. The exhibition area hosted the first large presentation of modernist visual art in Sweden and was simultanoeusly a decisive event for the introduction of modernist window displays. From the late 1920s and onwards window displays were clearly being influenced by avant-garde modernist art such as cubism, futurism and constructivism. This is evident in the designs themselves but it was also spelled out in professional journals and handbooks. In the commercial context pure marketing rationales and arguments were linked to the modernist aesthetic.The modernist design in window displays was not unique to Sweden around 1930. However, this is an instructive case as the reception of modernist images differed widely between the two image communities. Within marketing aesthetics the Stockholm exhibition marks the breakthrough for modernism. But simultaneously, the art field was very resistant to modernist aesthetics and the Art Concret exhibition proved to be a complete fiasco.