Columbia College Chicago

Abstract This chapter explores how urban line dancing functions as a vital social practice among aging Black women, offering joy, exercise, and solidarity in the face of systemic violence and personal loss. Through rich ethnographic narrative, the chapter immerses into intergenerational dance spaces in Chicago and Phoenix, showing how Baby Boomer women redefine ageing and reclaim space through movement. While line dancing affirms heteronormative gender roles and middle-class respectability, it also provides room for agency, cultural expression, and collective healing. The chapter challenges dominant narratives by centering Black women’s embodied knowledge, shared memory, and creative resistance within a historically marginalized dance tradition. Finally, the chapter reveals how urban line dance communities cultivate joy, care, and intergenerational connection, ensuring that Black women continue to move with purpose, power, and pride.

Through examining the courageous activism and righteous agitation of Dawn Staley and conclusion examines the potential and possibilities of a new coaching future. It reflects on leadership, the politics of sport, and the power that a coach could play, one that is rarely seen inside football.

Abstract The purpose of this book is to provide a systematic exploration of the ways in which psychology is used in contemporary society. The goal is to refine our understanding of the extent and limits of the field as a science and therefore as a set of discourses about truth, biology, mind, and meaning. In addition to conceptual analysis of empirical research, history and anthropology are employed toward articulating a more interdisciplinary, multilevel, global, humanistic form of psychology. The author’s method includes a critical assessment of the nature of explanations provided through the various uses of psychology. A synthesis of epistemic and contextual constraints eventuate in consideration of the affective nature of belief itself. It is argued that psychology takes on the guise of mythology by boring a human-size hole between belief and explanation. Achieving reflexivity, the flexible, functional languages of psychology establish agency as central to human nature. This is the suspicious sphere of epistemology and influence within which the uses of psychology reside.

Emilio Williams is a bilingual (Spanish/English) award-winning writer and educator. His critically acclaimed plays have been produced in Argentina, Estonia, France, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. He holds a BA in Film and Video and an MFA in Writing. He is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists where he is also a faculty member. He divides his time between Chicago and Paris. His experimental prose ha...

This book introduces readers to artificial intelligence (AI) through the lens of playable media and explores the impact of such software on everyday life. From video games to robotic companions to digital twins, artificial intelligence drives large sectors of the culture industry where play, media and machine learning coexist. This book illustrates how playable media contribute to our sense of self, while also harnessing our data, tightening our bonds with computation and realigning play with the demands of network logic. Author Eric Freedman examines a number of popular media forms - from the Sony AIBO robotic dog, video game developer Naughty Dog’s Uncharted and The Last of Us franchises, to Peloton’s connected fitness equipment - to lay bare the computational processes that undergird playable media, and addresses the social, cultural, technological and economic forces that continue to shape user-centered experience and design. The case studies are drawn from a number of related research fields, including science and technology studies, media studies and software studies. This book is ideal for media studies students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding how applied artificial intelligence works in popular, public and visual culture.