This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication. On 26 September 1960, an estimated 70 million Americans watched John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the first ever televised presidential debate. Nixon perspired heavily and appeared unshaven while Kennedy was immaculate and composed with a California suntan. Kennedy had found his perfect medium and in future he was to use it to great effect. Read about the famous TV encounter between Kennedy and Nixon along with other significant political encounters that changed the world.
This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication. He didn’t realize it at the time, but in the late 1860s, David Livingstone had disappeared and was presumed dead. He had been in Central Africa and out of touch with the world for 5 years. In November 1871, Henry Morton Stanley mounted an expedition to find him. Read about the famous encounter between Stanley and Livingstone along with other famous chance encounters that changed the world.
Setting up cultural encounters is a widespread intervention strategy employed to diffuse conflicts and manage difficulties related to diversity. These organised cultural encounters bring together people of different backgrounds in order to promote peaceful coexistence and inclusion. These transformative aims relate to the participants but are often also expected to spill over into the society, community or context addressed by the encounter. As a category, ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’ draws together a variety of activities and events such as multicultural festivals, dialogue initiatives, diversity training and inclusion projects – activities that are generally not considered to be of the same kind. Most of the existing literature on these types of encounters is instrumental and has an overall emphasis on evaluations in terms of outcome or success rate. This book goes beyond evaluations, and the contributors pose and debate theoretical and methodological questions and analyse the practices and performativities of particular encounters. Taken together, it makes an important contribution to the theorisation and analysis of intercultural relations and negotiations. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.
This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication. The final phase of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France coincided with the reign of England’s most charismatic king – Henry V. Within that final phase came the most famous battle of the war, the Battle of Agincourt. For the English the confrontation between the two armies in this single battle came to symbolize everything it means to be English Read about the Battle of Agincourt along with other significant hostile encounters that changed the world.
This book challenges current views that public life is in decline and that contemporary urban design trends reliant on privatisation, control, events, and thematic designs are to be blamed. Drawing on detailed and extensive analysis of a case study that illustrates well such urban design trends, it shows that informal social life and interaction occur more than its necessary in new master planned environments and new designed public settings, whether public or private owned and/or managed. Furthermore, it reveals the existence of a new category of informal public social settings which it calls fourth places because of their close relationship to Oldenburg’s third places in terms of social and behavioural characteristics – radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity and social comfort – but distinct in terms of activities, locations and spatial conditions – being characterised by spatial, temporal and managerial in-betweenness, i.e. indeterminacy in form, function and times, and a great sense of publicness. The acceptance of these findings problematises well-established urban design theories about master planning, expands existing social theories about the optimal conditions for public social life by empirically and spatially elaborating on them and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space in relation to the specific dynamics of informal social interaction. More importantly, it brings optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into designing more lively and inclusive public spaces.
As society becomes more and more fragmented, we are building more complex networks of second level associations. Although these are important social networks, they all remain relatively impersonal and non-permanent. This book looks at such non-intimate interpersonal relationships such as neighbours and work colleagues.
"7.8 billion. That's how many people populate the world. Yet, sometimes we feel like we're all alone. Perhaps we've lost hope and need to find inspiration and direction. Or maybe we're just having a bad day. Then, when we least expect it, a stranger smile, pays for our meal, offers us a helping hand, or imparts timely words of wisdom. Something shifts. Warmness fills our hearts. We feel a little bit less alone. This collection of heartwarming stories shows how a brief encounter with a stranger can brighten someone's day or even change their life. The encounters might be fleeting, but each leave behind a message of hope that will not soon fade away. There are 7.8 billion people in this world, and it's up to us to make it a kinder place. After all, we are all in this together.
The introduction of omnibus services in the late 1820s revolutionised urban life in Paris, London and many other cities. As the first form of mass transportation—in principle, they were ‘for everyone’—they offered large swaths of the population new ways of seeing both the urban space and one another. This study examines how the omnibus gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that probed the unique social experience of urban transit. These representations took many forms—from stories, plays and poems to songs, caricatures and paintings—and include works by many well-known artists and authors such as Picasso and Pissarro and Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Guy de Maupassant. Analysing this corpus, the book explores how the omnibus and horse-drawn tram functioned in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century and looks at the types of stories and values that were projected upon them. The study is comparative in approach and considers issues of gender, class and politics, as well as genre and narrative technique.
This book assumes an “everyday life” perspective towards masking in public spaces in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic. Facemasks are perhaps one of the most tangible ways in which the changes wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic were made visible. In the space of a few months in 2020, masking in the UK went from being almost non-existent in public to becoming widespread, both before and after the UK government mandated masking in most enclosed public spaces in July 2020. In this context, the speed and scale of the introduction of masking in public settings offers sociologists a rare chance to document the (contested) emergence of a new social practice. We argue that the nature of masking during the pandemic means that masking practices need to be understood through the entwinement of material, interactional, and moral dimensions. We develop a relational perspective to explore the relationship between the materiality and moral significance of masking, and how this translated into the development of masking practices in public spaces. The authors argue further that the specific context of masking during the pandemic provides sociologists with a unique lens to think through the nature of material, interactional, and moral practices in general.
