While the field of public management has become increasingly international, research and policy recommendations that work for one country often do not work for another. Why, for example, is managerial networking important in the United States, moderately effective in the United Kingdom, and of little consequence in the Netherlands? Comparative Public Management argues that scholars must find a better way to account for political, environmental, and organizational contexts to build a more g...

As The Walt Disney Company celebrates 100 years of fairy-tale magic, this collection of essays encapsulates this long and successful journey. From its beginnings as Laugh-O-Gram in the early 1920s, the two-man operation has become a multi-billion-dollar corporation that is a world leader in media communications. Their magical stories have continued across generations, supported by film, theme parks, and merchandise, all of which have made Disney a household name. This collection seeks to c...

The twelve essays in A Critical Companion to Mel Gibson offer various interpretations of Mel Gibson’s work, treating this prolific but controversial figure not only as a filmmaker but as a historian, religious thinker, and social philosopher. From The Man Without a Face and Braveheart to The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge, this interdisciplinary collection mines Gibson’s life and oeuvre for insight into existential...

This book highlights how horror in film and television creates platforms to address distinct areas of modern-day concern. In examining the prevalence of dark tropes in contemporary horror films such as Get Out, Annabelle: Creation, A Quiet Place, Hereditary and The Nun, as well as series such as Stranger Things, American Horror Story and Game of Thrones, amongst numerous others, the authors contend that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘horror renais...

Border and Bordering: Politics, Poetics, Precariousness focuses on the idea of border and its various geopolitical, sociocultural, and cognitive incarnations. In recent times, border has emerged as a common trope in contemporary language with phenomena such as ‘bordering’, ‘borderless’, ‘building borders’, ‘breaking borders’, ‘crossing borders’, ‘porous borders’, and ‘shifting borders’. Whether concrete or shadow, borders are omnipresent. The volume contains sixteen essays on various aspec...

Issues of race permeate virtually every corner of policy creation and implementation in the United States, yet theoretically driven research on interactions of policy, race, and ethnicity rarely offers practical tools that can be readily applied by current and future civil servants, private contractors, or nonprofit boards. Arguing that scholarship can and should inform practice to address issues of equity in public affairs, rather than overlook, ignore, or deny them, Race and Public A...

Based on the 1,800 largest school districts in the United States over a decade, The Politics of African-American Education documents the status of African-American education and the major role that partisanship plays. The book brings together the most comprehensive database on minority education to date that centers around three arguments. First, partisanship permeates African-American education; it affects who is elected to the school board, the racial composition of school administrators...

A radical history of transness in cinema, and an exploration of the political possibilities of its future.In the history of cinema, trans people are usually murdered, made into a joke, or viewed as threats to the normal order — relegated to a lost highway of corpses, fools, and monsters.In this book, trans film critics Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay take the reader on a drive down this lost highway, exploring the way that tran...

Often considered the lowest depth to which cinema can plummet, the rape-revenge film is broadly dismissed as fundamentally exploitative and sensational, catering only to a demented, regressive demographic. This second edition, ten years after the first, continues the assessment of these films and the discourse they provoke. Included is a new chapter about women-directed rape-revenge films, a phenomenon that--revitalized since #MeToo exploded in late 2017--is a filmmaking tradition with a h...

As the horror subgenre du jour, found footage horror's amateur filmmaking look has made it available to a range of budgets. Surviving by adapting to technological and cultural shifts and popular trends, found footage horror is a successful and surprisingly complex experiment in blurring the lines between quotidian reality and horror's dark and tantalizing fantasies.Found Footage Horror Films explores the subgenre's stylistic, historical and thematic development. I...

Science Fiction explores the genre from 1895 to the present day, drawing on examples from over forty countries. It raises questions about the relationship between science fiction, science and technology, and examines the interrelationships between spectacle, narrative and self-reflexivity, paying particular attention to the role of special effects in creating meaning and affect. It explores science fiction’s evocations of the sublime, the grotesque, and the camp, and charts the wa...

This collection investigates the evolution of comics and horror by analysing a range of approaches and traditions. International contributors explore how multiple aspects of comics (forms, cultures, histories) have contributed to the depiction and development of horror across many subgenres (folk horror, ecohorror, gothic romance and more); their chapters also show how horror has informed the development of comics across multiple periods, places and genres, from seventeenth-century broadsh...