Book: Sensual Religion demonstrates the value of paying attention to the senses and materials in lived religion and also leads the way for improved studies of religion as sensuality. Each of the five senses - vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell - will be covered by two chapters, the first historical and the second contemporary. The historical discussions focus on the sensuality of religion in ancient Greece, Samaria, Rome and Byzantium - including reflections on their value for understanding other historical and contemporary contexts. Chapters with a contemporary focus engage with Chinese, African-Brazilian, Sikh, First Nations and Metis, and Spanish Catholic religious lives and activities. Beyond the rich case studies, each chapter offers perspectives and arguments about better ways of approaching lived, material and performative religion - or sensual religion. Historical and ethnographic critical and methodological expertise is presented in ways that will inspire and enable readers to apply, refine and improve on their practice of the study of religions. In particular, our intention is to foreground the senses and sensuality as a critical issue in understanding religion and to radically improve multi- and inter-disciplinary research and teaching about the lived realities of religious people in this sensual world.

Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms, including creative writing, as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research, learning, and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research, arts practice, and philosophy, bringing the arts to life within their taught and learned contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education.

© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, Eckart Voigts; individual chapters, the contributors. It is not only artworks that can be grouped into historical and cultural contexts such as Sumerian or Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, Yoruba or Olmec statuary, Baroque chiaroscuro or Mughal miniature painting, Ming or Attic vases, the French nouvelle vague or Brazilian cinema novo. Academic interpretation of art, too, is located within historically specific networks of thought in which any one form of understanding art interacts in complex ways with prior and overlapping forms of understanding. This is true of all arts disciplines, but it has been particularly instrumental in relation to the study of adaptation. In part, this is no great revelation for the field. Because of certain consequences of its historical development, relating to the comparative valorisation of its intersecting media, adaptation studies has a strong record of historical self-analysis. The long domination of a fidelity-based model, which attempted to account for how filmmakers might ‘faithfully’ negotiate what Jack Jorgens calls the “expressive possibilities of shifting relations between words and images” (1977: 17), eventually ushered in a new theory which critiqued fidelity analysis by locating it within a historically specific context. But the precise form of the model which displaced fidelity analysis is not subject to the same historical explanation. That is not to say that its intellectual roots are not thought of historically. The new model is usually called dialogism because of the way that it principally draws on early twentieth-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) idea that all works of art are constantly informed by and informing other works of art, so that adaptations are just more acute examples of this dialogue between texts. There are specific historical reasons, however, why it should be dialogism, rather than some other methodology which might make a similar criticism of fidelity analysis, that replaced fidelity as adaptation studies’ new orthodoxy at around the turn of this century.

Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching explores various multidisciplinary visual and performing art forms, including creative writing, as ways to provide a rich contribution and understanding to research, learning, and teaching. Key figures in the field share their art-based research, arts practice, and philosophy, bringing the arts to life within their taught and learned contexts across a variety of art forms and levels of post-compulsory education.