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Ephemeral Epistemologies and Encounters > Living Collaborative Bibliography
Living Collaborative Bibliography
A shared archive of sources on ephemeral(ity)
This is an evolving collection of materials shared by members and participants of the Ephemeral Epistemologies and Encounters network.
Here you'll find primary and secondary texts, images, fragments, and links — all contributing in different ways to how we understand and practice fleeting forms of knowledge, proximity, resistance, and relation.
Author Last Name | Author First Name | Title | Year | Medium | URL | Additional Notes |
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Aden | Roger | Rhetorics haunting the National Mall : displaced and ephemeral public memories | 2018 | https://books.google.de/books?id=LAVnDwAAQBAJ&printsec=copyright&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false | The book vividly illustrates that a nation’s history is more complicated than the simple binary of remembered/forgotten. Some parts of history, while not formally recognized within a commemorative landscape, haunt those landscapes by virtue of their ephemeral or displaced presence. Rather than being discretely contained within a formal sites, these memories remain public by lingering along the edges and within the crevices of commemorative landscapes. By integrating theories of haunting, place, and public memory, this collection demonstrates that the National Mall, often referred to as “the nation’s front yard,” might better be understood as “the nation’s attic” because it hides those issues we do not want to address but cannot dismiss. The neatly ordered installations and landscaping of the National Mall, if one looks and listens closely, reveal the messiness of US history. From the ephemeral memories of protests on the Mall to the displaced but persistent presences of inequality, each chapter in this book examines the ways in which contemporary public life in the US is haunted by incomplete efforts to close the book on the past. | |
Archer-Parré | Caroline | Transient Print : Essays on the History of Printed Ephemera | 2023 | Book | https://www.peterlang.com/document/1311773 | Edited by Caroline Archer-Parré, , Malcolm Dick, , John Hinks, , Lisa Peters, , and Elaine Jackson |
Barker | Cory | Social TV : multi-screen content and ephemeral culture | 2022 | Book, Ebook | https://www.ubcpress.ca/social-tv | In Social TV: Multi-Screen Content and Ephemeral Culture, author Cory Barker reveals how the US television industry promised—but failed to deliver—a social media revolution in the 2010s to combat the imminent threat of on-demand streaming video. Barker examines the rise and fall of Social TV across press coverage, corporate documents, and an array of digital ephemera. He demonstrates that, despite the talk of disruption, the movement merely aimed to exploit social media to reinforce the value of live TV in the modern attention economy. Case studies from broadcast networks to tech start-ups uncover a persistent focus on community that aimed to monetize consumer behavior in a transitionary industry period.
To trace these unfulfilled promises and flopped ideas, Barker draws upon a unique mix of personal Social TV experiences and curated archives of material that were intentionally marginalized amid pivots to the next big thing. Yet in placing this now-forgotten material in recent historical context, Social TV shows how the era altered how the industry pursues audiences. Multi-screen campaigns have shifted away from a focus on live TV and toward all-day “content” streams. The legacy of Social TV, then, is the further embedding of media and promotional material onto every screen and into every moment of life. |
Bauer | Dominique | The home, nations and empires, and ephemeral exhibition spaces : 1750-1918 | 2021 | Book, Ebook | https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/home-nations-and-empires-and-ephemeral-exhibition-spaces/DEAE021C3E14D164D1AAB98EBED3E298 | Edited by Dominique Bauer & Camilla Murgia
"This book explores ephemeral exhibition spaces between 1750 and 1918. The chapters focus on two related spaces: the domestic interior and its imagery, and exhibitions and museums that display both national/imperial identity and the otherness that lurks beyond a country's borders. What is revealed is that the same tension operates in these private and public realms; namely, that between identification and self-projection, on the one hand, and alienation, otherness and objectification on the other. In uncovering this, the authors show that the self, the citizen/society and the other are realities that are constantly being asserted, defined and objectified. This takes place, they demonstrate, in a ceaseless dynamic of projection versus alienation, and intimacy versus distancing." |
Bauer | Dominique | Ephemeral spectacles, exhibition spaces and museums : 1750-1918 | 2021 | Book, Ebook | https://ocul-uwo.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991045010194005163&context=L&vid=01OCUL_UWO:UWO_DEFAULT&lang=en&search_scope=OCULDiscoveryNetwork&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=OCULDiscoveryNetwork&query=any,contains,ephemeral&offset=0 | Editors: Dominique Bauer, Camilla Murgia
This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced and known. They therefore had a dimension of spectacle to them, as the volume demonstrates. Against this backdrop, the different chapters deal with a plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the wunderkammer, the spectacle garden, cosmoramas and panoramas, the literary space, the temporary museum, and the alternative exhibition space. |
Boustani | Ghalia | Pop-up retail : the evolution, application and future of ephemeral stores | 2021 | Book | https://www.routledge.com/Pop-Up-Retail-The-Evolution-Application-and-Future-of-Ephemeral-Stores/Boustani/p/book/9780367628550?srsltid=AfmBOoqz7IAwAxyrLt4sHpzR_wMFKD67rEw4L0R68VOMgcNwWVwxfKRp | Ephemeral stores, also known as pop-up stores, have existed since the beginning of trade between consumers. They appeared in city centres, villages or other convenient places where they proposed an offering and then disappeared as soon as its offering was wearied. This is a very similar experience to the current phenomenon; ephemeral stores appear unannounced and disappear without notice or can morph into something else. Brands adopt these stores because of the array of benefits they present and their characterizing features. Consumers, on the other hand, are not only positively reactive to ephemeral stores, they actively demand these novel, engaging, satisfying or beneficial stores more than ever as they provide them with constant change and surprise. |
Brandstetter | Gabriele | Ephemer/flüchtig | 2020 | Anthologie | https://www.wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/index.php?ID_Section=1&ID_Product=1342 | in: Formen der Zeit. Ein Wörterbuch der ästhetischen Eigenzeiten, hrsg. v. Michael Gamper, Helmut Hühn und Steffen Richter, Hannover: Werhahn Verlag 2020 (=Ästhetische Eigenzeiten 16), S. 95-103. (ISBN: 978-3-86525-766-6) |
Druick | Zoë | Cinephemera : archives, ephemeral cinema, and new screen histories in Canada | 2014 | Book | https://www.mqup.ca/cinephemera-products-9780773544475.php | Edited by Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer · Film & Television Studies
What do digital platforms mean for cinema studies in Canada? In an era when digital media are proliferating and thousands upon thousands of clips are available online, it seems counter-intuitive to say that audio-visual history is quickly disappearing. But the two processes are actually happening in tandem.
Adopting a media-archaeological approach to the history of cinema, contributors to Cinephemera cover a wide range of pressing issues relating to Canadian cinema's ephemerality, including neglected or overlooked histories, the work of found footage filmmakers, questions about access and copyright, and practices of film archiving. Spurred by rapid changes to technologies of production, viewing, and preservation, this collection showcases both leading and emerging scholars grappling with the shifting meaning of cinema as an object of study. Film historians are put in conversation with experimental filmmakers and archivists to provide renewed energy for cinema studies by highlighting common interests around the materiality and circulation of films, videos, and other old media.
Considering a wide range of cases from the earliest days of silent film production to the most recent initiatives in preservation, Cinephemera exposes the richness of moving image production in Canada outside the genres of feature length narrative fiction and documentary - a history that is at risk of being lost just as it is appearing.
Contributors include Andrew Burke (Winnipeg), Jason Crawford (Champlain), Liz Czach (Alberta), Seth Feldman (York), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia), André Habib (Montreal), Randolph Jordan (SFU), Peter Lester (Brock), Scott Mackenzie (Queen's); Louis Pelletier (Montreal), Katherine Quanz (WLU), Micky Story (New College), Charles Tepperman (Calgary), Jennifer VanderBurgh (Saint Mary's), William C. Wees (McGill), Jerry White (Dalhousie), and Christine York (Concordia). |
Garibaldi | Korey | Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America | 2025 | Hardcover, Paperback, Ebook | https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691255552/impermanent-blackness | Princeton UP.
This book analyzes the evolving and often unstable nature of racial dynamics and Black literary culture in the American context, under the sign of impermanence.
Korey Garibaldi is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame and associate editor of American Quarterly. |
Geismar, et al. (eds.) | Haidy | Impermanence: Exploring Continuous Change across Cultures | 2022 | Book | https://uclpress.co.uk/keyword/impermanence/ | " Impermanence engages with an emergent body of social theory emphasizing flux and transformation, and brings this into a dialogue with other traditions of thought and practice, notably Buddhism that has sustained a long-lasting and sophisticated meditation on impermanence.
In cases drawn from all over the world, this volume investigates the significance of impermanence in such diverse contexts as social death, atheism, alcoholism, migration, ritual, fashion, oncology, museums, cultural heritage and art. The authors draw on a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, art history, Buddhist studies, cultural geography and museology. This volume also includes numerous photographs, artworks and poems that evocatively communicate notions and experiences of impermanence." |
Grainge | Paul | Ephemeral media : transitory screen culture from television to YouTube | 2011 | Book | https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ephemeral-media-9781838715564/ | Ephemeral Media explores the practices, strategies and textual forms helping producers negotiate a fast-paced mediascape. Examining dynamics of brevity and evanescence in the television and new media environment, this book provides a new perspective on the transitory, and transitional, nature of screen culture in the early twenty-first century. |
Li | Kin Sum | Tea, Fragrance, and Music : Ephemeral Arts and the Formation of Scholar-Artist Communities in Northern Song China | 2025 | Book, Ebook | https://brill.com/display/title/63606?srsltid=AfmBOorwdtZVfZIDzWhMiJHJQaD_TteFGnmqd6ejWLXo9YtfY1Qb3vsE | "This book explores one of the central questions among many disciplines: how communities are formed. It investigates this question through the perspectives of scholar-artist communities in Northern Song China. You will learn how some of the then popular ephemeral artistic practices, such as whisking tea, burning aromatic substances, and playing and listening to qin music, were performed. Through these practices related sensory experiences were generated. The formation process of communities invovled many other aspects such as the interplay among people, materials, ephemeral arts, and sensory experiences, which is hard to identify in pure textual sources." |
Manning | Erin | Ephemeral Territories: representing nation, home, and identity in Canada | 2003 | Book | https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816639250/ephemeral-territories/ | Explores questions of identity and belonging through the lens of Canadian cultural production |
Russell | Gillian | The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, Sociability, and the Cultures of Collecting | 2020 | Book | https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ephemeral-eighteenth-century/4F9B8D61D476ED883A5B739C720BBD4F | Often regarded as trivial and disposable, printed ephemera, such as tickets, playbills and handbills, was essential in the development of eighteenth-century culture. In this original study, richly illustrated with examples from across the period, Gillian Russell examines the emergence of the cultural category of printed ephemera, its relationship with forms of sociability, the history of the book, and ideas of what constituted the boundaries of literature and literary value. Russell explores the role of contemporary collectors such as Sarah Sophia Banks in preserving such material, arguing for 'ephemerology' as a distinctive strand of popular antiquarianism. Multi-disciplinary in scope, The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century reveals new perspectives on the history of theatre, the fiction of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, and on the history of bibliography, as well as highlighting the continuing relevance of the concept of ephemerality to how we connect through social media today. |
Snooks | Graeme | The ephemeral civilization : exploding the myth of social evolution | 1997 | Book | https://www.routledge.com/The-Ephemeral-Civilization-Exploding-the-Myth-of-Social-Evolution/Snooks/p/book/9780415862516?srsltid=AfmBOorKcqpL9EcHw62yT7yiwGHQIpoaI9Ehb3QJCfmGYXLy08QhjMT4 | The Ephemeral Civilization is an astonishing intellectual feat in which Graeme Snooks develops an original and ground-breaking analysis of changing sociopolitical forms over the past 3,000 years. Snooks challenges the prevailing theories of social evolutionism with an innovative approach which also looks ahead to the twenty-first century. The Ephemeral Civilization builds on the model of dynamic strategy outlined in the author's highly acclaimed companion volume, The Dynamic Society.
The Ephemeral Society is divided into three parts - theory, history and future. |
Somers | Tim | Ephemeral print culture in early modern England : sociability, politics and collecting | 2021 | Book, Ebook | www-cambridge-org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/core/books/ephemeral-print-culture-in-early-modern-england/73953DF0FE6A0B2CC7D69FF3BAB87573#fndtn-information | "'Cheap' genres of print such as ballads, almanacs and playing cards were part of everyday life in seventeenth-century society - ubiquitous and disposable. Toward the end of the century, however, individuals began to preserve, arrange and display articles of cheap print within carefully curated collections. What motivated this sudden urge to preserve the ephemeral? This book answers that question by analysing the social, political and intellectual factors behind the formation of cheap print collections, how these collections were used by their owners, and what this activity can tell us about 'print culture' in the early modern period.
The book's central collector is John Bagford (1650-1715), a shoemaker who became a dealer of prints and other 'curiosities' to important collectors of the time such as Samuel Pepys, Hans Sloane and Robert Harley. Bagford's own rich and largely unstudied collection is a fascinating study in its own right and his position at the centre of commercial and intellectual networks opens up a whole world of collecting. This world encompasses later Stuart partisan political culture, when modern parties and the 'public sphere' first emerged; the 'New Science' and 'virtuoso culture' with its milieu of natural philosophers, antiquaries and artisans; the aural and visual landscape of marketplaces, streets and alehouses; and developing practices of record-keeping, life-writing and historical writing during the long eighteenth century." |
Taylor | Iain | Media materialities : form, format, and ephemeral meaning | 2025 | Book | https://www.intellectbooks.com/media-materialities | Brings together a breadth of perspectives addressing media materialities, and their significance to the study of media, culture, and society. Offers new thinking and perspectives on media materialities, including work that explores media materiality, and the past, physical and digital tensions and media materialities in digital games. |
Vélez-Serna | Maria | Ephemeral Cinema Spaces: Stories of Reinvention, Resistance and Community | 2020 | Book | https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462986541/ephemeral-cinema-spaces |
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