Based on interviews and the voluminous materials in the archives of the SED, the Stasi and central and regional authorities, this volume focuses on several contrasting minorities (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, ‘guest’ workers from Vietnam and Mozambique, football fans, punks, and skinheads) and their interaction with state and party bodies during Erich Honecker’s rule over the communist system. It explores how they were able to resist persecution and surveillance by instruments of the state, thus illustrating the limits on the power of the East German dictatorship and shedding light on the notion of authority as social practice.
Replicants are bioengineered humans, once designed by the Tyrell Corporation for use Off-world. After a series of violent rebellions, their manufacture was prohibited, and Tyrell Corp went bankrupt. Niander Wallace acquired the remains of Tyrell Corp and created a new line of Replicants who obey. A Replicant underground survives, led by the former combat model Freysa and her human partner Aahna Ashina, known as Ash, formerly a Blade Runner. Twenty years ago, in 2019, Ash spared the Replicant Isobel Selwyn, a Replicant replica of industrialist Alexander Selwyn’s wife. Together with Alexander’s human daughter, Cleo, Isobel escaped to the off-world colonies. Now Isobel has gone missing, rumored to be back on Earth and Cleo has returned to find her. Searching for the late Alexander Selwyn’s research into Replicant physiology Niander Wallace has sent his creation Luv, the first Replicant Blade Runner, to hunt down both Cleo and Isobel. Believing that Isobel holds the secret to Replicant fertility, Wallace has ordered Luv to capture the girl at any cost and to kill anyone who comes into contact with her. Meanwhile, Ash has been given a computer disc by Alexander’s former Replicant bodyguard Hythe, which Ash discovers contains the information Wallace is looking for. Cleo sought out Ash, however, Luv tracked them both down before Ash could help her find Isobel. Ash gave Luv a blank disc claiming it was what Wallace was after before escaping in a Spinner and heading off to join Freysa. Thwarted, Luv returned to Wallace who introduced her to a Replicant created from the DNA of Ash and codenamed Rash…
The East German Ministry of State Security, popularly known as the Stasi, was one of the largest and most intrusive secret police systems in world history. So extensive was the system of surveillance and control that in any given year throughout the 1970s and 1980s, about one in fifty of the 13 million East German adults were working for the Stasi either as an officer or as an informer. Drawing on original sources from the Stasi archives and the recollections of contemporary witnesses, The Stasi: Myth and Reality reveals the intricacies of the relationship between the Stasi enforcers, its agents and its targets/victims, and demonstrates how far the Stasi octopus extended its tentacles into people’s lives and all spheres of society. The origins and developments of this vast system of repression are examined, as well as the motivation of the informers and the ways in which they penetrated the niches of East German society. The final chapters assess the ministry’s failure to help overcome the GDR’s inherent structural defects and demonstrate how the Stasi’s bureaucratic procedures contributed to the implosion of the Communist system at the end of the 1980’s.
Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing. Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.
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