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Author: Gayle L. Ormiston
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780934223096
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Bringing together philosophy, literary criticism and textual theory, social and political theory, and the philosophy of language and cognitive science, this collection intends to establish an interpretive framework for exploring the ubiquity nd mediacy of technology.
Author: Ursula K. Heise
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-01-06
Total Pages: 490
ISBN-13: 1317660196
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to the field, offering a broad overview of its founding principles while providing insight into exciting new directions for future scholarship. Articulating the significance of humanistic perspectives for our collective social engagement with ecological crises, the volume explores the potential of the environmental humanities for organizing humanistic research, opening up new forms of interdisciplinarity, and shaping public debate and policies on environmental issues. Sections cover: The Anthropocene and the Domestication of Earth Posthumanism and Multispecies Communities Inequality and Environmental Justice Decline and Resilience: Environmental Narratives, History, and Memory Environmental Arts, Media, and Technologies The State of the Environmental Humanities The first of its kind, this companion covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines within the humanities and with the social and natural sciences. Exploring how the environmental humanities contribute to policy and action concerning some of the key intellectual, social, and environmental challenges of our times, the chapters offer an ideal guide to this rapidly developing field.
Author: Frederick Ferré
Publisher: JAI Press(NY)
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 392
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: George B. Silberbauer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1981-04-30
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780521235785
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana is a sand desert covered by scrub and thorn forest, dry and bitterly cold in winter and extremely hot in summer before the short wet season. The only kinds of vegetation surviving this climate are short-lived annuals and deciduous species that lie dormant in the dry season. In this inhospitable territory live the hunter-gatherer G/wi bushmen. George Silberbauer has lived and worked among the G/wi for over ten years. In Hunter and Habitat, he analyses the ways in which G/wi society and culture have been shaped by the rugged natural environment. The book provides a thorough analysis of G/wi society, describing their social, political, and economic organization, their living patterns, subsistence technology, and seasonal adaptations. In short, Hunter and Habitat describes and elucidates the foundation of G/wi society: the interrelationships of the bushmen, their sociocultural system, and their habitat.
Author: Rosalind Williams
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2008-04-11
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0262731908
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Real and imagined undergrounds in the late nineteenth century viewed as offering a prophetic look at life in today's technology-dominated world. The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet's deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization. Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today's technology-dominated society. In a new essay written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”
Author: Zahir Tari
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2003-10-25
Total Pages: 1565
ISBN-13: 354039964X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →missions in fact also treat an envisaged mutual impact among them. As for the 2002 edition in Irvine, the organizers wanted to stimulate this cross-pollination with a program of shared famous keynote speakers (this year we got Sycara, - ble, Soley and Mylopoulos!), and encouraged multiple attendance by providing authors with free access to another conference or workshop of their choice. We received an even larger number of submissions than last year for the three conferences (360 in total) and the workshops (170 in total). Not only can we therefore again claim a measurable success in attracting a representative volume of scienti?c papers, but such a harvest allowed the program committees of course to compose a high-quality cross-section of worldwide research in the areas covered. In spite of the increased number of submissions, the Program Chairs of the three main conferences decided to accept only approximately the same number of papers for presentation and publication as in 2002 (i. e. , around 1 paper out of every 4–5 submitted). For the workshops, the acceptance rate was about 1 in 2. Also for this reason, we decided to separate the proceedings into two volumes with their own titles, and we are grateful to Springer-Verlag for their collaboration in producing these two books. The reviewing process by the respective program committees was very professional and each paper in the main conferences was reviewed by at least three referees.
Author: Rosalind Williams
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2003-08-11
Total Pages: 271
ISBN-13: 0262731630
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A humanistic account of the changing role of technology in society, by a historian and a former Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT. When Warren Kendall Lewis left Spring Garden Farm in Delaware in 1901 to enter MIT, he had no idea that he was becoming part of a profession that would bring untold good to his country but would also contribute to the death of his family's farm. In this book written a century later, Professor Lewis's granddaughter, a cultural historian who has served in the administration of MIT, uses her grandfather's and her own experience to make sense of the rapidly changing role of technology in contemporary life. Rosalind Williams served as Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT from 1995 through 2000. From this vantage point, she watched a wave of changes, some planned and some unexpected, transform many aspects of social and working life—from how students are taught to how research and accounting are done—at this major site of technological innovation. In Retooling, she uses this local knowledge to draw more general insights into contemporary society's obsession with technology. Today technology-driven change defines human desires, anxieties, memories, imagination, and experiences of time and space in unprecedented ways. But technology, and specifically information technology, does not simply influence culture and society; it is itself inherently cultural and social. If there is to be any reconciliation between technological change and community, Williams argues, it will come from connecting technological and social innovation—a connection demonstrated in the history that unfolds in this absorbing book.
Author: Benjamin H. Bratton
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-02-19
Total Pages: 523
ISBN-13: 026202957X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical architecture. What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention. The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds. thestack.org
Author: Bronislaw Szerszynski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2008-04-15
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 1405137770
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This provocative and timely book argues that contemporary ideas and practices concerning nature and technology remain closely bound up with religious ways of thinking and acting. Using examples from North America, Europe and elsewhere, it reinterprets a range of 'secular' phenomena in terms of their conditioning by a complex series of transformations of the sacred in Western history. The contemporary practices of environmental politics, technological risk behaviour, alternative medicine, vegetarianism and ethical consumption take on new significance as sites of struggle between different sacral orderings. Nature, Technology and the Sacred introduces a radically new direction for today's critical discourse concerning nature and technology – one that reinstates it as a moment within the ongoing religious history of the West.
