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Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780822332930
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →DIVAn accounting of the varying forms of social imaginary that have underpinned the rise of Western modernity./div
Author: Sheila Jasanoff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-09-02
Total Pages: 363
ISBN-13: 022627666X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.
Author: Johannes Riquet
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-06-12
Total Pages: 249
ISBN-13: 1351396862
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This collection of essays offers a series of reflections on the specific literary and cultural forms that can be seen as the product of modernity’s spatial transformations, which have taken on new urgency in today’s world of ever increasing mobility and global networks. The book offers a broad perspective on the narrative and poetic dimensions of the modern discourses and imaginaries that have shaped our current geographical sensibilities. In the early twenty-first century, we are still grappling with the spatial effects of ‘early’ and ‘high’ modern developments, and the contemporary crises revolving around political boundaries and geopolitical orders in many parts of the world have intensified spatial anxieties. They call for a sustained analysis of individual perceptions, cultural constructions and political implications of spatial processes, movements and relations. The contributors of this book focus both on the spatial orders of modernity and on the various dynamic processes that have shaped our engagement with modern space.
Author: John Rundell
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-01
Total Pages: 314
ISBN-13: 1317118715
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book offers a new perspective on the issue of modernity through a series of interconnected essays. Drawing centrally on the works of Castoriadis, Luhmann, Heller and Lefort, and in critical discussion with Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Adorno, Habermas and Taylor, the author argues that modernity is not only a unique historical creation but also a multiple one. With a focus on five broad themes - the problem of understanding of modernity after the decline of grand narratives; the complexity of the modern condition; politics, especially with reference to freedom and totalitarian regimes; the variety and density of modern life; and the centrality of a concept of culture to social and critical theory - John Rundell advances the view that modernity is not the outcome of an evolutionary process or historical development, but is unique and indeterminate, as are the constitutive dimensions that can be identified as 'modern'. There are, then, different modernities. A rigorous engagement with a range of prominent and contemporary social theorists, Imaginaries of Modernity casts new light on the significance of understanding the multidimensional character of modernity and the plurality of its forms beyond the conventional paradigms associated with only the West. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social theory, critical theory, sociology and philosophy concerned with questions of culture, politics and modernity.
Author: Suzi Adams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2019-10-03
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 1786607778
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Written by members of the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective, these programmatic essays showcase new critical interventions in understandings of social imaginaries and the human condition. They include a new comparative approach to theorizing Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor; the rethinking of the creative imagination in relation to common sense; analyses of political imaginaries in neoliberal and constitutional contexts from perspectives drawing on Gauchet and Lefort; and the taking up questions of historical continuity and discontinuity in civilizational worlds. In addressing pressing questions concerning social imaginaries, the book advances the field as a whole. The book includes a Foreword by George H. Taylor. This book is a must-read for all scholars interested in social and political imaginaries and will appeal to researchers and graduate students working across a wide variety of disciplines in the human sciences.
Author:
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9781452913148
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Phillip Wegner
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2002-06-04
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 9780520926769
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity. As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha.
Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-02-24
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 9780691133430
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →It historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema.
Author: Bernard Debarbieux
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 1788973879
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Travelling through various historical and geographical contexts, Social Imaginaries of Space explores diverse forms of spatiality, examining the interconnections which shape different social collectives. Proposing a theory on how space is intrinsically linked to the making of societies, this book examines the history of the spatiality of modern states and nations and the social collectives of Western modernity in a contemporary light.
Author: Matthew Gandy
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-10-31
Total Pages: 363
ISBN-13: 0262028255
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A study of water at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure in Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.
