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Retopia: Creating New Spaces of Possibility

Author: Dirk Hoyer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-22

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1000880087

Retopia tells the story of social innovation in times of crisis, and through its cross-disciplinary narrative it goes beyond existing forms of future anticipation and maps out a practice-based approach to the creation of new realities. It explores how new imaginaries, social experiments, and laboratories of societies can create spaces of possibilities, revalidate the peripheries, and create new forms of social coherence. The peripheral regions in Europe are facing a crisis triangle: depopulation, the rise of the ‘useless’ class, and outdated social welfare systems. It is a crisis of political imaginaries and a lack of inspiring political stories. In response to this, the book specifically focuses on the concept of ‘retopia’, the idea of creating inclusive spaces of social innovation that encourage active participation. Through the creation of relocalized societies with a high degree of autonomy in ‘leftover’ spaces, such as Sicily, Western Latvia, or Northern Bulgaria, retopian redevelopment schemes offer new perspectives on ‘ruined spaces’. Retopia uncovers the common links and limitations of utopian studies, future studies, degrowth, narratology, the commons, and political geography. Retopia: Creating New Spaces of Possibility is an articulation of the potentialities of social innovation, political imaginaries, and future images, provoking a stimulating discussion among scholars and students in the fields of Politics and Future and Anticipation Studies.

The Philosophy of Outer Space

Author: Mirko Daniel Garasic

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-24

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1040024122

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This volume provides a rigorous philosophical investigation of the rationales, challenges, and promises of the coming Space Age. Over the past decade, space exploration has made significant and accelerating progress, and its potential has attracted growing attention from science, states, businesses, innovators, as well as the media and society more generally. Yet philosophical theorizing concerning the premises, values, meanings, and impacts of space exploration is still in its infancy, and this potentially immense field of study is far from mainstream yet. This book advances outer space philosophy by integrating key scientific and societal debates sparked by recent developments in space research and activities with conceptual, existential, ethical, aesthetic, and political themes and concerns. It maps various regions of philosophical exploration, reflection, and speculation regarding humanity’s present and future emanations into outer space, to promote a broad, rich, and nuanced societal debate regarding this transformative enterprise, which is as stimulating as it can be disorienting. This book will be a fascinating read for academics, researchers, and students interested in philosophy, space studies, science and technology studies, future studies, and sustainability.

Retrotopia

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-05-23

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 150951533X

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We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state—a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topos, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and benevolent ruler. But while we have lost our faith in utopias of all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling has not died. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia. The emergence of retrotopia is interwoven with the deepening gulf between power and politics that is a defining feature of our contemporary liquid-modern world—the gulf between the ability to get things done and the capability of deciding what things need to be done, a capability once vested with the territorially sovereign state. This deepening gulf has rendered nation-states unable to deliver on their promises, giving rise to a widespread disenchantment with the idea that the future will improve the human condition and a mistrust in the ability of nation-states to make this happen. True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its stimulus from the urge to rectify the failings of the present human condition—though now by resurrecting the failed and forgotten potentials of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, genuine or putative, serve as the main landmarks today in drawing the road-map to a better world. Having lost all faith in the idea of building an alternative society of the future, many turn instead to the grand ideas of the past, buried but not yet dead. Such is retrotopia, the contours of which are examined by Zygmunt Bauman in this sharp dissection of our contemporary romance with the past.

Futuribles

Author: Bertrand de Jouvenel

Publisher:

Published: 1965

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13:

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Ethical Humans

Author: Victor Jeleniewski Seidler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1000482774

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Ethical Humans questions how philosophy and social theory can help us to engage the everyday moral realities of living, working, loving, learning and dying in new capitalism. It introduces sociology as an art of living and as a formative tradition of embodied radical eco post-humanism. Seeking to embody traditions of philosophy and social theory in everyday ethics, this book validates emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge and shows how the denigration of women has gone hand in hand with the denigration of nature. It queries post-structuralist traditions of anti-humanism that, for all their insights into the fragmentation of identities, often sustain a distinction between nature and culture. The author argues that in a crisis of global warming, we have to learn to listen to our bodies as part of nature and draws on Wittgenstein to shape embodied forms of philosophy and social theory that questions theologies that tacitly continue to shape philosophical traditions. In acknowledging our own vulnerabilities, we question the vision of the autonomous and independent rational self that often remains within the terms of dominant white masculinities. This book offers different modes of self-work, drawing on psychoanalysis and embodied post-analytic psychotherapies as part of a decolonising practice questioning Eurocentric colonising modernity. In doing so it challenges, with Simone Weil, Roman notions of power and greatness that have shaped visions of white supremacy and European colonial power and empire. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, environmental philosophy, social theory and sociology, ethics and philosophy, cultural studies, future studies, gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and philosophy and sociology as arts of living.

Anticipation, Sustainability, Futures and Human Extinction

Author: Bruce E. Tonn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-16

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1000358887

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This book considers the philosophical underpinnings, policy foundations, institutional innovations, and deep cultural changes needed to ensure that humanity has the best chance of surviving and flourishing into the very distant future. Anticipation of threats to the sustainability of human civilization needs to encompass time periods that span not just decades but millennia. All existential risks need to be jointly assessed, as opposed to addressing risks such as climate change and pandemics separately. Exploring the potential events that are likely to cause the biggest risks as well as asking why we should even desire to thrive into the distant future, this work looks at the ‘biggest picture possible’ in order to argue that futures-oriented decision-making ought to be a permanent aspect of human society and futures-oriented policy making must take precedent over the day-to-day policy making of current generations in times of great peril. The book concludes with a discourse on the truly fundamental bottom-up changes needed in our personal psychologies and culture to support these top-down recommendations. This book is of great interest to philosophers, policy analysts, political scientists, economists, psychologists, planners, and theologians.

The Doctrine of Awakening

Author: Julius Evola

Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

Published: 1996-02

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780892815531

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Italian philosopher Julius Evola pares away centuries of adaptations to reveal Buddhist practice in its original context. Most surprisingly, he argues that the widespread belief in reincarnation is not an original Buddhist tenet. Evola presents actual practices of concentration and visualization, and places them in the larger metaphysical context of the Buddhist model of mind and universe.

Strategic Public Relations Leadership

Author: Anne Gregory

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-22

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1000603415

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Public relations professionals are operating in an increasingly challenging and complex environment. Pressures from outside the organisation include new accountabilities, empowered stakeholders, increased public cynicism and a new communication landscape. Internally, there are increasing demands to demonstrate a strategic contribution, alongside a requirement to coach and counsel senior managers exposed to these environmental pressures. This revised and updated edition provides a framework to enable public relations professionals to clearly articulate and demonstrate their own contribution to organisational effectiveness, while also setting out the specific capabilities public relations leaders must exhibit to operate at the highest levels of the organisation. This edition further develops the pioneering approach to integrating thinking around public relations, leadership, and strategy. It has been updated comprehensively to address contemporary developments and introduce new research and fresh perspectives from the authors. New to this edition are insights from Chief Executives on what they expect from public relations leaders and a comprehensive set of capabilities which scope the demanding role of professionals at the top of their game. Concise and practical, this textbook is suitable for MBA and other postgraduate and executive education qualifications in Public Relations and Corporate Communications – especially for those students who wish to pursue a successful career as a professional public relations specialist, able to operate strategically at the top of successful organisations.