Impact of science and technology on society Books

Book SynopsisHave you ever considered how mobile media change what we see, hear and pay attention to, or how they alter our movement through the city? Over the last decade, mobile media and communication technologies have become deeply integral to our perception and bodily experience of the world. In Bodies and Mobile Media, Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken explore mobile media as a lens through which to understand how embodiment both shapes, and is shaped by, media experience. It offers a unique approach by focusing on specific sensory affordances and body parts – including the eyes, ears, face, hands and feet – to consider the uneven ratios of sensory perception at work in our engagement with mobile devices. Each chapter provides rich and accessible narratives of mobile media practices interwoven with current scholarship in media studies and phenomenology, with a concluding chapter that reflects on mobile media use as a synesthetic experience. By interpreting theoretical insights about the relationship between the body and technology, the book serves as an important work of knowledge translation. This work is crucial, the authors argue, if we are to critically understand how our perception and experience of the world are mediated by technology. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.Trade Review“This fantastic book provides a wealth of knowledge about the body’s intersection with technology, bringing together works of scholarship that have not been in conversation up until now.”Jason Farman, University of Maryland“A fascinating and thoughtful explication of the relationship between our bodily senses and mobile media, offering a unique perspective on the corporeal experience of modern technology.”Lee Humphreys, Cornell University“At the centre of Richardson and Wilken's research is the question of how smartphones and other digital mobile devices impact people as a whole. The book, written by two media and communication researchers, reveals how technology changes and challenges the lives of millions of people.”Magazin für ComputertechnikTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Face 2. Eyes 3. Ears 4. Hands 5. Feet Conclusion References Index

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Book SynopsisHave you ever considered how mobile media change what we see, hear and pay attention to, or how they alter our movement through the city? Over the last decade, mobile media and communication technologies have become deeply integral to our perception and bodily experience of the world. In Bodies and Mobile Media, Ingrid Richardson and Rowan Wilken explore mobile media as a lens through which to understand how embodiment both shapes, and is shaped by, media experience. It offers a unique approach by focusing on specific sensory affordances and body parts – including the eyes, ears, face, hands and feet – to consider the uneven ratios of sensory perception at work in our engagement with mobile devices. Each chapter provides rich and accessible narratives of mobile media practices interwoven with current scholarship in media studies and phenomenology, with a concluding chapter that reflects on mobile media use as a synesthetic experience. By interpreting theoretical insights about the relationship between the body and technology, the book serves as an important work of knowledge translation. This work is crucial, the authors argue, if we are to critically understand how our perception and experience of the world are mediated by technology. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.Trade Review“This fantastic book provides a wealth of knowledge about the body’s intersection with technology, bringing together works of scholarship that have not been in conversation up until now.”Jason Farman, University of Maryland“A fascinating and thoughtful explication of the relationship between our bodily senses and mobile media, offering a unique perspective on the corporeal experience of modern technology.”Lee Humphreys, Cornell University“At the centre of Richardson and Wilken's research is the question of how smartphones and other digital mobile devices impact people as a whole. The book, written by two media and communication researchers, reveals how technology changes and challenges the lives of millions of people.”Magazin für ComputertechnikTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Face2. Eyes3. Ears4. Hands5. FeetConclusionReferencesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone’s right to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits” and to “enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications.” This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field. The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of “post-truth” societies. “Dual use” and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk. The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right, Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally.Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Setting the Scene Chapter 2. The Right to Science as a Cultural Human Right Chapter 3. The Dissemination of Science Chapter 4. Scientific Freedom Chapter 5. The Right to Science and International Cooperation and Solidarity Chapter 6. Of Human Rights, Human Duties, and Science Diplomacy Conclusion Notes Index

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Book SynopsisDeath and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period’s rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses—such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons—the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation. Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself—its parts, or its preserved representation—functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory. Zigarovich’s analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.

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Book SynopsisA novel way of looking at information challenges longstanding dogmas—from a preeminent German thinker It is widely agreed that we live in an “information age,” but what exactly is information? This small, seemingly facile question is in fact surprisingly difficult, and it has occupied many of the best philosophical minds of the modern age. In this wholly original addition to the quest to understand information, German philosopher Peter Janich argues that our understanding of information is based in the much broader history of scientific naturalism—the belief that science is a fundamental aspect of the world and not a human contrivance. His novel critique of this widespread dogma grounds science in human life practices and wrestles with the very fundamentals of the scientific way of understanding reality.Offering new perspectives on the major contemporary fields of communications technology, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence, What Is Information? provides a deep look into humanity in an information age. Its arguments show ways of reconciling the sciences and the humanities, shining new light on the relationship of science to the natural world.Trade Review"Peter Janich’s What is Information? is a philosophical unicorn. This short, punchy text offers civil defense against philosophical catastrophe. It is a one-stop shop for repairing conceptual sloppiness in how we talk about information. Written with a sly wit, it is not only abstract: its extended meditation on various technologies breaks fresh ground in the philosophy and history of media. Janich joins a multi-tongued chorus proclaiming that bad things happen when we let media get away with pretending to be invisible."—John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental MediaTable of ContentsTranslators’ IntroductionEric Hayot and Lea Pao1. Information and Myth2. Legacies3. Articles of Faith4. Information Concepts Today5. Methodical Repair Work6. ConsequencesTranslators’ AcknowledgmentsNotesPeter Janich: A Partial BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth What’s sexy about saving the planet? Funny you should ask. Because that is precisely—or, perhaps, broadly—what Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have spent many years bringing to light in their live art, exhibitions, and films. In 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality as they became lovers with the Earth and made their mutual pleasure an embodied expression of passion for the environment. Ever since, they have been not just pushing but obliterating the boundaries circumscribing biology and ecology, creating ecosexual art in their performance of an environmentalism that is feminist, queer, sensual, sexual, posthuman, materialist, exuberant, and steeped in humor.Assuming the Ecosexual Position tells of childhood moments that pointed to a future of ecosexuality—for Annie, in her family swimming pool in Los Angeles; for Beth, savoring forbidden tomatoes from the vine on her grandparents’ Appalachian farm. The book describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, which involved influential performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young. Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, including the Chemo Fashion Show, Cuddle, Sidewalk Sex Clinics, and Ecosex Walking Tours. Over the years, they celebrated many more weddings to various nature entities, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Adriatic Sea. To create these weddings, they collaborated with hundreds of people and invited thousands of guests as they vowed to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth.As entertaining as it is deeply serious, and arriving at a perilous time of sharp differences and constricting categories, the story of this artistic collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, art and environmentalism, to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.Trade Review"Tuned to the more than human, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have married widely and well, mating with the airs, waters, and places of Earth, inviting their companions into profligate kinning for earthly survival. They have taken me on their ecosexual journeys, rolling around with them on their theoretical and performative ground to get sufficiently soiled to be brave enough to join the old whore and the hillbilly in their radical practices of joy, love, and rage. Read this book, revel in its wacky seriousness, risk its call to transformative art and life."—Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene"This book is a manifesto, a memoir, a call to action, a piece of art, and a love story. As we fight to save our planet, consider Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’s approach, which is rooted in our bodies and our relationships to one another and nature. Their form of environmental activism smashes binaries, promotes radical inclusivity, and embraces the power of pleasure."—Tristan Taormino, author of Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships"Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens give the ‘eco-curious’ a holistic and multifaceted insight into their practice and pedagogy. Through storytelling, poetic manifestos, and detailed descriptions of projects, the artists trace their relentless commitment to all forms of ecosex devotion and offer readers an open-ended guide on how to embody and enact a daily earth-loving practice."—Guillermo Gómez-Peña, performance artist, writer, and artistic director of La Pocha NostraTable of ContentsContentsForeplayUna Chaudhuri Preface: Hello Earthlings! Welcome to Our Book Introduction: Rolling around on the Theoretical GroundEcosexual Glossary1. Our Ecosex Herstories2. First Comes Art, Then Comes Marriage3. The Miraculous Conception of Love Art Lab4. Nascent Ecosexuals: Hello, Green!5. Happy Trails and the Climax of Love Art Lab 6. Off the Beaten Path7. The E.A.R.T.H. Lab Experiments8. An Old Whore and a Hillbilly Make a Splash at documenta 149. Conclusion: Sincerely YoursAfterwordPaul B. PreciadoPostscriptLinda M. Montano Field Guides: Acknowledgments from Beth and AnnieNotesBetween the Covers: Related Books and MoviesIndex

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Book SynopsisIn what senses do animals, plants, and minerals “write”? How does their “writing” mark our livesour past, present, and future? Addressing such questions with an exhilarating blend of creative flair and theoretical depth, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast traces how the lives of, yes, sheep, oranges, gold, and yeast mark the stories of those animals we call “human.”Bringing together often separate conversations in animal studies, plant studies, ecotheory, and biopolitics, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast crafts scripts for literary and historical study that embrace the fact that we come into being through our relations to other animal, plant, fungal, microbial, viral, mineral, and chemical actors. The book opens and closes in the company of a Shakespearean character talking through his painful encounter with the skin of a lamb (in the form of parchment). This encounter stages a visceral awareness of what Julian Yates names a “multispecies impression,” the way all acts of writing are saturated with the “writing” of other beings. Yates then develops a multimodal reading strategy that traces a series of anthropo-zoo-genetic figures that derive from our comaking with sheep (keyed to the story of biopolitics), oranges (keyed to economy), and yeast (keyed to the notion of foundation or infrastructure). Working with an array of materials (published and archival), across disciplines and historical periods (Classical to postmodern), the book allows sheep, oranges, and yeast to dictate their own chronologies and plot their own stories. What emerges is a methodology that fundamentally alters what it means to read in the twenty-first century. Trade Review"Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast promises—and delivers—everything. A microcosmos, it treats sheep, plants, microbes, and Benjamin Franklin’s bread rolls, ranging from pastoral poetry to Philip K. Dick. At every turn, Yates surprised and delighted me. This volume's multimodal capaciousness, equally adept in historiographical, philosophical, biographical, and even genetic frameworks, should entice anyone feeling the slightest temptation towards posthuman and ecological cultural studies."—Karl Steel, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, CUNY"Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression is another of the year's tours de force, an exhilarating rumination on the strange intimacies between nonhuman and human life forms and practices that open a way to imagine the ‘multi species’ shapes of what we think we know about early modern culture."—Studies in English Literature"Of Sheep is one of the most sophisticated conjunctions of ecocriticism, posthumanism, and historicism to appear in many years, providing a comprehensive index of our current theoretical moment’s most influential proper names and terms of art. It’s beautiful in the way that all hand-drawn maps are, and it should be widely read."—Studies in English LiteratureTable of ContentsContentsImpression Part I. Sheep1. Counting Sheep in the Belly of the Wolf2. What Was Pastoral (Again)? More Versions (Otium for Sheep)Part II. Oranges3. Invisible Inc. (Time for Oranges)4. Gold You Can Eat (On Theft)Part III. Yeast5. Bread and Stones (On Bubbles)ErasureAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.Trade Review"If you’ve ever wondered how we’ve gotten to the point where virtually every cultural theory field now boasts a ‘bio-’ or ‘neuro-’ subfield, Carsten Strathausen’s Bioaesthetics is an excellent guide. Setting the stage with scrupulous readings of historical controversies, Strathausen then incisively critiques the reductionist ‘biologism’ he finds in ‘literary Darwinism,’ ‘biopoetics,’ ‘neuroaestethics,’ and so on, before judiciously tackling Deleuze and affect theory. A powerful and insightful study, Bioaesthetics rewards the reader with clarifying and careful mappings of important contemporary concepts."—John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the SciencesTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe Biological Nature of What?Against Consilience What Is Bioaesthetics?Structure and Chapters1. Human Nature after KantKant and BiologyPreformation and Epigenesis before 1800Emergent Life (Autopoiesis and Cognition)Sensus Communis Aestheticus2. Marxism and BiologyMarx and DarwinChance and Necessity, or, Kant RevisitedScience and PoliticsA Biologistic Theory of HistoryOn Norm-Circularity and Aleatory Materialism3. Cultural EvolutionSociobiologyEvolutionary Psychology (EP)Social Learning and SociogenesisOf Memes and Culturgens Technogenesis4. Evolutionary AestheticsArt and NatureA Survey of the FieldLiterary Darwinism RevisitedCognitive Studies5. NeuroaestheticsHow to “Read” a Brain ScanThe Cerebral SubjectConsciousnessNeuronal Aesthetics: The Historical ViewNeuroaesthetics: The Scientific View“The Pre-existing Idea within Us”: Zeki’s PlatonismCodaDeleuze and AffectA Posthuman Aesthetics?NotesIndex

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.Trade Review"If you’ve ever wondered how we’ve gotten to the point where virtually every cultural theory field now boasts a ‘bio-’ or ‘neuro-’ subfield, Carsten Strathausen’s Bioaesthetics is an excellent guide. Setting the stage with scrupulous readings of historical controversies, Strathausen then incisively critiques the reductionist ‘biologism’ he finds in ‘literary Darwinism,’ ‘biopoetics,’ ‘neuroaestethics,’ and so on, before judiciously tackling Deleuze and affect theory. A powerful and insightful study, Bioaesthetics rewards the reader with clarifying and careful mappings of important contemporary concepts."—John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the SciencesTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe Biological Nature of What?Against Consilience What Is Bioaesthetics?Structure and Chapters1. Human Nature after KantKant and BiologyPreformation and Epigenesis before 1800Emergent Life (Autopoiesis and Cognition)Sensus Communis Aestheticus2. Marxism and BiologyMarx and DarwinChance and Necessity, or, Kant RevisitedScience and PoliticsA Biologistic Theory of HistoryOn Norm-Circularity and Aleatory Materialism3. Cultural EvolutionSociobiologyEvolutionary Psychology (EP)Social Learning and SociogenesisOf Memes and Culturgens Technogenesis4. Evolutionary AestheticsArt and NatureA Survey of the FieldLiterary Darwinism RevisitedCognitive Studies5. NeuroaestheticsHow to “Read” a Brain ScanThe Cerebral SubjectConsciousnessNeuronal Aesthetics: The Historical ViewNeuroaesthetics: The Scientific View“The Pre-existing Idea within Us”: Zeki’s PlatonismCodaDeleuze and AffectA Posthuman Aesthetics?NotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe words most commonly associated with the environmental movement—save, recycle, reuse, protect, regulate, restore—describe what we can do to help the environment, but few suggest how we might transform ourselves to better navigate the sudden turns of the late Anthropocene. Which words can help us to veer conceptually along with drastic environmental flux? Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert asked thirty brilliant thinkers to each propose one verb that stresses the forceful potential of inquiry, weather, biomes, apprehensions, and desires to swerve and sheer. Each term is accompanied by a concise essay contextualizing its meaning in times of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and global climate change.Some verbs are closely tied to natural processes: compost, saturate, seep, rain, shade, sediment, vegetate, environ. Many are vaguely unsettling: drown, unmoor, obsolesce, power down, haunt. Others are enigmatic or counterintuitive: curl, globalize, commodify, ape, whirl. And while several verbs pertain to human affect and action—love, represent, behold, wait, try, attune, play, remember, decorate, tend, hope—a primary goal of Veer Ecology is to decenter the human. Indeed, each of the essays speaks to a heightened sense of possibility, awakening our imaginations and inviting us to think the world anew from radically different perspectives. A groundbreaking guide for the twenty-first century, Veer Ecology foregrounds the risks and potentialities of living on—and with—an alarmingly dynamic planet.Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Joseph Campana, Rice U; Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Lara Farina, West Virginia U; Cheryll Glotfelty, U of Nevada, Reno; Anne F. Harris, DePauw U; Tim Ingold, U of Aberdeen; Serenella Iovino, U of Turin; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Scott Maisano, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Tobias Menely, U of California, Davis; Steve Mentz, St. John’s U; J. Allan Mitchell, U of Victoria; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Vin Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Laura Ogden, Dartmouth College; Serpil Opperman, Hacettepe U, Ankara; Daniel C. Remein, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Margaret Ronda, U of California, Davis; Nicholas Royle, U of Sussex; Catriona Sandilands, York U; Christopher Schaberg, Loyola U; Rebecca R. Scott, U of Missouri; Theresa Shewry, U of California, Santa Barbara; Mick Smith, Queen’s U; Jesse Oak Taylor, U of Washington; Brian Thill, Golden West College; Coll Thrush, U of British Columbia, Vancouver; Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College; Julian Yates, U of Delaware.Trade Review"Many of the themes and ideas described by the essayists are unique, deeply enriching the reader's understanding of the future possibilities of the dynamic Earth. Many essays deserve multiple reads; their perspectives widen and deepen one another in the context of the essays surrounding it. A powerful book worth owning, reflecting on, and rereading time and again."—Choice"Veer Ecology is a sustained argument for the necessity of art and politics to make sense of environmental science."—Glasgow Review of Books"Veer Ecology is a valuable contribution to efforts to make sense of the extraordinary transitions put in place by drastic environmental change."—Radical Philosophy"Critics interested in adding new tools to their kits and readers interested in radically rethinking ecology will find Veer Ecology a useful and provocative companion."—ISLE"Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking compel readers to consider the power of language as a tool for both thinking and acting in the Anthropocene."—H-net

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Book SynopsisTranshumanism posits that humanity is on the verge of rapid evolutionary change as a result of emerging technologies and increased global consciousness. However, this insight is dismissed as a naive and controversial reframing of posthumanist thought, having also been vilified as “the most dangerous idea in the world” by Francis Fukuyama. In this book, Andrew Pilsch counters these critiques, arguing instead that transhumanism’s utopian rhetoric actively imagines radical new futures for the species and its habitat.Pilsch situates contemporary transhumanism within the longer history of a rhetorical mode he calls “evolutionary futurism” that unifies diverse texts, philosophies, and theories of science and technology that anticipate a radical explosion in humanity’s cognitive, physical, and cultural potentialities. By conceptualizing transhumanism as a rhetoric, as opposed to an obscure group of fringe figures, he explores the intersection of three major paradigms shaping contemporary Western intellectual life: cybernetics, evolutionary biology, and spiritualism. In analyzing this collision, his work traces the belief in a digital, evolutionary, and collective future through a broad range of texts written by theologians and mystics, biologists and computer scientists, political philosophers and economic thinkers, conceptual artists and Golden Age science fiction writers. Unearthing the long history of evolutionary futurism, Pilsch concludes, allows us to more clearly see the novel contributions that transhumanism offers for escaping our current geopolitical bind by inspiring radical utopian thought. Trade Review"I know of no other work that provides such a detailed and penetrating analysis of a cultural trend—transhumanism—that promises, like it or not, to be of increasing importance in the near future."—Jeff Pruchnic, author of Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition"Pilsch’s book offers a positive outlook of the posthumanist ethos and a nuanced consideration of transhumanism, contributing an important and lucid analysis of the movement’s evolution and a theoretical engagement with transhumanism’s rhetoric that will prove fascinating to anyone thinking about technology and the human limit."—Project MuseTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction1. An Inner Transhumanism: Modernism and Cognitive Evolution2. Astounding Transhumanism! Evolutionary Supermen and the Golden Age of Science Fiction3. Toward Omega: Hedonism, Suffering, and the Evolutionary Vanguard4. Transhuman Aesthetics: The New, the Lived, and the CuteConclusion: Acceleration and Evolutionary Futurist Utopian PracticeAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisTranshumanism posits that humanity is on the verge of rapid evolutionary change as a result of emerging technologies and increased global consciousness. However, this insight is dismissed as a naive and controversial reframing of posthumanist thought, having also been vilified as “the most dangerous idea in the world” by Francis Fukuyama. In this book, Andrew Pilsch counters these critiques, arguing instead that transhumanism’s utopian rhetoric actively imagines radical new futures for the species and its habitat.Pilsch situates contemporary transhumanism within the longer history of a rhetorical mode he calls “evolutionary futurism” that unifies diverse texts, philosophies, and theories of science and technology that anticipate a radical explosion in humanity’s cognitive, physical, and cultural potentialities. By conceptualizing transhumanism as a rhetoric, as opposed to an obscure group of fringe figures, he explores the intersection of three major paradigms shaping contemporary Western intellectual life: cybernetics, evolutionary biology, and spiritualism. In analyzing this collision, his work traces the belief in a digital, evolutionary, and collective future through a broad range of texts written by theologians and mystics, biologists and computer scientists, political philosophers and economic thinkers, conceptual artists and Golden Age science fiction writers. Unearthing the long history of evolutionary futurism, Pilsch concludes, allows us to more clearly see the novel contributions that transhumanism offers for escaping our current geopolitical bind by inspiring radical utopian thought. Trade Review"I know of no other work that provides such a detailed and penetrating analysis of a cultural trend—transhumanism—that promises, like it or not, to be of increasing importance in the near future."—Jeff Pruchnic, author of Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition"Pilsch’s book offers a positive outlook of the posthumanist ethos and a nuanced consideration of transhumanism, contributing an important and lucid analysis of the movement’s evolution and a theoretical engagement with transhumanism’s rhetoric that will prove fascinating to anyone thinking about technology and the human limit."—Project MuseTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction1. An Inner Transhumanism: Modernism and Cognitive Evolution2. Astounding Transhumanism! Evolutionary Supermen and the Golden Age of Science Fiction3. Toward Omega: Hedonism, Suffering, and the Evolutionary Vanguard4. Transhuman Aesthetics: The New, the Lived, and the CuteConclusion: Acceleration and Evolutionary Futurist Utopian PracticeAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry The trillions of microbes in and on our bodies are determined by not only biology but also our social connections. Gut Anthro tells the fascinating story of how a sociocultural anthropologist developed a collaborative “anthropology of microbes” with a human microbial ecologist to address global health crises across disciplines. It asks: what would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Based partly at a preeminent U.S. lab studying the human microbiome, the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, and partly at a field site in Bangladesh studying infant malnutrition, it examines how microbes travel between human guts in the “field” and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life.As lab scientists studied the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries, Amber Benezra explored ways to reconcile the scale and speed differences between the lab, the intimate biosocial practices of Bangladeshi mothers and their children, and the looming structural violence of poverty. In vital ways, Gut Anthro is about what it means to collaborate—with mothers, local field researchers in Bangladesh, massive philanthropic global health organizations, with the microbiome scientists, and, of course, with microbes. It follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research—microbes as kin, as data, and as race. Revealing how racial categories are used in microbiome research, Benezra argues that microbial differences need transdisciplinary collaboration to address racial health disparities without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation.Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical accounting of what it means to do anthropology today. Cover alt text:Black background overlaid with a pink organic path suggestive of a human digestive system. Title appears within the guts as if being processed.Trade Review"From start to finish, Gut Anthro demonstrates how relations are integral to science. With bold, page-turning prose, Amber Benezra traces microbiokinships from kitchen tables to scientific laboratories, offering a refreshingly honest analysis of how knowledge and process are one and the same. Miscarriage. Diarrhea. Career ambitions. Humanitarian hubris. Anthropological complicity. We learn from microbes—and the messy, fragile, tenacious humans that study them—how much the minute details of mundane life matter. Alternately hopeful and unsettling, this is a book that expertly does what microbes have always done: change how we see, how we collaborate, and who we are."—Emily Yates-Doerr, author of The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala"This is an utterly arresting ethnographic examination of a networked bioscience project that stretches from sample collection in Bangladesh to data analysis at a U.S. university. Amber Benezra offers an account—rigorous, revelatory, wrenching—of the vexed promises of acting as both participant and observer in the contact zones of today’s international biomedical research."—Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Book SynopsisThe first philosophy of technology, constructing humans as technological and technology as an underpinning of all culture Ernst Kapp was a foundational scholar in the fields of media theory and philosophy of technology. His 1877 Elements of a Philosophy of Technology is a visionary study of the human body and its relationship with the world that surrounds it. At the book’s core is the concept of “organ projection”: the notion that humans use technology in an effort to project their organs to the outside, to be understood as “the soul apparently stepping out of the body in the form of a sending-out of mental qualities” into the world of artifacts.Kapp applies this theory of organ projection to various areas of the material world—the axe externalizes the arm, the lens the eye, the telegraphic system the neural network. From the first tools to acoustic instruments, from architecture to the steam engine and the mechanic routes of the railway, Kapp’s analysis shifts from “simple” tools to more complex network technologies to examine the projection of relations. What emerges from Kapp’s prophetic work is nothing less than the emergence of early elements of a cybernetic paradigm.Trade Review"I am convinced that, with this newly available translation, Kapp's ideas and concepts—like organ projection or the state as disciplinary machine comprised of parts functioning in circular full-closure—will enter and fortify the international field of media studies as well as, and more so, the more comprehensive field concerned with thinking the relationship of technology and civilization."—Siegfried Zielinski, from the Afterword"Ernst Kapp's book is long overdue in translation. This edition masterfully introduces the English speaking world to a text that is essential to both the history and the future of media theory. Elements of a Philosophy of Technology is required reading for anyone interested in the study of media and technology."—Bernhard Siegert, Bauhaus-University Weimar"With its Hegelian inflection, Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology tells us of the spirit of a techno-philosophy that anticipates the centrality of the modern question of technology in the reconfiguration of the human and the meaning of civilization. He invites us not to overcome but to re-invent the human condition through an expanded techno-philosophical enquiry into the possibilities of the projection of techne today."—Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths University of London"Elements of a Philosophy of Technology lays out a theory of culture and technology rooted in humans’ instinctual drive to make tools, a faculty that is called “organ projection.”" —LA Review of BooksTable of ContentsIntroductionJeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif WeatherbyPreface1. The Anthropological Scale2. Organ Projection3. The First Tools4. Limbs and Measure5. Apparatuses and Instruments6. The Inner Architecture of the Bones 7. Steam Engines and Rail Lines8. The Electromagnetic Telegraph 9. The Unconscious 10. Machine Technology 11. The Fundamental Morphological Law12. Language 13. The StateAfterword: A Media-Archaeological Postscript to the Translation of Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (1877)Siegfried Zielinski

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length, in-depth ethnography of U.S. human spaceflight What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extreme, revealing how outer space contributes to making what counts as the scope and scale of today’s natural and social environments. With unprecedented access to spaceflight worksites ranging from astronaut training programs to life science labs and architecture studios, Olson examines how U.S. experts work within the solar system as the container of life and as a vast site for new forms of technical and political environmental control. Olson’s book shifts our attention from space’s political geography to its political ecology, showing how scientists, physicians, and engineers across North America collaborate to build the conceptual and nuts-and-bolts systems that connect Earth to a specifically ecosystemic cosmos. This cosmos is being redefined as a competitive space for potential economic resources, social relations, and political strategies. Showing how contemporary U.S. environmental power is bound up with the production of national technical and scientific access to outer space, Into the Extreme brings important new insights to our understanding of modern environmental history and politics. At a time when the boundaries of global ecologies and economies extend far below and above Earth’s surface, Olson’s new analytic frameworks help us understand how varieties of outlying spaces are known, made, and organized as kinds of environments—whether terrestrial or beyond.Trade Review"This captivating book tells the story of how 'outer space' is being reimagined and remade in the key of the environmental, as a cosmic ecosystem. Drawing on fieldwork with scientists at an undersea space-analog habitat, at NASA mission control, and at a center for space medicine, Valerie Olson artfully demonstrates how our human home planet is the scale and place from which a habitable cosmos is made and imagined."—Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond"In this seminal ethnographic study, Valerie Olson offers nothing less than a new anthropological object: the system—solar, living, artificial, conceptual—for showing how ‘future space’ is being made on the horizons of the contemporary ecopolitical moment. Traveling alongside her, we come into close contact with knowledge that unEarthed entities are uniquely placed to reveal, and with questions that closed and semi-open systems pose to timeworn discliplinary limits."—Debbora Battaglia, author of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces"Olson’s ethnography sheds light on the everyday practices that go into the creation not only of specific systems and environments, but also of a general way of thinking about relations."—CHOICE"Into the Extreme is a testament to Olson’s comprehensive and creative reading practices and skillful ability to identify and synthesize concerns stretching across a diverse set of fields, histories, and genres."—Anthropological QuarterlyTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Space Systems1. Metasystem2. Connection3. Separation4. Transhabitation5. Solar EcosystemConclusion: Future SpaceAcknowledgmentsBibliography

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award​A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourses Although the scale of the information economy and the impact of digital media on social life in China today could pale that of any other country, the story of their emergence in the post-Mao sociopolitical environment remains untold. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was not determined by the technology of digitization alone but developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism.Anticipating discussions on information surveillance, data collection, and precarious labor conditions today, Xiao Liu goes far beyond the current scholarship on internet and digital culture in China, questioning the limits of current new-media theory and history, while also salvaging postsocialism from the persistent Cold War structure of knowledge production.Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, Information Fantasies constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries—one that will change how we look at the development of the postsocialist world and the emergence of digital technologies.Trade Review"Xiao Liu’s creative, erudite, and richly researched book entirely reconfigures our understanding of the media landscape in 1980s China. Her dense explorations of how new media emerged, coalesced, and interacted in this crucial period range over multiple formats—forgotten science fiction stories, neglected films, photographs, videotapes, computers, television and teletext, qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories—to draw science and aesthetics into a charged and illuminating encounter. The result is unquestionably one of the most original works to appear in Chinese cultural studies since the millennium."—Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford"Liu solidly connects a very unique system with the IT perceptual revolution, essential for understanding the present futuristic scenario."—Neural"Information Fantasies strives to maintain a balance between the liberatory excitement around digital media and the constant crises of postsocialist precariousness (p. 10) and will surely prove a fundamental resource for an audience of readers as interdisciplinary as this volume’s author."—Asiascape"Information Fantasies shows that the close reading of signs, symptoms and systems need not be at odds with descriptions of materiality and technicity."—Critical Inquiry"An ambitious academic dream turned into reality. The book shows the author’s diligence in research and skills in organizing extensive and dispersive materials with a clear focus. . . . A valuable work in the study of communication and humanity."—China Review International"The site-specific and historically situated cases, along with brilliant interpretations, will interest researchers in media, literature, and modern China studies as well as historians of technology."—Technology and Culture Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: “Information Pot” and Postsocialist Politics of Mediation1. Extrasensory Powers, Magic Waves, and Information Explosion: Imagining the Digital2. The Curious Case of a Robot Doctor: Rethinking Labor, Expert Systems, and the Interface3. The “Ultrastable System” and the New Cinema4. Affective Form: Advertising, Information Aesthetics, and Experimental Writing in the Market Economy5. Liminal Mediation and the Cinema RedefinedEpilogue: The Virtual Past(s) of the Future(s)AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisTracing the connections between human-like robots and AI at the site of dehumanization and exploited labor The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized. Trade Review"The Robotic Imaginary persuasively shows how contemporary depictions of robots and AI offer unique insight into both the governing conceptions of the human (of who does and doesn’t count as fully human) and the gendered and racialized ways in which we are currently imagining and constructing labor."—Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative"The Robotic Imaginary is a profound contribution to our comprehension of ‘the human,’ read through technocultures of artificial intelligence and robotics. Jennifer Rhee makes an incisive and compelling argument for the connections between histories of devalued labor and of the dehumanized Other, and the limits of identification and knowability as the basis for an ethics of caring, thinking, feeling, and dying."—Lucy Suchman, author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated ActionsTable of ContentsIntroduction: All Too Dehumanized1. Caring: Care Labor, Conversational Artificial Intelligence, and Disembodied Women2. Thinking: Closed Worlds, Domestic Labor, and Situated Robotics3. Feeling: Emotional Labor, Sociable Robots, and Shameless Androids4. Dying: Drone Labor, War, and the DehumanizedEpilogue. The Human: That Which We Have Yet to KnowAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA bold philosophical investigation into technology and the limits of the human A daring, original work of philosophical speculation, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude mounts a sustained investigation into the possibility that human beings may technologically overcome the transcendental limits of possible experience and envisages what such a transition would look like. Focusing on emergent neurotechnologies, which establish a direct channel of communication between brain and machine, Michael Haworth argues that such technologies intervene at the border between interiority and exteriority, offering the promise of immediacy and the possibility of the mind directly affecting the outside world or even other minds. Through detailed, targeted readings of Kant, Freud, Heidegger, Croce, Jung, and Derrida, Haworth explores the effect of this transformation on human creativity and our relationships with others. He pursues these questions across four distinct but interrelated spheres: the act of artistic creation and the potential for a technologically enabled coincidence of idea and object; the possibility of humanity achieving the infinite creativity that Kant attributed only to God; the relationship between the psyche and the external world in Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology; and the viability and impact of techno-telepathic communication. Addressing readers interested in contemporary continental philosophy and philosophy of technology, media and communications, and science and technology studies, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude critically envisions a plausible posthuman future.Trade Review"Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude is a highly original and profound scholarly inquiry into the impact of technology on our understanding of art and of communication more generally. Michael Haworth is one of the most talented young researchers working in the humanities today."—Alexander García Düttmann, Universität der Künste, BerlinTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Idea Becomes a Machine that Makes the Art2. Intellectual Intuition and Finite Creativity3. Unus Mundus4. Techno-Telepathy and the Otherness of the OtherNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write it Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.Trade Review"What happens to the lyric imagination in our new ‘computational environment’? Seth Perlow confronts a central paradox of postmodernity: a poem, on the one hand understood as ‘a small (or large) machine made of words’ (William Carlos Williams), is, on the other, devoted to resisting the inherent rationalism of that machine. Indeed, the ‘afterlife of the lyric,’ as Perlow argues in a series of fascinating case studies ranging from Emily Dickinson to Jackson Mac Low and Amiri Baraka, is one of lyric exemption—the resistance to absorption into normative discourse channels. Frank O’Hara’s poems, for example, may well claim to be ‘like’ telephone calls, but their actual articulation is one of depersonalization and replacement rather than imitation. Casting a wide net, The Poem Electric is a highly original investigation of how ‘electronics enable poets and their readers to animate and rework, rather than reject and surpass, familiar lyric norms.’"—Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice and Unoriginal Genius"Seth Perlow presents a magnificent challenge to the current fashion of ‘big data’ and mathematized literary analysis. The Poem Electric shows how qualitative, lyric intensities embody dispositions that are of indispensable value to us, and which are in productive tension with the world of screens and memes that we inhabit. It represents a wonderful challenge to so many of our assumptions about the value of technology to the humanities and the place of the lyric in our technologized lifeworlds."—Joel Nickels, author of World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance"By examining the ‘afterlives of the lyric’ through their relation to modern positivism—or, more accurately, the ‘equipment’ of rationalism—Seth Perlow ventures into territory rarely visited by theorists and critics. He seeks to identify the rationalized ‘objecthood’ of the lyric poem by pairing it with a series of electronic tools. He does so by repeatedly tracing a dialectical movement by which poetry’s ‘exemption from rationalism’ is exposed as a fallacy by its transactions with various devices and emblems of techno-rationalism: digital archives of audio and visual files, for example, or computer-generated lists of random numbers. Perlow’s critical anatomies can produce startling effects, as when his examination of the figure of the telephone in Frank O’Hara’s poetry reveals not O’Hara’s ebullient sociality (as we have been taught to believe), but a disturbing condition of anonymity and a-sociality. Remarkable for its close reflections and readings of unfamiliar texts, The Poem Electric helps to articulate a field of compelling interest."—Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric"Instead of emphasizing quantitative data and empirically oriented interpretive methods, Perlow prefers to hone in on, “electronics’ messier, more complex influences upon how people read and write.” Whereas the Digital Humanities tends to privilege a machine’s ability to render literary texts as informational fields, Perlow’s approach—focusing on how writers and readers interact with literary equipment—is one that expands critical lenses and realms of investigation thus far practiced in that academic discipline."—Rain TaxiTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Technologies of Lyric Exemption1. Affect: The Possessions of Emily Dickinson2. Chance: Gertrude Stein, Jackson Mac Low, and A Million Random Digits3. Anonymity: Frank O’Hara Makes Strangers with Friends4. Improvisation: Amirit Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and Spontaneous PoeticsConclusion: Lyric and ObjecthoodNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write it Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.Trade Review"What happens to the lyric imagination in our new ‘computational environment’? Seth Perlow confronts a central paradox of postmodernity: a poem, on the one hand understood as ‘a small (or large) machine made of words’ (William Carlos Williams), is, on the other, devoted to resisting the inherent rationalism of that machine. Indeed, the ‘afterlife of the lyric,’ as Perlow argues in a series of fascinating case studies ranging from Emily Dickinson to Jackson Mac Low and Amiri Baraka, is one of lyric exemption—the resistance to absorption into normative discourse channels. Frank O’Hara’s poems, for example, may well claim to be ‘like’ telephone calls, but their actual articulation is one of depersonalization and replacement rather than imitation. Casting a wide net, The Poem Electric is a highly original investigation of how ‘electronics enable poets and their readers to animate and rework, rather than reject and surpass, familiar lyric norms.’"—Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice and Unoriginal Genius"Seth Perlow presents a magnificent challenge to the current fashion of ‘big data’ and mathematized literary analysis. The Poem Electric shows how qualitative, lyric intensities embody dispositions that are of indispensable value to us, and which are in productive tension with the world of screens and memes that we inhabit. It represents a wonderful challenge to so many of our assumptions about the value of technology to the humanities and the place of the lyric in our technologized lifeworlds."—Joel Nickels, author of World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance"By examining the ‘afterlives of the lyric’ through their relation to modern positivism—or, more accurately, the ‘equipment’ of rationalism—Seth Perlow ventures into territory rarely visited by theorists and critics. He seeks to identify the rationalized ‘objecthood’ of the lyric poem by pairing it with a series of electronic tools. He does so by repeatedly tracing a dialectical movement by which poetry’s ‘exemption from rationalism’ is exposed as a fallacy by its transactions with various devices and emblems of techno-rationalism: digital archives of audio and visual files, for example, or computer-generated lists of random numbers. Perlow’s critical anatomies can produce startling effects, as when his examination of the figure of the telephone in Frank O’Hara’s poetry reveals not O’Hara’s ebullient sociality (as we have been taught to believe), but a disturbing condition of anonymity and a-sociality. Remarkable for its close reflections and readings of unfamiliar texts, The Poem Electric helps to articulate a field of compelling interest."—Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric"Instead of emphasizing quantitative data and empirically oriented interpretive methods, Perlow prefers to hone in on, “electronics’ messier, more complex influences upon how people read and write.” Whereas the Digital Humanities tends to privilege a machine’s ability to render literary texts as informational fields, Perlow’s approach—focusing on how writers and readers interact with literary equipment—is one that expands critical lenses and realms of investigation thus far practiced in that academic discipline."—Rain TaxiTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Technologies of Lyric Exemption1. Affect: The Possessions of Emily Dickinson2. Chance: Gertrude Stein, Jackson Mac Low, and A Million Random Digits3. Anonymity: Frank O’Hara Makes Strangers with Friends4. Improvisation: Amirit Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and Spontaneous PoeticsConclusion: Lyric and ObjecthoodNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisInterrogating the work of four contemporary French philosophers to rethink philosophy’s relationship to science and science’s relationship to realityThe Technique of Thought explores the relationship between philosophy and science as articulated in the work of four contemporary French thinkers—Jean-Luc Nancy, François Laruelle, Catherine Malabou, and Bernard Stiegler. Situating their writings within both contemporary scientific debates and the philosophy of science, Ian James elaborates a philosophical naturalism that is notably distinct from the Anglo-American tradition. The naturalism James proposes also diverges decisively from the ways in which continental philosophy has previously engaged with the sciences. He explores the technical procedures and discursive methods used by each of the four thinkers as distinct “techniques of thought” that approach scientific understanding and knowledge experimentally. Moving beyond debates about the constructed nature of scientific knowledge, The Technique of Thought argues for a strong, variably configured, and entirely novel scientific realism. By bringing together post-phenomenological perspectives concerning individual or collective consciousness and first-person qualitative experience with science’s focus on objective and third-person quantitative knowledge, James tracks the emergence of a new image of the sciences and of scientific practice. Stripped of aspirations toward total mastery of the universe or a “grand theory of everything,” this renewed scientific worldview, along with the simultaneous reconfiguration of philosophy’s relationship to science, opens up new ways of interrogating immanent reality.Trade Review"This book is a tour de force: it remains faithful to the thought of the theorists studied while putting forward its own distinct philosophy. It also brings together philosophy and science in ways that have been lacking in contemporary continental thought."—Aurélien Barrau, Laboratory of Subatomic Physics and Cosmology, Université Grenoble Alpes"Rethinking the relation between philosophy and science, and written in dialogue with a wide range of scientific discourses, Ian James situates an incisive series of postphenomenological and postdeconstructive readings in light of Anglophone traditions of naturalism and science writing. The Technique of Thought is a remarkably lucid and accessible volume that will both initiate and transform scholarly debates across numerous disciplinary fields and traditions."—Philip Armstrong, The Ohio State University"This book tentatively envisions philosophy as a technique of thought in order to "imagine a future" when there is no longer a fracture between analytic and Continental traditions in philosophy."—Philosophical Reviews"While the title of this brilliant book is written in the singular, it should, to my mind, be read through the lens of what one of the thinkers addressed in the book, Jean-Luc Nancy, has referred to as the singular plural. For as Ian James establishes from one chapter to the next, in meticulous readings of contemporary scientific and philosophical texts, the real is irreducibly multiple."—Critical Inquiry"The rigor and deft with which James approaches scientific-realist perspectives produce a rich picture of post-metaphysical thinking."—Rhizomes"James’s staged encounter of some of the most interesting current scientific and philosophical work is not only extremely rewarding to read, but also highly suggestive of myriad paths for research to come."—French Studies Table of ContentsContentsPrefaceIntroduction. Post–Continental Naturalism: A Question1. The Image of Philosophy 2. The Relational Universe3. Generic Science 4. Thinking BodiesConclusion. The Eclipse of TotalityNotesBibliography

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Book SynopsisAn innovative, multifaceted approach to scientific experiments as designed by and shaped through interaction with the modeling process The role of scientific modeling in mediation between theories and phenomena is a critical topic within the philosophy of science, touching on issues from climate modeling to synthetic models in biology, high energy particle physics, and cognitive sciences. Offering a radically new conception of the role of data in the scientific modeling process as well as a new awareness of the problematic aspects of data, this cutting-edge volume offers a multifaceted view on experiments as designed and shaped in interaction with the modeling process.Contributors address such issues as the construction of models in conjunction with scientific experimentation; the status of measurement and the function of experiment in the identification of relevant parameters; how the phenomena under study are reconceived when accounted for by a model; and the interplay between experimenting, modeling, and simulation when results do not mesh. Highlighting the mediating role of models and the model-dependence (as well as theory-dependence) of data measurement, this volume proposes a normative and conceptual innovation in scientific modeling—that the phenomena to be investigated and modeled must not be precisely identified at the start but specified during the course of the interactions arising between experimental and modeling activities.Contributors: Nancy D. Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Anthony Chemero, U of Cincinnati; Ronald N. Giere, U of Minnesota; Jenann Ismael, U of Arizona; Tarja Knuuttila, U of South Carolina; Andrea Loettgers, U of Bern, Switzerland; Deborah Mayo, Virginia Tech; Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan U; Paul Teller, U of California, Davis; Michael Weisberg, U of Pennsylvania; Eric Winsberg, U of South Florida.Trade Review"Throughout, the various essays help provide substance to a bold new account of models: far from being mere representations in need of experimental validation, scientific models both shape and are shaped by experiment and data measurement."—CHOICE"A snapshot of the kinds of questions philosophers of science have begun asking since the philosophical shift from theories to practices."—Journal for General Philosophy of Science Table of ContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroductionIsabelle Peschard and Bas C. van Fraassen1. Models of Experiments Ronald N. Giere2. Dynamics, Data, and Noise in the Cognitive SciencesAnthony Chemero3. Articulating the World: Experimental Practice and Conceptual UnderstandingJoseph Rouse4. Modeling/Experimentation: The Synthetic Strategy in the Study of Genetic CircuitsTarja Knuuttila and Andrea Loettgers5. Will Your Policy Work? Experiments versus ModelsNancy D. Cartwright6. Causal Content and Global Laws: Grounding Modality in Experimental PracticeJenann Ismael 7. Experimental Flukes and Statistical Modeling in the Higgs DiscoveryDeborah Mayo8. Values and Evidence in Model-Based Climate ForecastingEric Winsberg9. Validating Idealized Models Michael WeisbergSymposium on Measurement10. Introduction: The Changing Debates over MeasurementBas C. van Fraassen11. Measurement Accuracy Realism Paul Teller12. Let’s Take the Metaphysical Bull by the Horns Bas C. van Fraassen13. Taking the Metaphysical Bull by the Horns: Completing the JobPaul TellerContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisAn innovative, multifaceted approach to scientific experiments as designed by and shaped through interaction with the modeling process The role of scientific modeling in mediation between theories and phenomena is a critical topic within the philosophy of science, touching on issues from climate modeling to synthetic models in biology, high energy particle physics, and cognitive sciences. Offering a radically new conception of the role of data in the scientific modeling process as well as a new awareness of the problematic aspects of data, this cutting-edge volume offers a multifaceted view on experiments as designed and shaped in interaction with the modeling process.Contributors address such issues as the construction of models in conjunction with scientific experimentation; the status of measurement and the function of experiment in the identification of relevant parameters; how the phenomena under study are reconceived when accounted for by a model; and the interplay between experimenting, modeling, and simulation when results do not mesh. Highlighting the mediating role of models and the model-dependence (as well as theory-dependence) of data measurement, this volume proposes a normative and conceptual innovation in scientific modeling—that the phenomena to be investigated and modeled must not be precisely identified at the start but specified during the course of the interactions arising between experimental and modeling activities.Contributors: Nancy D. Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Anthony Chemero, U of Cincinnati; Ronald N. Giere, U of Minnesota; Jenann Ismael, U of Arizona; Tarja Knuuttila, U of South Carolina; Andrea Loettgers, U of Bern, Switzerland; Deborah Mayo, Virginia Tech; Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan U; Paul Teller, U of California, Davis; Michael Weisberg, U of Pennsylvania; Eric Winsberg, U of South Florida.Trade Review"Throughout, the various essays help provide substance to a bold new account of models: far from being mere representations in need of experimental validation, scientific models both shape and are shaped by experiment and data measurement."—CHOICE"A snapshot of the kinds of questions philosophers of science have begun asking since the philosophical shift from theories to practices."—Journal for General Philosophy of Science Table of ContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroductionIsabelle Peschard and Bas C. van Fraassen1. Models of Experiments Ronald N. Giere2. Dynamics, Data, and Noise in the Cognitive SciencesAnthony Chemero3. Articulating the World: Experimental Practice and Conceptual UnderstandingJoseph Rouse4. Modeling/Experimentation: The Synthetic Strategy in the Study of Genetic CircuitsTarja Knuuttila and Andrea Loettgers5. Will Your Policy Work? Experiments versus ModelsNancy D. Cartwright6. Causal Content and Global Laws: Grounding Modality in Experimental PracticeJenann Ismael 7. Experimental Flukes and Statistical Modeling in the Higgs DiscoveryDeborah Mayo8. Values and Evidence in Model-Based Climate ForecastingEric Winsberg9. Validating Idealized Models Michael WeisbergSymposium on Measurement10. Introduction: The Changing Debates over MeasurementBas C. van Fraassen11. Measurement Accuracy Realism Paul Teller12. Let’s Take the Metaphysical Bull by the Horns Bas C. van Fraassen13. Taking the Metaphysical Bull by the Horns: Completing the JobPaul TellerContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisA philosophical and cultural distillation of the bleak joys in today’s ambivalent ecologies and patterns of lifeBleak Joys develops an understanding of complex entities and processes—from plant roots to forests to ecological damage and its calculation—as aesthetic. It is also a book about “bad” things, such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological and technical but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjects.Avidly interdisciplinary, Bleak Joys draws on scientific work in plant sciences, computing, and cybernetics, as well as mathematics, literature, and art in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. It places the sensory world of plants next to the generalized and nonlinear infrastructure of irresolvability—the economics of indifference up against the question of how to make a home on Planet Earth in a condition of damaged ecologies. Crosscutting chapters on devastation, anguish, irresolvability, luck, plant, and home create a vivid and multifaceted approach that is as remarkable for its humor as for its scholarly complexity.Engaging with Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, among others, Bleak Joys captures the modes of crises that constitute our present ecological and political condition, and reckons with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest.Trade Review"Bleak Joys is a tour de force—a survey of some of the most important ideas and environmental issues of our times."—Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies and editor of The Multispecies Salon"With Bleak Joys, Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova take us on an extraordinary exploration of aesthetic transformations in the era of the new climate regime. Not only does the book offer a unique perspective on a new framework of thought, but it also questions the perceptual, emotional, and ethico-aesthetic transformations imposed on us by the ecological crisis that constitutes our present."—Didier Debaise, author of Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible

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Book SynopsisA primatologist and a humanist together explore the meaning of being a “human animal”Humanness is typically defined by our capacity for language and abstract thinking. Yet decades of research led by the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos can acquire human language through signing and technology. Drawing on this research, Dialogues of the Human Ape brings Savage-Rumbaugh into conversation with the philosopher Laurent Dubreuil to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of what being a “human animal” means. In their use of dialogue as the primary mode of philosophical and scientific inquiry, the authors transcend the rigidity of scientific and humanist discourses, offering a powerful model for the dissemination of speculative hypotheses and open-ended debates grounded in scientific research.Arguing that being human is an epigenetically driven process rather than a fixed characteristic rooted in genetics or culture, this book suggests that while humanness may not be possible in every species, it can emerge in certain supposedly nonhuman species. Moving beyond irrational critiques of ape consciousness that are motivated by arrogant, anthropocentric views, Dialogues on the Human Ape instead takes seriously the continuities between the ape mind and the human mind, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will, and the formation of the “human animal” self.Trade Review"These dialogues provide unique insight into ape language research. Stimulating language in apes is too ramified to be controlled intellectually or restricted to a laboratory. It requires spontaneity, taking participants beyond the known. Even communicating the work requires spontaneity, for the intellect does not know what happened. You will be amazed at what these dialogues reveal about humanness beyond humanity."—Pär Segerdahl, Uppsala University"Dialogues on the Human Ape demolishes the simple human/animal dichotomy and the idealization that only humans ‘have’ language, as though language is some kind of all-or-none essence. These compelling conversations between Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Laurent Dubreuil will open minds and challenge assumptions about what it means to be a human ape."—Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley"This book appears in an important series on Post-humanities, so academics and researchers in that field would certainly find much value in this volume as well. The book is intellectually and emotionally engaging, well written, and nicely organized."—ASEBL Journal"The book explores the continuities between the ape and human minds, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will and the formation of the self."—Cornell ChronicleTable of ContentsContentsForewordPrelude1. On Animals and Apes2. On Dialogue and Consciousness3. On the Flavors of Consciousness4. On Language and Apes5. On Free WillAnnex: A Timeline of Ape Language Research

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Book SynopsisA primatologist and a humanist together explore the meaning of being a “human animal”Humanness is typically defined by our capacity for language and abstract thinking. Yet decades of research led by the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has shown that chimpanzees and bonobos can acquire human language through signing and technology. Drawing on this research, Dialogues of the Human Ape brings Savage-Rumbaugh into conversation with the philosopher Laurent Dubreuil to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of what being a “human animal” means. In their use of dialogue as the primary mode of philosophical and scientific inquiry, the authors transcend the rigidity of scientific and humanist discourses, offering a powerful model for the dissemination of speculative hypotheses and open-ended debates grounded in scientific research.Arguing that being human is an epigenetically driven process rather than a fixed characteristic rooted in genetics or culture, this book suggests that while humanness may not be possible in every species, it can emerge in certain supposedly nonhuman species. Moving beyond irrational critiques of ape consciousness that are motivated by arrogant, anthropocentric views, Dialogues on the Human Ape instead takes seriously the continuities between the ape mind and the human mind, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will, and the formation of the “human animal” self.Trade Review"These dialogues provide unique insight into ape language research. Stimulating language in apes is too ramified to be controlled intellectually or restricted to a laboratory. It requires spontaneity, taking participants beyond the known. Even communicating the work requires spontaneity, for the intellect does not know what happened. You will be amazed at what these dialogues reveal about humanness beyond humanity."—Pär Segerdahl, Uppsala University"Dialogues on the Human Ape demolishes the simple human/animal dichotomy and the idealization that only humans ‘have’ language, as though language is some kind of all-or-none essence. These compelling conversations between Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Laurent Dubreuil will open minds and challenge assumptions about what it means to be a human ape."—Terrence W. Deacon, University of California, Berkeley"This book appears in an important series on Post-humanities, so academics and researchers in that field would certainly find much value in this volume as well. The book is intellectually and emotionally engaging, well written, and nicely organized."—ASEBL Journal"The book explores the continuities between the ape and human minds, addressing why language matters to consciousness, free will and the formation of the self."—Cornell ChronicleTable of ContentsContentsForewordPrelude1. On Animals and Apes2. On Dialogue and Consciousness3. On the Flavors of Consciousness4. On Language and Apes5. On Free WillAnnex: A Timeline of Ape Language Research

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Book SynopsisAn engaging critique of the science and metaphysics behind our understanding of the universe The James Webb Space Telescope, when launched in 2021, will be the premier orbital observatory, capable of studying every phase of the history of the universe, from the afterglow of the Big Bang to the formation of our solar system. Examining the theoretical basis for key experiments that have made this latest venture in astrophysics possible, Bjørn Ekeberg reveals that scientific cosmology actually operates in a twilight zone between the physical and metaphysical. Metaphysical Experiments explains how our current framework for understanding the universe, the Big Bang theory, is more determined by a deep faith in mathematical universality than empirical observation. Ekeberg draws on philosophical insights by Spinoza, Bergson, Heidegger, and Arendt; on the critical perspectives of Latour, Stengers, and Serres; and on cutting-edge physics research at the Large Hadron Collider, to show how the universe of modern physics was invented to reconcile a Christian metaphysical premise with a claim to the theoretical unification of nature.By focusing on the nonmathematical assumptions underlying some of the most significant events in modern science, Metaphysical Experiments offers a critical history of contemporary physics that demystifies such concepts as the universe, particles, singularity, gravity, blackbody radiation, the speed of light, wave/particle duality, natural constants, black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. Ekeberg’s incisive reading of the metaphysical underpinnings of scientific cosmology offers an innovative account of how we understand our place in the universe.Trade Review"In this provocative and sharply written account, Bjørn Ekeberg makes a radical case for the social construction of physics and its truths, urging that the mathematical unification of physical phenomena is not only physics’ goal but also a deeply metaphysical requirement for its progress—progress put into doubt, not to say crisis, by the emergence of mathematical theories (such as multiverse or string theory) that seem ‘untestable in any empirical sense and probably remain beyond the horizon of experimental physics.’"—Brian Rotman, author of Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being "What if the basis of contemporary cosmology were false? This stirring question launches Bjørn Ekeberg on a lucid exploration of modern scientific history, leading to the recent marriage of cosmology with experimental particle physics. Well-informed in contemporary philosophy, Ekeberg provides a unique synthesis that will be of interest to philosophers of science and contemplative scientists alike."—Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture "This erudite, idiosyncratic book more than earns a place on the library shelf." —CHOICETable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Cosmic World-Object1. The Metaphysics Experiment: From Particle Collider to the Cosmos2. God, That Is, Nature: The Invention of the Universe3. Probability and Proliferation: The Invention of the Particle4. Big Bang Metaphysics: The Universe of Modern CosmologyConclusion: A Question of RelevanceNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThe life and work of the outstanding Catalan-Majorcan philosopher, logician, and mystic Ramon Llull continues to fascinate thinkers, artists, and scholars worldwideIn this book, international experts from Europe and the United States address Lullism as a remarkable and distinctive method of thinking and experimenting. The origins and impact of Ramon Llull’s oeuvre as a modern thinker are presented, and their interdisciplinary and intercultural implications, which continue to this day, are explored. Ars combinatoria, generative and permutative generation of texts, the epistemic and poetic power of algorithmic systems, plus the principle of unconditional dialogue between cultural groups and their individual members, are the most important coordinates of this combinatorial–dialogical media and communication theory, which appeared very early in the history of science, technology, and art. It was developed in the work of Ramon Llull during the transition from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century when Arab-Islamic, Jewish, and Christian cultures intersected. The legacy of Lullism lives on in poetry and in the visual and electronic-based arts, as well as in research on the history of informatics, formal logic, and media archaeology. The primary idea of Llull’s teachings—to enable rational and therefore trustworthy dialogue between cultures and religions through a universally valid system of symbols—is today still topical and of great relevance, especially in the tensions prevailing in globalized spaces of possibility.Contributors: Miquel Bassols, Florian Cramer, Salvador Dalí, Fernando Domínguez Reboiras, Diane Doucet-Rosenstein, Jordi Gayà, Jonathan Gray, Daniel Irrgang, David Link, Sebastián Moro Tornese, Josep E. Rubio, Henning Schmidgen, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Gianni Vattimo, Janet Zweig.

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Book SynopsisOn contemporary communication in its various human and nonhuman formsContemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Machine communication—to communicate not just via but also with machines—is therefore the focus of this volume. Diving into digital communications history, Finn Brunton brings to the fore the alienness of computational communication by looking at network timekeeping, automated trolling, and early attempts at communication with extraterrestrial life. Picking up this fascination with inhuman communication, Mercedes Bunz then performs a close reading of interaction design and interfaces to show how technology addresses humans (as very young children). Finally, Paula Bialski shares her findings from a field study of software development, analyzing the communicative forms that occur when code is written by separate people. Today, communication unfolds merely between two or more conscious entities but often includes an invisible third party. Inspired by this drastic shift, this volume uncovers new meanings of what it means “to communicate.”

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Book SynopsisInterdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution that reject meme theory in favor of a complex understanding of dynamic change over time How do cultures change? In recent decades, the concept of the meme, posited as a basic unit of culture analogous to the gene, has been central to debates about cultural transformation. Despite the appeal of meme theory, its simplification of complex interactions and other inadequacies as an explanatory framework raise more questions about cultural evolution than it answers. In Beyond the Meme, William C. Wimsatt and Alan C. Love assemble interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution, providing a nuanced understanding of it as a process in which dynamic structures interact on different scales of size and time. By focusing on the full range of evolutionary processes across distinct contexts, from rice farming to scientific reasoning, this volume demonstrates how a thick understanding of change in culture emerges from multiple disciplinary vantage points, each of which is required to understand cultural evolution in all its complexity. The editors provide an extensive introductory essay to contextualize the volume, and Wimsatt contributes a separate chapter that systematically organizes the conceptual geography of cultural processes and phenomena.Any adequate account of the transmission, elaboration, and evolution of culture must, this volume argues, recognize the central roles that cognitive and social development play in cultural change and the complex interplay of technological, organizational, and institutional structures needed to enable and coordinate these processes.Contributors: Marshall Abrams, U of Alabama at Birmingham; Claes Andersson, Chalmers U of Technology; Mark A. Bedau, Reed College; James A. Evans, U of Chicago; Jacob G. Foster, U of California, Los Angeles; Michel Janssen, U of Minnesota; Sabina Leonelli, U of Exeter; Massimo Maiocchi, U of Chicago; Joseph D. Martin, U of Cambridge; Salikoko S. Mufwene, U of Chicago; Nancy J. Nersessian, Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard U; Paul E. Smaldino, U of California, Merced; Anton Törnberg, U of Gothenburg; Petter Törnberg, U of Amsterdam; Gilbert B. Tostevin, U of Minnesota.Trade Review"Beyond the Meme is a collection of thought-provoking essays dealing with the multifaceted complexity and wide diversity of cultural systems."—Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science "An appreciation of how development and structure can be brought to bear on specific problems."—Evolutionary Studies

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Book SynopsisOffering a deeper understanding of today’s internet media and the management theory behind itPlatforms are everywhere. From social media to chat, streaming, credit cards, and even bookstores, it seems like almost everything can be described as a platform. In The Platform Economy, Marc Steinberg argues that the “platformization” of capitalism has transformed everything, and it is imperative that we have a historically precise, robust understanding of this widespread concept. Taking Japan as the key site for global platformization, Steinberg delves into that nation’s unique technological and managerial trajectory, in the process systematically examining every facet of the elusive word platform. Among the untold stories revealed here is that of the 1999 iPhone precursor, the i-mode: the world’s first widespread mobile internet platform, which became a blueprint for Apple and Google’s later dominance of the mobile market. Steinberg also charts the rise of social gaming giants GREE and Mobage, chat tools KakaoTalk, WeChat, and LINE, and video streaming site Niconico Video, as well as the development of platform theory in Japan, as part of a wider transformation of managerial theory to account for platforms as mediators of cultural life. Analyzing platforms’ immense impact on contemporary media such as video streaming, music, and gaming, The Platform Economy fills in neglected parts of the platform story. In narrating the rise and fall of Japanese platforms, and the enduring legacy of Japanese platform theory, this book sheds light on contemporary tech titans like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix, and their platform-mediated transformation of contemporary life—it is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand what capitalism is today and where it is headed.Trade Review"By relocating the origins of the platform economy to Japan’s consumer technology industries of the 1990s, Marc Steinberg offers a powerful intervention into current debates about platformization. This is a book that challenges us to think differently about the business and culture of digital media."—Ramon Lobato, author of Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution"Phenomenal. Marc Steinberg rewrites the history of the platform economy. Moving beyond an exclusive focus on Silicon Valley, he demonstrates that a crucial part of this history can be found in 1990s Japan. Steinberg deftly traces the emergence of platform theory and practices around Docomo’s i-mode, exploring intersections with U.S. and French discourse, and ending with the global markets forged by iOS and Android."—Thomas Poell, coauthor of The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World"The American tech giants monopolize our attention in daily life; they also tend to hog the attention in technology criticism. Marc Steinberg offers a more expansive and nuanced analysis, showing that the ‘platform’ story did not begin in Silicon Valley and is not likely to end there. A rigorous, illuminating book."—Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, author of Personal Stereo"The impressive feat of Steinberg’s book is that it allows both interpretations of platformization to emerge: a fairer crediting of Japanese theories and practices as well as a fuller questioning of global media industry dominance."—Film Quarterly"Readers in many disciplines seeking to better understand how the Android and Apple iOS, Netflix, Amazon, and myriad other everyday commercial experiences have come to be, and how they may change or adapt in ways that Silicon Valley will not necessarily lead, can look to The Platform Economy for global insights and a nuanced analysis of the way words and worlds have been formed, in part, through Japanese iterations of platforms and contents."—The Journal of Popular Culture"The Platform Economy adds a significant dimension to the study of platforms and urges us to think deeply about platformization, as well as the multidirectionality of cultural circulation more broadly."—Critical Inquiry"An important contribution for recapitulating certain concepts in management theory and reconstructing the discursive formation of the term ‘platform.’"—Journal of Japanese Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction1. Contents Discourse: A Platform Prelude2. Platform Typology: From Hardware to Contents3. The Japanese Genesis of Transactional Platform Theory4. Docomo’s i-mode and the Formatting of the Mobile Internet5. Platforms after i-mode: Dwango’s Niconico VideoConclusion: The Platformization of Regional Chat AppsAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA diverse, enriching volume of media analysis from a pioneering thinker in the field Expanding on Siegfried Zielinski’s groundbreaking inquiry into “deep time” of the media, the essays in Variations on Media Thinking further the eminent media theorist’s unique method of expanded hermeneutics, which means for him interpreting technical artifacts as essential parts of our cultural lives. Covering such topics as the televisualized “Holocaust,” the ubiquity of media today, the Internet, the genealogy of sound art, and history’s first hacker movement, these essays further diversify Zielinski’s insight into the hidden layers of media development, which he first articulated in his pioneering work Deep Time of the Media.Including many previously untranslated and scarce essays, these “written time machines” open new lines of investigation for cultural scholars. From the automata of the Arabic-Islamic Renaissance (800–1200) to the largest and loudest techno-event ever, known as The Symphony of Sirens—which transformed Baku in 1922 into an immense music box of modern noise—Variations on Media Thinking covers Zielinski’s inquiries since 1975. Richly illustrated and full of provocation, brilliant insight, and fascinating research, this volume is perfect for students of media archaeology, philosophy, and technology, as well as any adventurous, rigorous thinkers engaged with culture and media.Trade Review"Historians of technology know that any tool is also an instrument of exploration, experiment, and simulation. Siegfried Zielinski reminds us that any technology is also a generator of wonder. In fact, Zielinski does not write media history, he writes world history through the generative lens of media as machines of speculation and imagination. This is a material history of dissent, heretical hermeneutics, and electrified alchemic curiosity."—Matteo Pasquinelli, Karlsruhe University of Art and Design

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Book SynopsisAn ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death.On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities—those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means—and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless. As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life. Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions. Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding.On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions. Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?Trade Review"If Bruno Latour once argued that we have never been modern, then Abou Farman shows convincingly that we have also never, really, been secular. On Not Dying challenges we secularists to recognize that distinctions between mind and matter, ghost and machine, religion and science have only ever been provisional grounds for a secular world that is increasingly in question."—David Valentine, University of Minnesota"For atheists, death is the end of the human being, but for religious believers, there is an afterlife in another world. Abou Farman describes the ambition of secular immortalists as abolitioning death (assumed to be an intrinsic fact of life) through means of technoscience. In this brilliant study of the cryonics movement, Farman has taken the anthropology of science in a highly original and mind-widening direction."—Talal Asad, Graduate Center, City University of New York"Unmissable and vital reading."—Neural"This is no celebration of cryonic ‘immortalism’ but rather a fascinating appraisal of certain existential binds into which we secularists have gotten ourselves and of immortalists’ exploitation of those binds to advance a techno‐utopian vision of a very particular posthuman future."—American Anthropologist"On Not Dying is a wonderfully crafted ethnography which will appeal to a wide array of audiences including, but not restricted to, those interested in STS, anthropology and the history of science."—Somatosphere "The absence of characterological complexity opens a space for both an intensive history of secularist perspectives on mortality, and a cornucopia of philosophical provocations on humanism, temporality, cosmos, and more."—Medical Anthropology Quarterly Table of ContentsContentsPreface: Realm of the PossibleAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Problems of Discontinuity and Indeterminacy in a Secular World1. After Life: Varieties of Immortality in the Secular World2. Immortalism: The History of a Futuristic Movement3. Suspension: Stretching Time between the Finite and the Infinite4. Deanimation: Matter, Materialism, and Personhood beyond Death5. Convergence: Secular Solipsism and the Mind of the Cosmos6. Progress and Despair: The Perverse Dialectics of Immortality as Techno-Civilizing MissionNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death.On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities—those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means—and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless. As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life. Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions. Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding.On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions. Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?Trade Review"If Bruno Latour once argued that we have never been modern, then Abou Farman shows convincingly that we have also never, really, been secular. On Not Dying challenges we secularists to recognize that distinctions between mind and matter, ghost and machine, religion and science have only ever been provisional grounds for a secular world that is increasingly in question."—David Valentine, University of Minnesota"For atheists, death is the end of the human being, but for religious believers, there is an afterlife in another world. Abou Farman describes the ambition of secular immortalists as abolitioning death (assumed to be an intrinsic fact of life) through means of technoscience. In this brilliant study of the cryonics movement, Farman has taken the anthropology of science in a highly original and mind-widening direction."—Talal Asad, Graduate Center, City University of New York"Unmissable and vital reading."—Neural"This is no celebration of cryonic ‘immortalism’ but rather a fascinating appraisal of certain existential binds into which we secularists have gotten ourselves and of immortalists’ exploitation of those binds to advance a techno‐utopian vision of a very particular posthuman future."—American Anthropologist"On Not Dying is a wonderfully crafted ethnography which will appeal to a wide array of audiences including, but not restricted to, those interested in STS, anthropology and the history of science."—Somatosphere "The absence of characterological complexity opens a space for both an intensive history of secularist perspectives on mortality, and a cornucopia of philosophical provocations on humanism, temporality, cosmos, and more."—Medical Anthropology Quarterly Table of ContentsContentsPreface: Realm of the PossibleAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Problems of Discontinuity and Indeterminacy in a Secular World1. After Life: Varieties of Immortality in the Secular World2. Immortalism: The History of a Futuristic Movement3. Suspension: Stretching Time between the Finite and the Infinite4. Deanimation: Matter, Materialism, and Personhood beyond Death5. Convergence: Secular Solipsism and the Mind of the Cosmos6. Progress and Despair: The Perverse Dialectics of Immortality as Techno-Civilizing MissionNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn in-depth look at life in the “smart” city Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies—logistical governance—to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today—it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.Trade Review"Design, Control, Predict presents smart urbanism as both a logistical node and network. Where global flows of data and capital merge with widespread movements toward austerity and surveillance: there we find smart cities emerging on nearly every continent. Yet as Aaron Shapiro’s illuminating ethnographic research demonstrates, each node in that global assemblage is itself a logistical network within which algorithms orchestrate the circulation of bodies and bicycles, carceral logics and cybernetic imaginaries."—Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media"An enticing and informative book that tells a contemporary story of deception and appropriation of public goods."—Journal of Urban Affairs

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Book SynopsisAn in-depth look at life in the “smart” city Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies—logistical governance—to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today—it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.Trade Review"Design, Control, Predict presents smart urbanism as both a logistical node and network. Where global flows of data and capital merge with widespread movements toward austerity and surveillance: there we find smart cities emerging on nearly every continent. Yet as Aaron Shapiro’s illuminating ethnographic research demonstrates, each node in that global assemblage is itself a logistical network within which algorithms orchestrate the circulation of bodies and bicycles, carceral logics and cybernetic imaginaries."—Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media"An enticing and informative book that tells a contemporary story of deception and appropriation of public goods."—Journal of Urban Affairs

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Book SynopsisA personal account of the aging body and advanced technologies by a preeminent philosopher of technologyMedical Technics is a rigorous examination of how medical progress has modified our worlds and contributed to a virtual revolution in longevity. Don Ihde offers a unique autobiographical tour of medical events experienced in a decade, beginning in his 70s. Ihde offers experiential and postphenomenological analyses of technologies such as sonography and microsurgery, and ultimately asks what it means to increasingly become a cyborg. Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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Book SynopsisAn investigation of how-to guides for sensor technologies Sensors are increasingly common within citizen-sensing and DIY projects, but these devices often require the use of a how-to guide. From online instructional videos for troubleshooting sensor installations to handbooks for using and abusing the Internet of Things, the how-to genres and formats of digital instruction continue to expand and develop. As the how-to proliferates, and instructions unfold through multiple aspects of technoscientific practices, Jennifer Gabrys asks why the how-to has become one of the prevailing genres of the digital. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able and actionable through the instructional mode of citizen-sensing projects.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the leadTrade Review"How to Do Thing with Sensors is a relatively condensed argument, considering its complexity. It is one that has the potential to open up its readers to a more nuanced and complex understanding of making and maker culture."—Hyperrhiz"Gabrys encourages those with curiosity to develop and refine questions through the iterative process of making sensors and taking readings. Like a character or reader exploring a new world for the first time, she fosters new modes of engagement with the built world."—Public Books

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Book SynopsisAssesses a promising new approach to restoring the health of our bodies and our planet Most of us are familiar with probiotics added to milk or yogurt to improve gastrointestinal health. In fact, the term refers to any intervention in which life is used to manage life—from the microscopic, like consuming fermented food to improve gut health, to macro approaches such as biological pest control and natural flood management. In this ambitious and original work, Jamie Lorimer offers a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches and an insightful critique of their promise and limitations. During our current epoch—the Anthropocene—human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment, leading to the loss of ecological abundance, diversity, and functionality. Lorimer describes cases in which scientists and managers are working with biological processes to improve human, environmental, and even planetary health, pursuing strategies that stand in contrast to the “antibiotic approach”: Big Pharma, extreme hygiene, and industrial agriculture. The Probiotic Planet focuses on two forms of “rewilding” occurring on vastly different scales. The first is the use of keystone species like wolves and beavers as part of landscape restoration. The second is the introduction of hookworms into human hosts to treat autoimmune disorders. In both cases, the goal is to improve environmental health, whether the environment being managed is planetary or human. Lorimer argues that, all too often, such interventions are viewed in isolation, and he calls for a rethinking of artificial barriers between science and policy. He also describes the stark and unequal geographies of the use of probiotic approaches and examines why these patterns exist. The author’s preface provides a thoughtful discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic as it relates to the probiotic approach. Informed by deep engagement with microbiology, immunology, ecology, and conservation biology as well as food, agriculture, and waste management, The Probiotic Planet offers nothing less than a new paradigm for collaboration between the policy realm and the natural sciences. Trade Review"This brilliant book delivers an incisive reading of probiotic cultural practices today—taking in everything from home fermentation to permaculture to rewilding. Jamie Lorimer expertly shows us that social and scientific projects that aim at re-calibrating microbial, bodily, and ecological worlds are experiments in the politics of symbiosis. In our days of viral peril, The Probiotic Planet is a vital reminder of the multiple futures biology may yet prepare."—Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond"Moving between human intestines and forests patches, The Probiotic Planet maps a diverse and emerging terrain of ecological experimentation, both formal and vernacular. A transdisciplinary analysis that brings detailed attention to scientific practices into dialogue with critical social theory, this book is also a bold and important experiment in its own right."—Heather Anne Swanson, director, Aarhus University Centre for Environmental Humanities "Lorimer unravels the multiplicities of present-day scientific designs for the future."—Los Angeles Review of Books "This book bridges the gap between two widely separated topics: healing the planet by rewilding, and internal sanitation of the body by natural allies."—Anthropos "The book is well referenced... and the text is supported by appropriate and readable tables and charts."—CHOICE Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Life in the Anthropocene1. The Probiotic Turn: Rewilding and Biome Restoration2. Thinking like Gaia: The Science of the Probiotic Turn3. Symbiopolitics: Governing through Keystone Species4. Wild Experiments: The Controlled Decontrolling of Ecological Controls5. Geographies of Dysbiosis: The Patchiness of the Probiotic Turn6. Future-Pasts: The Temporalities of the Probiotic Turn7. Probiotic Value: Putting Keystone Species to WorkConclusions: A Spectrum of ProbioticsAcknowledgmentsGlossary NotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHumanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis In 2016, Antarctica’s Totten Glacier, formed some 34 million years ago, detached from its bedrock, melted from the bottom by warming ocean waters. For the editors of Timescales, this event captures the disjunctive temporalities of our era’s—the Anthropocene’s—ecological crises: the rapid and accelerating degradation of our planet’s life-supporting environment established slowly over millennia. They contend that, to represent and respond to these crises (i.e., climate change, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, species extinction, and biodiversity loss) requires reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the planet’s. Timescales’ collection of lively and thought-provoking essays puts oceanographers, geophysicists, geologists, and anthropologists into conversation with literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists. Together forging new intellectual spaces, they explore the relationship between geological deep time and historical particularity, between ecological crises and cultural expression, between environmental policy and social constructions, between restoration ecology and future imaginaries, and between constructive pessimism and radical (and actionable) hope. Interspersed among these essays are three complementary “etudes,” in which artists describe experimental works that explore the various timescales of ecological crisis. Contributors: Jason Bell, Harvard Law School; Iemanjá Brown, College of Wooster; Beatriz Cortez, California State U, Northridge; Wai Chee Dimock, Yale U; Jane E. Dmochowski, U of Pennsylvania; David A. D. Evans, Yale U; Kate Farquhar; Marcia Ferguson, U of Pennsylvania; Ömür Harmanşah, U of Illinois at Chicago; Troy Herion; Mimi Lien; Mary Mattingly; Paul Mitchell, U of Pennsylvania; Frank Pavia, California Institute of Technology; Dan Rothenberg; Jennifer E. Telesca, Pratt Institute; Charles M. Tung, Seattle U. Trade Review"[Timescales] brings together reflections from experts in a variety of academic disciplines on the relationships between past, present, and future and what that means for a planet in crisis."—Penn Today

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Book SynopsisHumanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis In 2016, Antarctica’s Totten Glacier, formed some 34 million years ago, detached from its bedrock, melted from the bottom by warming ocean waters. For the editors of Timescales, this event captures the disjunctive temporalities of our era’s—the Anthropocene’s—ecological crises: the rapid and accelerating degradation of our planet’s life-supporting environment established slowly over millennia. They contend that, to represent and respond to these crises (i.e., climate change, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, species extinction, and biodiversity loss) requires reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the planet’s. Timescales’ collection of lively and thought-provoking essays puts oceanographers, geophysicists, geologists, and anthropologists into conversation with literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists. Together forging new intellectual spaces, they explore the relationship between geological deep time and historical particularity, between ecological crises and cultural expression, between environmental policy and social constructions, between restoration ecology and future imaginaries, and between constructive pessimism and radical (and actionable) hope. Interspersed among these essays are three complementary “etudes,” in which artists describe experimental works that explore the various timescales of ecological crisis. Contributors: Jason Bell, Harvard Law School; Iemanjá Brown, College of Wooster; Beatriz Cortez, California State U, Northridge; Wai Chee Dimock, Yale U; Jane E. Dmochowski, U of Pennsylvania; David A. D. Evans, Yale U; Kate Farquhar; Marcia Ferguson, U of Pennsylvania; Ömür Harmanşah, U of Illinois at Chicago; Troy Herion; Mimi Lien; Mary Mattingly; Paul Mitchell, U of Pennsylvania; Frank Pavia, California Institute of Technology; Dan Rothenberg; Jennifer E. Telesca, Pratt Institute; Charles M. Tung, Seattle U. Trade Review"[Timescales] brings together reflections from experts in a variety of academic disciplines on the relationships between past, present, and future and what that means for a planet in crisis."—Penn Today

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Book SynopsisA pointed look at the state of tech-based mental healthcare and what we must do to change it Proponents of technology trumpet it as the solution to the massive increase in the mental distress that confronts our nation. They herald the arrival of algorithms, intelligent chatbots, smartphone applications, telemental healthcare services, and more—but are these technological fixes really as good as they seem? In Therapy Tech, Emma Bedor Hiland presents the first comprehensive study of how technology has transformed mental healthcare, showing that this revolution can’t deliver what it promises.Far from providing a solution, technological mental healthcare perpetuates preexisting disparities while relying on the same failed focus on personal responsibility that has let us down before. Through vivid, in-depth case studies, Therapy Tech reveals these problems, covering issues including psychosurveillance on websites like Facebook and 7 Cups of Tea, shortcomings of popular AI “doctors on demand” like Woebot, Wysa, and Joy, and even how therapists are being conscripted into the gig economy.Featuring a vital coda that brings Therapy Tech up to date for the COVID era, this book is the first to give readers a large-scale analysis of mental health technologies and the cultural changes they have enabled. Both a sobering dissection of the current state of mental health and a necessary warning of where things are headed, Therapy Tech makes an important assertion about how to help those in need of mental health services today.Trade Review"Therapy Tech is a spirited, contrarian take on the idea that technology can solve or mitigate the U.S. mental health care crisis. Emma Bedor Hiland convincingly argues that smartphone wellness apps, telemedicine, and therapeutic chatbots will not cure the structural inequalities of the healthcare system; moreover, these mental health technologies carry insidious neoliberal baggage. A thought-provoking, critical exploration into the cultural life of modern mental health technologies."—Elizabeth J. Donaldson, author of Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health"Clear, concise, and accessible, Therapy Tech wades into the massive digital mental healthcare industry, providing readers with front-line reporting on the most recent episode in America’s long history of health-related consumerism. Emma Bedor Hiland shows that increased development of products and platforms—what she calls ‘technological solutionism’—does not improve access to mental healthcare for historically marginalized and under-resourced poor, rural, and racialized communities, and, if unchecked, will result in intensified forms of ‘psychosurveillance.’"—Michael Rembis, director, Center for Disability Studies, University at BuffaloTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Pursuing a Technological Fix1. Mental Wellness by Smartphone App2. Psychosurveillance3. Chatbots and Therapeutic AI4. Telemental Healthcare5. The Future of Mental Health TechnologiesCOVID CodaAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA pointed look at the state of tech-based mental healthcare and what we must do to change it Proponents of technology trumpet it as the solution to the massive increase in the mental distress that confronts our nation. They herald the arrival of algorithms, intelligent chatbots, smartphone applications, telemental healthcare services, and more—but are these technological fixes really as good as they seem? In Therapy Tech, Emma Bedor Hiland presents the first comprehensive study of how technology has transformed mental healthcare, showing that this revolution can’t deliver what it promises.Far from providing a solution, technological mental healthcare perpetuates preexisting disparities while relying on the same failed focus on personal responsibility that has let us down before. Through vivid, in-depth case studies, Therapy Tech reveals these problems, covering issues including psychosurveillance on websites like Facebook and 7 Cups of Tea, shortcomings of popular AI “doctors on demand” like Woebot, Wysa, and Joy, and even how therapists are being conscripted into the gig economy.Featuring a vital coda that brings Therapy Tech up to date for the COVID era, this book is the first to give readers a large-scale analysis of mental health technologies and the cultural changes they have enabled. Both a sobering dissection of the current state of mental health and a necessary warning of where things are headed, Therapy Tech makes an important assertion about how to help those in need of mental health services today.Trade Review"Therapy Tech is a spirited, contrarian take on the idea that technology can solve or mitigate the U.S. mental health care crisis. Emma Bedor Hiland convincingly argues that smartphone wellness apps, telemedicine, and therapeutic chatbots will not cure the structural inequalities of the healthcare system; moreover, these mental health technologies carry insidious neoliberal baggage. A thought-provoking, critical exploration into the cultural life of modern mental health technologies."—Elizabeth J. Donaldson, author of Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health"Clear, concise, and accessible, Therapy Tech wades into the massive digital mental healthcare industry, providing readers with front-line reporting on the most recent episode in America’s long history of health-related consumerism. Emma Bedor Hiland shows that increased development of products and platforms—what she calls ‘technological solutionism’—does not improve access to mental healthcare for historically marginalized and under-resourced poor, rural, and racialized communities, and, if unchecked, will result in intensified forms of ‘psychosurveillance.’"—Michael Rembis, director, Center for Disability Studies, University at BuffaloTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Pursuing a Technological Fix1. Mental Wellness by Smartphone App2. Psychosurveillance3. Chatbots and Therapeutic AI4. Telemental Healthcare5. The Future of Mental Health TechnologiesCOVID CodaAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn examination of the presumed opposition between the natural human body and artificial inanimate objectsProsthesis is a landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, seamlessly integrated (both physically and psychologically) with prosthetics. Here David Wills lays the groundwork for ideas he develops in two of his other books, Dorsality, exploring how technology functions behind or before the human, and Inanimation, giving perspective on what it means to be “alive.” In Prosthesis, Wills promotes the idea that the human body is open to supplementation by artificial addenda that operate both internally or externally and engage it in an unceasing arbitration with the environment. Questioning the opposition between animate and inanimate along with the logic of the automatic prioritization of living flesh, Prosthesis undertakes these assumptions by studying thematics of artificiality through the writings of Freud, Derrida, William Gibson, Peter Greenaway, and others. In the twenty-five years since its first publication, Prosthesis has been a point of reference in the field of disability studies. It has also been recognized for its “prosthetic” writing, consisting of academic and autobiographical voices and styles that are artificially attached to one another. Trade Review"Many of you, many of us know [David Wills's] work and, like me, have admired it for a long time. It is work that I not only admire, but to which I owe a great deal. . . . [Prosthesis] is in my estimation a great book, a magnificent book."—Jacques DerridaTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsOn David Wills and ProsthesisJacques DerridaPreface to 25th Anniversary Edition of Prosthesis1. Hamilton, 19702. Mentone, 18883. Africa, 21st Century4. Berchtesgaden, 19295. Paris, 19766. Rome, 19857. Cambridge, 15538. Menton, 19219. Geneva, 1978NotesBibliography

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Book SynopsisA methodological follow-up to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet The environmental and climatic crises of our time are fundamentally multispecies crises. And the Anthropocene, a time of “human-made” disruptions on a planetary scale, is a disruption of the fabric of life as a whole. The contributors to Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene argue that understanding the multispecies nature of these disruptions requires multispecies methods.Answering methodological challenges posed by the Anthropocene, Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene retools the empirical study of the socioecological chaos of the contemporary moment across the arts, human science, and natural science. Based on critical landscape history, multispecies curiosity, and collaboration across disciplines and knowledge systems, the volume presents thirteen transdisciplinary accounts of practical methodological experimentation, highlighting diverse settings ranging from the High Arctic to the deserts of southern Africa and from the pampas of Argentina to the coral reefs of the Western Pacific, always insisting on the importance of firsthand, “rubber boots” immersion in the field.The methodological companion to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minnesota, 2017), this collection puts forth empirical studies of the multispecies messiness of contemporary life that investigate some of the critical questions of our time.Contributors: Filippo Bertoni, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin; Harshavardhan Bhat, U of Westminster; Nathalia Brichet, U of Copenhagen; Janne Flora, Aarhus U, Denmark; Natalie Forssman, U of British Columbia; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Kirsten Hastrup, U of Copenhagen; Colin Hoag, Smith College; Joseph Klein, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andrew S. Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Daniel Münster, U of Oslo; Ursula Münster, U of Oslo; Jon Rasmus Nyquist, U of Oslo; Katy Overstreet, U of Copenhagen; Pierre du Plessis, U of Oslo; Meredith Root-Bernstein; Heather Anne Swanson, Aarhus U; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, U of California,Santa Cruz; Stine Vestbo.Trade Review "From snorkel fins to worn sneakers, drip torches, boats, dogsleds, and the hooves of a horse, Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene is a bold essay collection that pays attention to the ambulatory prosthetics that we wear or carry into particular fields (ocean, forest, savannah, university) and their many histories—material, colonial, multispecies. Situated knowledge has found its footing."—Melody Jue, author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater "Explicitly cross-disciplinary, [Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene] will be of wide interest to colleges and universities with larger libraries."—CHOICE "Where [Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene] really shines—and offers something new—is in its ethical and political imperative to develop novel methodologies to understand our current moment."—H-Net Reviews

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Book SynopsisExploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet Climate scientists point to permafrost as a “ticking time bomb” for the planet, and from the Arctic, apocalyptic narratives proliferate on the devastating effects permafrost thaw poses to human survival. In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity, both material and social, and something that affects not only life on earth but nonlife, too.Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood approaches the topic of thawing permafrost and the wild new economies and mitigation strategies forming in the far north through a study of the Sakha Republic, Russia’s largest region, and its capital city Yakutsk, which is the coldest city in the world and built on permafrost. Wrigley examines people who are creating commerce out of thawing permafrost, including scientists wishing to recreate the prehistoric “Mammoth steppe” ecosystem by eventually rewilding resurrected woolly mammoths, Indigenous people who forage the tundra for exposed mammoth bodies to sell their tusks, and government officials hoping to keep their city standing as the ground collapses under it. Warming begets thawing begets economic activity— and as a result, permafrost becomes discontinuous, both as land and as a social category, in ways that have implications for the entire planet. Discontinuity, Wrigley shows, eventually evolves into extinction.Offering a new way of defining extinction through the concept of “discontinuity,” Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood presents a meditative and story-focused engagement with permafrost as more than just frozen ground.Trade Review "A myth-busting, pioneering ride through climactic upheaval in the Russian Arctic, where extinction is not an end but a becoming. Charlotte Wrigley’s tales of life and matter, death and survival co-mingle, surprise, disrupt, and provoke. Masterful riffs about time across scales reimagine worlds beyond the hubris of scientific technofixes and other false promises of redemption."—Jennifer E. Telesca, author of Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna "Charlotte Wrigley challenges what we know—or think we know—about permafrost, the finality of extinction, and the role humans play in the Anthropocene. An engaging and thought-provoking read."—Jonathan C. Slaght, author of Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl "Grounded in the permafrost landscapes of northern Siberia, Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood traverses issues fundamental to our time: the meanings of extinction, the experiences of earth-shaking change, the seductions of engineering both genetic and geological. Told through the many lives—and possible death—of permafrost, Charlotte Wrigley’s theoretically rich narrative pushes us to imagine better worlds."—Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait "Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood rewards its readers with its sensory experience and its philosophical meditations, arming them with new questions with which to challenge their own slow-churning surroundings."—Science Magazine "Wrigley’s sustained and disparate application of the notion of discontinuity to a wide array of environmental questions makes for a sophisticated, thought-provoking, and often brilliant exploration that enriches scholars’ understandings of how non-living entities can intrude into human endeavors in unexpected ways."—Andy Bruno, The Russian Review

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Book SynopsisExploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet Climate scientists point to permafrost as a “ticking time bomb” for the planet, and from the Arctic, apocalyptic narratives proliferate on the devastating effects permafrost thaw poses to human survival. In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity, both material and social, and something that affects not only life on earth but nonlife, too.Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood approaches the topic of thawing permafrost and the wild new economies and mitigation strategies forming in the far north through a study of the Sakha Republic, Russia’s largest region, and its capital city Yakutsk, which is the coldest city in the world and built on permafrost. Wrigley examines people who are creating commerce out of thawing permafrost, including scientists wishing to recreate the prehistoric “Mammoth steppe” ecosystem by eventually rewilding resurrected woolly mammoths, Indigenous people who forage the tundra for exposed mammoth bodies to sell their tusks, and government officials hoping to keep their city standing as the ground collapses under it. Warming begets thawing begets economic activity— and as a result, permafrost becomes discontinuous, both as land and as a social category, in ways that have implications for the entire planet. Discontinuity, Wrigley shows, eventually evolves into extinction.Offering a new way of defining extinction through the concept of “discontinuity,” Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood presents a meditative and story-focused engagement with permafrost as more than just frozen ground.Trade Review "A myth-busting, pioneering ride through climactic upheaval in the Russian Arctic, where extinction is not an end but a becoming. Charlotte Wrigley’s tales of life and matter, death and survival co-mingle, surprise, disrupt, and provoke. Masterful riffs about time across scales reimagine worlds beyond the hubris of scientific technofixes and other false promises of redemption."—Jennifer E. Telesca, author of Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Bluefin Tuna "Charlotte Wrigley challenges what we know—or think we know—about permafrost, the finality of extinction, and the role humans play in the Anthropocene. An engaging and thought-provoking read."—Jonathan C. Slaght, author of Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl "Grounded in the permafrost landscapes of northern Siberia, Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood traverses issues fundamental to our time: the meanings of extinction, the experiences of earth-shaking change, the seductions of engineering both genetic and geological. Told through the many lives—and possible death—of permafrost, Charlotte Wrigley’s theoretically rich narrative pushes us to imagine better worlds."—Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait "Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood rewards its readers with its sensory experience and its philosophical meditations, arming them with new questions with which to challenge their own slow-churning surroundings."—Science Magazine "Wrigley’s sustained and disparate application of the notion of discontinuity to a wide array of environmental questions makes for a sophisticated, thought-provoking, and often brilliant exploration that enriches scholars’ understandings of how non-living entities can intrude into human endeavors in unexpected ways."—Andy Bruno, The Russian Review

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