Society and culture: general Books

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Book SynopsisForbidden Narratives: Critical Autobiography as Social Science explores overlapping layers of voices and stories that convey the social relations of psychiatric survivor participation within a community mental health service system. It is written from the perspective of a woman who, in the course of working with the survivor movement, had a physical and emotional breakdown. Ironically, the author found herself personally confronted with issues she typically dealt with only from a distance: as a mental health professional, a researcher, and an activist.The author of this volume writes herself into her work as a major character. Narratives such as this have traditionally been forbidden as outside proper professional standards. Now they are claiming and receiving attention. Forbidden Narratives has the power to speak to a broad audience not only of mental health professionals but also policy makers, sociologists and feminists. It is about the breaking up of professional discourse. It demonstrates and signals profound changes in the social sciences.

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Book SynopsisThis open access handbook presents a multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective on how the ‘digital’ is simultaneously changing Russia and the research methods scholars use to study Russia. It provides a critical update on how Russian society, politics, economy, and culture are reconfigured in the context of ubiquitous connectivity and accounts for the political and societal responses to digitalization. In addition, it answers practical and methodological questions in handling Russian data and a wide array of digital methods. The volume makes a timely intervention in our understanding of the changing field of Russian Studies and is an essential guide for scholars, advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying Russia today. Table of Contents1. Digital Russia Studies: An Introduction.2. The digitalization of Russian politics and political participation.3. E-Government in Russia: Plans, Reality, and Future Outlook.4. Russia’s Digital Economy Program: An Effective Strategy for Digital Transformation?.5. Law and Digitization in Russia.6. Personal Data Protection in Russia.7. Cyber-Crime and Punishment: Security, Information War, and the future of RuNet.8. Digital activism in Russia: The evolution and forms of online participation in an authoritarian state.9. Digital Journalism: Toward a theory of journalistic practice in the twenty-first century.10. Digitalization of Russian education: Changing actors and spaces of governance.11. Shifting the norm: the case of academic plagiarism.12. Digitalization of religion in Russia: adjusting preaching to new formats, channels and platforms.13. Doing Gender Online: Digital Spaces for Identity Politics.14. Digitalization of consumption in Russia: Online platforms, regulations and consumer behavior.15. Digital Art: A sourcebook of ideas for conceptualising new practices, networks and modes of self-expression.16. From Samizdat to New Sincerity. Digital Literature on the Russian-language Internet.17. Run Runet Runaway: The Transformation of the Russian Internet as a Cultural-Historical Object.18. Corpora in text-based Russian studies.19. RuThes Thesaurus for Natural Language Processing.20. Social media based research of interpersonal and group communication in Russia.21. Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its Challenges in the Digital Age.22. Affordances of Digital Archives: A Case of Prozhito archive of personal diaries.23. Open Government Data in Russia.24. Topic modeling in Russia: current approaches and issues in methodology.25. Topic Modeling Russian History.26. Studying ideational change in Russian politics with topic models and word embeddings.27. Deep Learning for the Russian Language.28. Automatic Sentiment Analysis of Texts: Case of Russian.29. Social Network Analysis in Russian Literary Studies.30. Tweeting Russian politics: studying on-line political dynamics.31. The State of the Art: Surveying Digital Russian Art History.32. Geospatial data analysis in Russia’s geoweb.

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Book SynopsisThis book brings together the work of historians and sociologists with perspectives from media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and information studies to address the origins, practices, and possible futures of contemporary machine learning. From its foundations in 1950s and 1960s pattern recognition and neural network research to the modern-day social and technological dramas of DeepMind’s AlphaGo, predictive political forecasting, and the governmentality of extractive logistics, machine learning has become controversial precisely because of its increased embeddedness and agency in our everyday lives. How can we disentangle the history of machine learning from conventional histories of artificial intelligence? How can machinic agents’ capacity for novelty be theorized? Can reform initiatives for fairness and equity in AI and machine learning be realized, or are they doomed to cooptation and failure? And just what kind of “learning” does machine learning truly represent? We empirically address these questions and more to provide a baseline for future research.Chapter 2 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.Table of Contents

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Book SynopsisVirtual Realities presents a ground-breaking application of phenomenology as a critical method to explore the impact of immersive media. Specific case studies examine 360-degree documentary productions about trauma, virtual military simulations, VR exposure therapy for anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder, and the emerging debate about regulating violent content in immersive media gaming. By addressing these texts primarily as experiences, Virtual Realities deploys an analytic and critical methodology that is sensitive to the bodily and cognitive impact of immersive media, especially via the body of an appropriately attentive researcher-critic. Virtual Realities provokes a rethinking of many of the taken-for-granted ideas and assumptions circulating in the field of immersive media. These include concepts of empathy, embodiment, the affective impact of textual and immersive properties on the users’ experience, as well as the “gee-whizz” mentality often associated with approaches to the medium. The case studies provide fresh engagement with immersive media such as cinematic VR at a time when dominant attitudes about the technology display an evangelical fascination with VR and other mixed realities as inexorably beneficial. Virtual Realities makes a compelling case for VR-phenomenology to be employed as a methodology by humanities scholars and also in cross-disciplinary applications of immersive media in fields such as psychology, human-computer interaction studies and the health sciences.Table of Contents1 Introduction2 Phenomenology and the Virtual Reality Researcher-Critic 3 On the Excitement of Measuring the Virtual Reality Audience 4 Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy 5 Virtual Reality, Trauma and Empathy 6 Regulation of Violent Content in Virtual Reality 7 Conclusion

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Book SynopsisMaking Energy Markets charts the emergence and early evolution of electricity markets in western Europe, covering the decade from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Liberalising electricity marked a radical deviation from the established paradigm of state-controlled electricity systems which had become established across Europe after the Second World War. By studying early liberalisation processes in Britain and the Nordic region, and analysing the role of the EEC, the book shows that the creation of electricity markets involved political decisions about the feasibility and desirability of introducing competition into electricity supply industries. Competition introduced risks, so in designing the process politicians needed to evaluate who the likely winners and losers might be and the degree to which competition would impact key national industries reliant on cross-subsidies from the electricity sector, in particular coal mining, nuclear power and energy intensive production. The book discusses how an understanding of the origins of electricity markets and their political character can inform contemporary debates about renewables and low carbon energy transitions. Trade Review“This book is therefore neither a history of technology work nor even a history of energy. However, Bolton succeeds in making understandable a particular period, that of the incomplete transformation of the electrical sys­tems inherited from the second Industrial Revolution into the fundamental infrastructures of energy transitions.” (Yves Bouvier, Technology and Culture, Vol. 64 (2), April, 2023)Table of ContentsIntroduction.- Britain: Inventing competition.- Trade-offs: Competition or Cash?.- Competition: A work in progress.- Europe: The economic logics of trade.- National electricity regimes: France and Germany.- The political market.- Power exchange: Norwegian origins.- Constructing a multinational market.- Conclusion: Remaking Markets.

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Book SynopsisUsing a Case Study Approach for Investigating the Status Quo and Future Options of AI-based Social Assessment in Public Service Provision.- Inclusive Technology Co-Design for Participatory AI.- Ethical Aspects of Research on AI-based Social Assessment.- Participatory Action Research for AI in Social Services: An Example of Local Practices from Catalonia.- Specialists and Algorithms: Implementation of AI in the Delivery of Unemployment Services in Estonia.- AI Use in the Asylum Procedure in Germany: Exploring Perspectives with Refugees and Supporters on Assessment Criteria and Beyond.- Social Assessment for the Targeted Subsidies Plan as a Social Service Provision in Iran: AI Application in the Targeted Subsidies Plan.- Social Assessment and Cultural Resistance: The Public Distribution System in Tamil Nadu, India.- The Role of AI in Effective Social Protection Delivery: The National Cash Transfer Programme in Nigeria.- The Potential of Artificial Intelligence in the Assessment of System of Social Integration of Veterans of the Russian-Ukrainian War.- Assessment for AI in Social Services: Community Virtual Nursing Home in Shanghai, China.- AI Integration in Mental Health Services: Examining Trends in the US and Peoria, Illinois.- Towards Culture-Sensitive, Responsive and Participatory AI.

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Book SynopsisChapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Theory: The construction of a field of global social policy.- Chapter 3: 1919-2019: Social security policies in the ILO and the World Bank.- Chapter 4: Methodology: A discursive analysis of epistemic infrastructures.- Chapter 5: The development of a shared ontological framework in the interwar and WWII period.- Chapter 6: The development of a shared ontological framework after WWII.- Chapter 7: The development of a shared evaluative framework.- Chapter 8: Discussion: The making of global social policy through numbers.- Chapter 9: Conclusion.

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Book SynopsisChapter 1: Design Participation for Social and Environmental Change.- Chapter 2: Design Participation Work and the Workshop as Its Microcosm.- Chapter 3: Extending Participation into Use Time and Design-in-Use.- Chapter 4: Design Participation in Steering Wide Sectoral Change.- Chapter 5: Diversifying Participation with Mixes and Ecologies of Knowledge.- Chapter 6: Zooming Out to Map Participation Approaches Through Producer–User Configurations.- Chapter 7: Scoping and Planning Design Participation.- Chapter 8: Conclusions: What Design Participation Can Offer and How to Overcome its Pitfalls.

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Book SynopsisChapter 1. Introduction: AI Interdisciplinarity and the Rule of Law – The Age of Legal Tech and Digital Governance Shaped by Digital Ethics, Responsible AI, and AI4People (Armando Aliu & Dorian Aliu).- Chapter 2. The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Thinking about AI (John Tasioulas).-  Chapter 3. The Trio of Computational Jurisprudence: History, Present, and Future (Surong Zhu & Guoyang Ma).- Chapter 4. Contribution to an Algorithm for the Rule of Law (Mohamed Ben Achour).- Chapter  5. From Procedural Fetishism to Substantive Due Process in AI Governance and Digital Constitutionalism (Monika Zalnieriute).- Chapter 6. The Right to Be Forgotten Meets Machine Learning: Evaluating the Legal Feasibility of Unlearning Methods (Liane Rose Colonna & Tobias Oechtering).- Chapter 7. Towards a General Principle of Vulnerability: Is Private Law Ready for the Digital Age? (Begoña Gonzalez Otero).- Chapter 8. International Law between Enhanced Anthropocentrism and Post-Anthropocentrism: The Need for an International Treaty on Bio-Technological Ethics (Themistoklis Tzimas).- Chapter  9. The EU AI Act and the Future of AI Governance: Implications for U.S. Firms and Policymakers (David Krause).- Chapter 10. Conclusion: Future of AI and the Rule of Law – Ethics and Regulatory Framework in Legal Tech and Digital Governance (Armando Aliu, Ruta Liepina, Sofia Klymchuk, Ikran Abdirahman, Beatrice Panattoni, Josh Lee Kok Thong & Hellen Van Der Kroef).

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Book SynopsisForeword: Patterning a Sustainable Future (Karen O’Brien).- Chapter 1. The Prefigurative Politics of Present Transformation (Siddharth Sareen and Sirkku Juhola).- Part I: Urban Sites of Experimentation and Contestation.-Chapter 2. Acclimatising to the Future: Prefiguration and Urban Experimentation in Public Policy (Bård Torvetjønn Haugland and Timo von Wirth).- Chapter 3. Prefigurative Politics in Citizen Science: The Golf Vinor Project as a Case of Present Transformations (David Stella).- Chapter 4. Prefiguring Consumption Reduction in Shadow Networks: Recirculating Resources, Knowledge and Skills in Urban Tool Libraries and Community Bike Workshops (Simon Batterbury, Sabrina Chakori and Carlos Uxo).- Chapter 5. Starting by Doing: Ethical Orientations for Open-Ended Prefigurative Action (Bob Grumiau and Ian Hughes).- Chapter 6. Prefigurative politics of post-growth futures in the making: learning from transformative practices that leverage (temporary) convivial space (Steven R. McGreevy, Corelia Baibarac-Duignan and Maximilian Spiegelberg).- Part II: Spaces of conviviality and politics.- Chapter 7. Broadening the Understanding of Deconstruction in Prefigurative Social Spaces (Giuseppe Feola).- Chapter 8. Prefigurative Politics in Action: Youth Climate Activism and Arendt’s Politics of New Beginnings (Turkan Firinci Orman).- Chapter 9. A Multi-Political Reflection on the transformative potential of citizen panels: Insights from five case studies (Maria Luisa Lode, Samyajit Basu, Cathy Macharis).- Chapter 10. Laughter, role-play, and immersion: Rediscovering the audience in prefigurative politics through carnival (Frank Eckerle).- Chapter 11. Community-based proleptic environmentalism: food, energy, and Kafka’s ‘Weg-von-hier’ (Gerald Taylor Aiken).- Chapter 12. Imagining futures in the present: Conceptualising prefigurative impulses through the politics of organising (Kavitha Ravikumar).- Chapter 13. Inhabitation as Prefigurative Politics and Source of Political Transformations (Jens Brandt and Jan Lilliendahl Larsen).- Chapter 14. Prefiguring Conservation, Peace, and Self-Determination in the Salween Peace Park in Karen State, Myanmar (Zali Fung and Sheila Htoo).- Part III: Sectoral movements.-  Chapter 15.Climate Change as a Crisis of Recognition: Prefigurative Politics of Socio-Ecological Movements for Food Sovereignty in Brazil (Juliana E. Goncalves).- Chapter 16.The potential role of the law clinics in prefigurative law and politics: Environmental law clinics as a case study (Zerrin Savasan).- Chapter 17. Prefiguring healthcare: Community-driven digital therapeutics and the politics of patient innovation (João Rocha-Gomes).- Chapter 18. Prefigurative Politics of Transformations in Land Use Decision-Making Systems in Europe (Simeon Vano, Julia Leventon, Peter Mederly).- Chapter 19. For a More-Than-Human Politics of Short Food Supply Chains in Times of Human-Plant Migrations (Elisa T. Bertuzzo).

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Book SynopsisThe contemporary fields of the study of culture, the humanities and the social sciences are unfolding in a dynamic constellation of cultural turns. This book provides a comprehensive overview of these theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking reorientations. It discusses the value of the new focuses and their analytical categories for the work of a wide range of disciplines. In addition to chapters on the interpretive, performative, reflexive, postcolonial, translational, spatial and iconic turns, it discusses emerging directions of research.Drawing on a wealth of international research, this book maps central topics and approaches in the study of culture and thus provides systematic impetus for changed disciplinary and transdisciplinary research in the humanities and beyond – e.g., in the fields of sociology, economics and the study of religion.This work is the English translation by Adam Blauhut of an influential German book that has now been completely revised. It is a stimulating example of a cross-cultural translation between different theoretical cultures and also the first critical synthesis of cultural turns in the English-speaking world.

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Book SynopsisEven seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.

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Book SynopsisA chronicle, a memoir, a reflection on the pandemic, and a cultural analysis of the new spatial, social, and epistemological forms that have arisen with it, this volume weaves together cultural history, aesthetics, and urban and digital studies. It looks at the particular ways in which the possibilities for touch, touching and being touched, both physically and affectively, are reconfigured by the pandemic. How are love, care, and humanity’s complex relationships with technology and nature played out in the interval between abandoned city centres and digitally mediated gatherings? How can we comprehend the reconfiguration of relationships through the human response to the pandemic as an experience that concerns us all but affects each of us in different ways? How do we think through the technological and material dependencies that the pandemic situation establishes? And how does this allow us to imagine the world beyond the pandemic—both utopian and dystopian? The essays in this book explore the new forms of intimacy and distance that are developing in the wake of COVID-19, offering a distinctive, topical analysis in the fields of urban and digital studies.

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Book SynopsisThis book offers to academic and general public readers timely reflections about our relationships to violence. Taking cues from the self-reflexivity, themes, and subject matters of Holocaust, queer, and Black studies, this large group of diverse intellectuals wrestles with questions that connect past, present and future: where do I stand in relation to violence? What is my attitude toward that adjacency? Whose story gets to be told by whom? What story do I take this image to be telling? How do I co-witness to another’s suffering? How do I honor the agency and resilience of family members or historical personages? How do past violence and injustice connect to the present? In smart, self-conscious, passionate, and often painfully beautiful prose, cultural practitioners, historians and cultural studies scholars such as Angelika Bammer, Doris Bergen, Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch, Priscilla Layne, Mark Roseman, Leo Spitzer, Susan R. Suleiman and Viktor Witkowski explore such questions, inviting readers to do the same. By making available compelling examples of thinkers performing their own work within the cauldron of crises that came to a boil in 2020 and continued into the next year, this volume proposes strategies for moving forward with hope.

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Book SynopsisMemory in the Balkans has often been described as binding, authoritative, and non-negotiable, functioning as a banner of war. This book challenges such a one-dimensional representation and offers a more nuanced analysis that accommodates frequently ignored instances of transnational solidarity, dialogue, communal mourning and working through a difficult past. Exploring a broad range of memorial practices, the book focuses on the ways in which cultural memory is mediated, performed and critically reworked by literature and the arts in the former Yugoslavia. Against the methodological nationalism of works that study Serbian, Croatian, or Bosniak culture as self-contained, this book examines post-Yugoslav literature, film, visual culture, and politicized art practices from a supranational angle. Not solely focusing on traumatic memories, but also exploring how post-Yugoslav cultural practices mobilize memory for a politics of hope, this volume moves beyond the trauma paradigm that still dominates memory studies. In its scope and approach, the book shows the relevance of the cultural memory of Eastern European citizens and the contribution they can offer to the building of Europe’s shared cultural memory and transnational identity.

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Book Synopsis This book provides an analysis of the forms and functions of Holocaust memorialisation in human rights museums by asking about the impact of global memory politics on how we imagine the present and the future. It compares three human rights museums and their respective emplotment of the Holocaust and seeks to illuminate how, in this specific setting, memory politics simultaneously function as future politics because they delineate a normative ideal of the citizen-subject, its set of values and aspirations for the future: that of the historically aware human rights advocate. More than an ethical practice, engaging with the Holocaust is used as a means of asserting one’s standing on "the right side of history"; the memorialisation of the Holocaust has thus become a means of governmentality, a way of governing contemporary citizen-subjects. The linking of public memory of the Holocaust with the human rights project is often presented as highly beneficial for all members of what is often called the "global community". Yet this book argues that this specific constellation of memory also has the ability to function as an exercise of power, and thus runs the risk of reinforcing structural oppression. With its novel theoretical approach this book not only contributes to Memory Studies but also connects Holocaust memory to Studies of Global Governmentality and the debate on decolonising memory politics.

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Book SynopsisRecent years have seen a wealth of new scholarship on the history of photography, cinema, digital media, and video games, yet less attention has been devoted to earlier forms of visual culture. The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic proliferation of new technologies, devices, and print processes, which provided growing audiences with access to more visual material than ever before. This volume brings together the best aspects of interdisciplinary scholarship to enhance our understanding of the production, dissemination, and consumption of visual media prior to the predominance of photographic reproduction. By setting these examples against the backdrop of demographic, educational, political, commercial, scientific, and industrial shifts in Central Europe, these essays reveal the diverse ways that innovation in visual culture affected literature, philosophy, journalism, the history of perception, exhibition culture, and the representation of nature and human life in both print and material culture in local, national, transnational, and global contexts.

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Book SynopsisThe beach confronts us with crucial issues of our times: migration, postcolonial power structures and mass tourism, climate change and pollution as well as gender and burkini swimwear controversies are examples of the numerous conflicts, discourses and practices that manifest within this liminal zone and that find their focal point there. The interdisciplinary volume understands ‘the beach’ as a (border) phenomenon in its own right and contributes to the new field of beach studies. It takes its point of departure from this changing image of ‘the beach’ to explore how its topographies, experiences and cultural significations are constructed through art, society and culture and how ‘the beach’ shapes poetics and aesthetic strategies in literature, film, photography, painting, music and performance. It aims to gain systematic insights from an analysis of historically and geographically specific varieties of the beach and to create a critical awareness for the contextual implications of contemporary discussions revolving around ‘the beach’.

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