Search results for ""Author Banu Subramaniam""

What is meat? Is it simply food to consume, or a metaphor for our own bodies? Can “bloody” vegan burgers, petri dish beef, live animals, or human milk be categorized as meat? In pursuing these questions, the contributors to Meat! trace the shifting boundaries of the meanings of meat across time, geography, and cultures. In studies of chicken, fish, milk, barbecue, fake meat, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, exotic meat, frozen meat, and other manifestations of meat, they highlight meat's entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From the imperial politics embedded in labeling canned white tuna as “the chicken of the sea” to the relationship between beef bans, yoga, and bodily purity in Hindu nationalist politics, the contributors demonstrate how meat is an ideal vantage point from which to better understand transnational circuits of power and ideology as well as the histories of colonialism, ableism, and sexism. Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Irina Aristarkhova, Sushmita Chatterjee, Mel Y. Chen, Kim Q. Hall, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Anita Mannur, Elspeth Probyn, Parama Roy, Banu Subramaniam, Angela Willey, Psyche Williams-Forson

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Behind the euphoric narrative of India as an emerging world power lies a complex and evolving relationship between science and religion. Evoking the rich mythology of comingled worlds where humans, animals, and gods transform each other and ancient history, Banu Subramaniam demonstrates how Hindu nationalism sutures an ideal past to technologies of the present to make bold claims about the Vedic Sciences and the scientific Vedas. Moving beyond a critique of India’s emerging bionationalism, this book explores the generative possibility of myth and story, interweaving compelling new stories into a rich analysis that animates alternative imaginaries and “other” worlds of possibilities.

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Behind the euphoric narrative of India as an emerging world power lies a complex and evolving relationship between science and religion. Evoking the rich mythology of comingled worlds where humans, animals, and gods transform each other and ancient history, Banu Subramaniam demonstrates how Hindu nationalism sutures an ideal past to technologies of the present to make bold claims about the Vedic Sciences and the scientific Vedas. Moving beyond a critique of India’s emerging bionationalism, this book explores the generative possibility of myth and story, interweaving compelling new stories into a rich analysis that animates alternative imaginaries and “other” worlds of possibilities.

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What is meat? Is it simply food to consume, or a metaphor for our own bodies? Can “bloody” vegan burgers, petri dish beef, live animals, or human milk be categorized as meat? In pursuing these questions, the contributors to Meat! trace the shifting boundaries of the meanings of meat across time, geography, and cultures. In studies of chicken, fish, milk, barbecue, fake meat, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, exotic meat, frozen meat, and other manifestations of meat, they highlight meat's entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From the imperial politics embedded in labeling canned white tuna as “the chicken of the sea” to the relationship between beef bans, yoga, and bodily purity in Hindu nationalist politics, the contributors demonstrate how meat is an ideal vantage point from which to better understand transnational circuits of power and ideology as well as the histories of colonialism, ableism, and sexism. Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Irina Aristarkhova, Sushmita Chatterjee, Mel Y. Chen, Kim Q. Hall, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Anita Mannur, Elspeth Probyn, Parama Roy, Banu Subramaniam, Angela Willey, Psyche Williams-Forson

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"Minding the gap" while using a wheelchair on the London Underground goes beyond a sharp eye and careful foot placement to avoid a fall: it can entail carrying and deploying a portable ramp to embark and disembark or carefully mapping out a custom route ahead of time. The extensive infrastructure of London's public transportation system requires constant improvisation from users who move through the system differently than nondisabled people do. Centering the voices of disabled passengers, Hacking the Underground highlights how marginalized groups subvert and ultimately transform infrastructures, actively shaping them. Raquel Velho draws on emancipatory action research in London, capturing the hegemonic character of infrastructures without losing the experiences and actions of marginalized users. Proposing a crip feminist and profoundly relational approach to infrastructure, Velho illustrates how the built environment holds the potential for both inclusionary and exclusionary world-building.

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Data, perilous and powerful, is both a worldmaking and a dismantling force. The collection of data about queer lives and bodies, the consequences of data analysis for queer subjects, and considerations of privacy and consent often present ethical dilemmas even as queer data expands our understanding of who and what counts. The need for queer analyses and perspectives has taken on a new sense of urgency in light of hostile antiqueer policies by major technology companies, the security theater of airports, the disproportionate rates of policing queer people and people of color, digital surveillance in border security, and the proliferation of digital health records. Gathering wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversations into one rich volume, Queer Data Studies challenges readers to rethink how the extraction, circulation, modeling, governance, and use of data affects queer subjects and, at the same time, to consider how the power of data might be harnessed in the service of queer ethics. Contributors take a capacious approach to data, drawing from a range of sources, including stories, sounds, medical data, police data, maps, and algorithmic modeling. This anthology engages intersectional, decolonial, feminist, queer, and trans research, advancing ongoing dialogues about data across the social sciences, humanities, and applied sciences.

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"Minding the gap" while using a wheelchair on the London Underground goes beyond a sharp eye and careful foot placement to avoid a fall: it can entail carrying and deploying a portable ramp to embark and disembark or carefully mapping out a custom route ahead of time. The extensive infrastructure of London's public transportation system requires constant improvisation from users who move through the system differently than nondisabled people do. Centering the voices of disabled passengers, Hacking the Underground highlights how marginalized groups subvert and ultimately transform infrastructures, actively shaping them. Raquel Velho draws on emancipatory action research in London, capturing the hegemonic character of infrastructures without losing the experiences and actions of marginalized users. Proposing a crip feminist and profoundly relational approach to infrastructure, Velho illustrates how the built environment holds the potential for both inclusionary and exclusionary world-building.

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Fifty-plus years of media fearmongering coupled with targeted breed bans have produced what could be called “America’s Most Wanted” dog: the pit bull. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, competing narratives began to change the meaning of “pit bull.” Increasingly represented as loving members of mostly white, middle-class, heteronormative families, pit bulls and pit bull–type dogs are now frequently seen as victims rather than perpetrators, beings deserving not fear or scorn but rather care and compassion. Drawing from the increasingly contentious world of human/dog politics and featuring rich ethnographic research among dogs and their advocates, Bad Dog explores how relationships between humans and animals not only reflect but actively shape experiences of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, breed, and species. Harlan Weaver proposes a critical and queer reading of pit bull politics and animal advocacy, challenging the zero-sum logic through which care for animals is seen as detracting from care for humans. Introducing understandings rooted in examinations of what it means for humans to touch, feel, sense, and think with and through relationships with nonhuman animals, Weaver suggests powerful ways to seek justice for marginalized humans and animals together.

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Fifty-plus years of media fearmongering coupled with targeted breed bans have produced what could be called “America’s Most Wanted” dog: the pit bull. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, competing narratives began to change the meaning of “pit bull.” Increasingly represented as loving members of mostly white, middle-class, heteronormative families, pit bulls and pit bull–type dogs are now frequently seen as victims rather than perpetrators, beings deserving not fear or scorn but rather care and compassion. Drawing from the increasingly contentious world of human/dog politics and featuring rich ethnographic research among dogs and their advocates, Bad Dog explores how relationships between humans and animals not only reflect but actively shape experiences of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, breed, and species. Harlan Weaver proposes a critical and queer reading of pit bull politics and animal advocacy, challenging the zero-sum logic through which care for animals is seen as detracting from care for humans. Introducing understandings rooted in examinations of what it means for humans to touch, feel, sense, and think with and through relationships with nonhuman animals, Weaver suggests powerful ways to seek justice for marginalized humans and animals together.

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Data, perilous and powerful, is both a worldmaking and a dismantling force. The collection of data about queer lives and bodies, the consequences of data analysis for queer subjects, and considerations of privacy and consent often present ethical dilemmas even as queer data expands our understanding of who and what counts. The need for queer analyses and perspectives has taken on a new sense of urgency in light of hostile antiqueer policies by major technology companies, the security theater of airports, the disproportionate rates of policing queer people and people of color, digital surveillance in border security, and the proliferation of digital health records. Gathering wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversations into one rich volume, Queer Data Studies challenges readers to rethink how the extraction, circulation, modeling, governance, and use of data affects queer subjects and, at the same time, to consider how the power of data might be harnessed in the service of queer ethics. Contributors take a capacious approach to data, drawing from a range of sources, including stories, sounds, medical data, police data, maps, and algorithmic modeling. This anthology engages intersectional, decolonial, feminist, queer, and trans research, advancing ongoing dialogues about data across the social sciences, humanities, and applied sciences.

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Today we live in times of proliferating fears. The daily updates on the ongoing "war on terror" amplify fear and anxiety as if they were necessary and important aspects of our reality. Concerns about the environment increasingly take center-stage, as stories and images abound about deadly viruses, alien species invasions, scarcity of oil, water, food; safety of GMOs, biological weapons, and fears of overpopulation. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties addresses how such environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the 'enemy Other'. In these highly original and thought-provoking essays, Making Threats focuses on five themes: security, scarcity, purity, circulation and terror. No other book has systematically examined the proliferation of fear in the context of current world events and from such a multidisciplinary perspective. It consolidates in one place cutting edge research and reflection on how the contemporary landscape of fear shapes and is shaped by environmental and biological discourses. By uncovering the linguistic tools that make fear resonate in the public consciousness, by identifying the interests that create or are sustained by fears, in short by giving fears histories, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties engages with some of the most potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.

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