Search results for ""mit press""

Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval tells the story of an unlikely partnership between June Jordan and R. Buckminster Fuller, and their attempt to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots.In the tense days leading up to the 2020 American elections, then-candidate for Pennsylvania State Senate Nikil Saval addressed a virtual audience at the Harvard GSD to tell a story about Black feminist writer June Jordan and a little-known project that resulted from the aftermath of the 1964 Harlem riot. The events of police brutality and community grieving made a lasting impression on Jordan, who, while known for her work as a poet, playwright, and activist, responded with a proposal for a multiple-tower housing design. Through an unlikely partnership with R. Buckminster Fuller, Jordan’s “Skyrise for Harlem” project offered a Futuristic vision for Harlem that argued for environmental redesign: “it is architecture, conceived of in its fullest meaning as

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How the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.How does the world form itself? How does it create itself as a world? And how do we understand the role of the visual in this regard? Most responses to these questions within cultural theory and visual culture refer to the rise of globalization, thus highlighting the acceleration of exchanges, the proliferation of information and communication devices, and the multiplication of globally circulated goods and images that characterize the world we live in. Visual Cultures as World Forming takes a different approach by focusing on the taking place of the world, a creative act that knows no economic return. This taking place does not lead to more proliferation of goods, additional financial exchanges, further communications, or an increase in the distribution of visual material, but leads to the continued “worlding” of the

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A dizzying trip through the mind(s) of the provocative and influential thinker Nick Land.During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land's unique work, variously described as “rabid nihilism,” “mad black deleuzianism,” and “cybergothic,” developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of “continental philosophy” —a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British “speculative realist” philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers—writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers—who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of ru

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The first career retrospective of activist photographer Brian Weil, whose work and practice explored insular cultures.This book offers the first career retrospective of Brian Weil (1954-1996), an artist whose photographs pushed viewers into a deeply unsteadying engagement with insular communities and subcultures. A younger contemporary of such participant-observer photographers as Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, Weil took photographs that foreground the complex relationships between photographer and subject, and between photograph and viewer. Weil was a member of ACT UP and the founder of New York City's first needle exchange, and his photographs became inextricably tied to his activist practice. His late work, an extensive series of portraits whose subjects bear witness to the emerging AIDS pandemic, is included here, along with selections from several earlier and concurrent projects: Sex (underground sex and bondage participants), Miami Crime (homicide scenes inve

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How survivors of the Covid-19 pandemic battling long-term disabling conditions are fighting for recognition and research—and helping to transform healthcare for many overlooked diseases.To the world’s public health authorities, Covid-19 would be either a deadly disease for some or a simple respiratory illness for most, its symptoms clearing up in just a matter of weeks. But then tens of millions around the world got sick and stayed sick. With scientists and doctors caught off guard, these Long Covid patients often found solace only with one another, organizing support groups across oceans and continents while ill in bed. In The Long Haul, CNN journalist Ryan Prior weaves his own life, the stories of activist patients, and the latest science into a captivating tale of regular people crying out for care that actually works.What Covid “long haulers” found was that their new illness was not so new. In fact, it resembled other post-viral

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Why catastrophic risks are more dangerous than you think, and how populism makes them worse.Did you know that you’re more likely to die from a catastrophe than in a car crash? The odds that a typical US resident will die from a catastrophic event—for example, nuclear war, bioterrorism, or out-of-control artificial intelligence—have been estimated at 1 in 6. That’s fifteen times more likely than a fatal car crash and thirty-one times more likely than being murdered. In What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, Andrew Leigh looks at catastrophic risks and how to mitigate them, arguing provocatively that the rise of populist politics makes catastrophe more likely. Leigh explains that pervasive short-term thinking leaves us unprepared for long-term risks. Politicians sweat the small stuff—granular policy details of legislation and regulation—but rarely devote much attention to reducing long-term risks. Pop

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How our understanding of and relationship to hedgehogs reveals the complex interactions between culture, technology, bodies, conservation, and care for other animals.Across the globe, the bumbling hedgehog has been framed in a variety of ways throughout history—as a symbol of both good and bad luck, of transformation, of vengeance, and of wit and reincarnation. In recent years, it has also, in different parts of the world, been viewed as a pest for its predation on ground-nesting birds and has thus become a target for culling. In Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness, Laura McLauchlan explores how human actors have interacted with hedgehogs and other species through time and attends to the questions these interactions raise when it comes to ending and preserving life in the name of species conservation and wildlife rehabilitation.Grounded in rich empirical material and careful critique, Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness traces the author’s own more-t

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A rich view of inclusive education at the intersection of language, literacy, and technology—drawing on case study research in a diverse full-inclusion US school before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.Despite advancing efforts at integration, the segregation of students with disabilities from their nondisabled peers persists. In the United States, 34 percent of all students with disabilities spend at least 20 percent of their instructional time in segregated classrooms. For students with intellectual or multiple disabilities, segregated placement soars to 80 percent. In Voices on the Margins, Yenda Prado and Mark Warschauer provide an ethnography of an extraordinary full-inclusion public charter school in the western United States—Future Visions Academy. And they ask: What does it mean to be inclusive in today’s schools with their increasingly pervasive use of digital technologies?Voices on the Margins examines the ways di

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Why immunization must be made mandatory in times of vaccine hesitancy, and how we can design and implement immunization policies in a practical, trustworthy, and democratic way.We live in perilous times when a significant number of citizens are either defiantly antivaccination or hesitant to accept vaccinations for themselves or for their children. In Inducing Immunity?, legal philosopher Roland Pierik and bioethicist Marcel Verweij, explore ways to regulate collective immunization in as democratic a manner as possible. Approaching the problem as a matter of a conflict between the responsibility of government to protect public health and the basic right to freedom of citizens, Pierik and Verweij argue that John Stuart Mill’s harm principle—the idea that individuals should be free to act so long as their actions do not harm others—offers a strong basis for coercive immunization policies.Covering childhood immunization policies, as well as

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A groundbreaking text on the history of the use of patents in architecture.Although patents existed in Renaissance Italy and even in Confucian thought, it was not until the middle third of the nineteenth century that architects embraced the practice of patenting in significant numbers. Patents could ensure, as they did for architects’ engineering brethren, the economic and cultural benefits afforded by exclusive intellectual property rights. But patent culture was never directly translatable to the field of architecture, which tended to negotiate issues of technological innovation in the context of the more abstract issues of artistic influence and formal expression. In Prior Art, scholar Peter Christensen offers the first full-scale monographic treatment of this complex relationship between art and invention.Christensen’s method, a site-oriented approach steeped in multinational and multilingual archival work, is geared toward unifying fractur

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A provocative edited collection that takes an original approach toward the black box of military technology, surveillance, and AI—and reveals the aesthetic dimension of warfare.War and Aesthetics gathers leading artists, political scientists, and scholars to outline the aesthetic dimension of warfare and offer a novel perspective on its contemporary character and the construction of its potential futures. Edited by a team of four scholars, Jens Bjering, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Solveig Gade, and Christine Strandmose Toft, this timely volume examines warfare through the lens of aesthetics, arguing that the aesthetic configurations of perception, technology, and time are central to the artistic engagement with warfare, just as they are key to military AI, weaponry, and satellite surveillance.People mostly think of war as the violent manifestation of a political rationality. But when war is viewed through the lens of aesthesis—meaning perce

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Forthcoming from the MIT Press

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Forthcoming from the MIT Press

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The story of a quest to uncover the evolutionary history of consciousness from a leading theoretical psychologist.We feel, therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? Weaving together intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, Nicholas Humphrey describes in Sentience his quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind.The goal is to solve the hard problem: to explain the wondrous, eerie fact of “phenomenal consciousness”—the redness of a poppy, the sweetness of honey, the pain of a bee sting. What does this magical dimension of experience amount to? What is it for? And why has it evolved? Humphrey presents here his new solution. He prop

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A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade.I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.On the last day of December 2009, Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses, reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bow

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The nature of olfaction; its importance for understanding perennial issues of philosophy of mind, perception, and consciousness; and its implications for cognitive neuroscience.What are smells? Despite the best efforts of philosophy and the chemosciences, the question remains vexing—but no more perplexing than the historical lapse of the past centuries to seriously consider a sense that has a key place in philosophy of mind and perception. Stinking Philosophy! is Benjamin Young’s answer to this critical lapse. Drawing together more than a decade's research on olfactory philosophy, the book offers a clear, comprehensive look at the nature of odors—how we perceive smells, how we cognitively represent odors, how we communicate about them as categories, and what they can tell us about consciousness.In Stinking Philosophy! Young presents a methodology for addressing the philosophical and conceptual issues raised by the sense of smell. T

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If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand?The endlessly fascinating question of whether we are alone in the universe has always been accompanied by another, more complicated one: if there is extraterrestrial life, how would we communicate with it? In this book, Daniel Oberhaus leads readers on a quest for extraterrestrial communication. Exploring Earthlings' various attempts to reach out to non-Earthlings over the centuries, he poses some not entirely answerable questions: If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand? What languages will they (and we) speak? Is there not only a universal grammar (as Noam Chomsky has posited), but also a grammar of the universe?Oberhaus describes, among other things, a late-nineteenth-century idea to communicate with Martians via Morse code and mirrors; the emergence in the twentieth century of SETI (the search for extraterrestri

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How big data and machine learning encode discrimination and create agitated clusters of comforting rage.In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.Chun, who has a background in systems design engineering as well as media studies and cultural theory, explains that although machine learning algorithms m

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How we can invent—but not predict—the future of cities.We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan. They are the product of our inventions; they evolve. In Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty explores what we need to understand about cities in order to invent their future.Batty outlines certain themes—principles—that apply to all cities. He investigates not the invention of artifacts but inventive processes. Today form is becoming ever more divorced from function; information networks now shape the traditional functions of cities as places of exchange and innovation. By the end of this century, most of the world's population will live in c

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AI is revolutionizing the world. Here’s how democracies can come out on top.Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous—in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. If we wield it for destruction, it will fan the flames of a new kind of war, one that holds democracy in the balance. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose.The new fire has three sparks: data, algorithms, and computing power. These components fuel viral disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons that once s

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An essay collection that insightfully explores the professional culture of contemporary economic theory, highlighting key features of successful economic theory from the last quarter century.When is a theoretical result taken seriously enough for economic application? How do theorists actively try to influence this judgment? What determines whether a new theoretical subfield adopts a “pure” or an “applied” style? How do theorists respond to economists’ penchant for “rational” explanations of human behavior? These are just some of the questions regarding the professional culture of contemporary economic theory that Ran Spiegler attempts to answer in this incisive essay collection, The Curious Culture of Economic Theory. In exploring these questions, Spiegler addresses the norms that economic theorists apply as they produce, evaluate, and disseminate research.Introducing a new genre—a kind of cultural criticism

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How withdrawal distress and cravings can haunt current and former addicts, and what they can teach us about addiction and its treatments.“The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house,” Jean Cocteau once wrote. In The Ghost in the Addict, Shepard Siegel offers a Pavlovian analysis of drug use. Chronic drug use, he explains, conditions users to have an anticipatory homeostatic correction, which protects the addict from overdose. This drug-preparatory response, elicited by drug-paired cues, is often mislabeled a “withdrawal response.” The withdrawal response, however, is not due to the baneful effects of previous drug administrations; rather, it is due to the body’s preparation for the next drug administration—a preparatory response that can haunt addicts like a ghost long after they have conquered their usage.Examining the failure of legislation, the circumstances of overdose, and the cues that

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A groundbreaking chronicle of scientific ocean drilling—a crowning achievement of the twentieth century—and how it shaped our knowledge of Earth's past.Under the radar—or, rather, sonar—of most people and many scientists, for the last six decades ships have plied the world’s oceans, mining the seafloor for its secrets—and quietly resolving confounding geological mysteries. Continental drift and plate tectonics. The origin of the Hawaiʻian Islands. The erstwhile disappearance of the Mediterranean. The mystery of the ice ages. All are part of the story told by deep-sea drilling—and chapters in the history that unfolds in Mysteries of the Deep. In a series of vignettes ranging from the voyage of the HMS Challenger in the 1870s to the adventures of research ship Chikyū in the 2020s, James Powell recounts the surprises the seafloor has yielded to the probing of scientists.With a global, sometimes

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An exploration of workplace participation and earnings patterns for diverse women in US STEM professions that upends the myth that STEM work benefits women economically.Seen as part economic driver, part social remedy, STEM work is commonly understood to benefit both the US economy and people—particularly women—from underrepresented groups. But what do diverse women find when they work in US STEM occupations? What do STEM jobs really deliver—and for whom? In Disparate Measures, Mary Armstrong and Susan Averett challenge the conventional wisdom that a diverse US STEM workforce will bring about economic abundance for the women who participate in it. Combining intersectionality theory and critical data theory with a feminist economic analysis, the authors explore how different groups of diverse women truly fare in US STEM professions.Disparate Measures is centered on eight unique, in-depth case studies, each of which provides an in

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