Search results for ""Author Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer""

Book SynopsisCan social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities.Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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Book SynopsisExamining the racial underpinnings of food, microbial medicine, and disgust in America American Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country's history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial, corporate, and medical archives, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness. Ranging from nineteenth-century colonial encounters with Native people to John Harvey Kellogg's ideas around civilization and bowel movements to mid-twentieth-century diet and parenting advice books, Wolf-Meyer analyzes how embedded racist histories of digestion and disgust permeate contemporary debates around fecal microbial transplants and other bacteriotherapeutic treatments for gastrointestinal disease. At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestionwhat goes int

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of sleep and its manifold discontents. With scrupulous care, Matthew Wolf-Meyer probes the current state of sleep medicine as well as its absorbing history. At a time when modern society’s dependence on sleeping pills and plush bedding has never been greater, The Slumbering Masses is all the more welcome for its ambitious compass and penetrating insights." —A. Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past "The Slumbering Masses is a fascinating account of the ordering and disordering of sleep as an institutional and individual phenomenon in modern America. Wolf-Meyer brings us into the lives of people struggling—at work, at home, and in clinics—to align their nights and days with the abstract demands of sleep as a biomedical form and social norm. He takes us into the past, too—expertly laying to rest fantasies of a prelapsarian agrarian lifestyle—and into the future—investigating how global sleep patterns have started to stagger and syncopate in response to advanced capitalism. Wolf-Meyer teaches us that sleep has a social life, and a restless one at that." —Stefan Helmreich, MIT"A deconstruction of current preconceptions about sleep. Wolf-Meyer (Anthropology/Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) challenges the notion, promulgated by the medical community and pharmaceutical companies, that the norm of eight hours of consolidated sleep has been scientifically established to be crucial for medical and physical health."—Kirkus Reviews"A fascinating scholarly approach that will cause readers to question some of the givens regarding sleep habits in American culture."—Library Journal"A great primer on the history and variability of sleep patterns, this book points to more flexible, realistic expectations of sleep to avoid both the drugs and the nights of insomnia."—ForeWord Reviews"Takes a polemical view of what might be called the “sleep question.” Wolf-Meyer, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, spent four years interviewing just about everyone involved in sleep research: physicians, technicians, patients, members of patients’ families. He concludes that what Americans have come to think of as sleep problems are mostly just problems in the way Americans have come to think about sleep."—The New Yorker"A powerful call."—American Ethnologist"Sleepers are indebted to The Slumbering Masses for compelling them to contemplate sleep (or the lack thereof) from a new perspective."—Canadian Bulletin of Medical History"Reminds us that how, where, and why we sleep are always political decisions."—Current Anthropology"Elegant and timely."—Medical Anthropology QuarterlyTable of ContentsContentsAbbreviationsPreface: Sleep at the Turn of the Twenty-first CenturyIntroduction: From the Lone Sleeper to the Slumbering MassesPart I. Sleeping, Past and Present1. The Rise of American Sleep Medicine: Diagnosing (and Misdiagnosing) Sleep2. The Protestant Origins of American Sleep 3. Sleeping and Not Sleeping in the Clinic: How Medicine Is Remaking Biology and SocietyPart II. Cultures of Sleep4. Desiring a Good Night’s Sleep: Order and Disorder in Everyday Life5. Before We Fall Asleep: Children’s Sleep and the Rise of the Solitary Sleeper6. Pharmaceuticals and the Making of Modern Bodies and Rhythms7. Early to Rise: Creating Well-Rested American Workers 8. Chemical Consciousness9. Sleeping on the Job: From Siestas to Workplace Naps10. Take Back Your Time: Activism and Overworked AmericansPart III. The Limits of Sleep11. Unconsciousness Criminality: Sleepwalking Murders, Drowsy Driving, and the Vigilance of the Law12. The Extremes of Sleep: War, Sports, and ScienceConclusion: The Futures of Sleep AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisDeveloping a cybernetic model of subjectivity and personhood that honors disability experiences to reconceptualize the category of the human Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood. Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aphasia, as well as family members of people diagnosed as autistic—texts that rethink modes of subjectivity through experiences with communication, caregiving, and the demands of everyday life. Arguing for a radical antinormative bioethics, Unraveling shifts the discourse on neurological disorders from such value-laden concepts as “quality of life” to develop an inclusive model of personhood that honors disability experiences and reconceptualizes the category of the human in all of its social, technological, and environmental contexts.Trade Review"Unraveling is a work of cultural reimagination. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer knits together neurological, psychiatric, and neuroscientific theories about ‘the brain’ in this broad-based inquiry into ‘communicative disorders.’ He insists that the many possibilities and blocked channels of communication depend on the interdependency of subject, personhood, family, community, and polity. He joins leading scholars in disability studies and feminist theory, illuminating the thoroughly social nature of all embodied communication and thus its ethical and political reliance on making a world where differences are welcome."—Rayna Rapp, New York University"This is a book for our times—a deep dive into the problematics of personhood in relationship to the neurological. This book, alluringly readable, vigorously challenges our conceptions of what makes a human being human and advocates for an anti-neoliberal vision of complex selfhood that is not dependent on predictable norms. While this subject could lend itself to predictable advocacy, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer stays ahead of the reader's assumptions and provides a new and thoughtful way of conceiving big questions concerning the very definitions of life, thought, value, and ethics. A must read for anyone interested in neurodivergence and disability in general."—Lennard J. Davis, author of Obsession: A HistoryTable of ContentsContentsPreface: Blind-Man-and-WorldIntroduction: Let’s Build a New Nervous System1. Neurological Subjectivity: How Neuroscience Makes and Unmakes People through Neurological Disorder2. Symbolic Subjectivity: How Psychoanalysis and the Communication of Meaning Disable Individuals3. Materialist Subjectivity: How Technology and Material Environments Make Personhood Possible4. Cybernetic Subjectivity: The Fusion of Body, Symbol, and Environment in the Facilitated Person5. Facilitated Subjectivity, Affective Bioethics, and the Nervous SystemEpilogue: Living and Dying in the Nervous System AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisDeveloping a cybernetic model of subjectivity and personhood that honors disability experiences to reconceptualize the category of the human Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood. Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aphasia, as well as family members of people diagnosed as autistic—texts that rethink modes of subjectivity through experiences with communication, caregiving, and the demands of everyday life. Arguing for a radical antinormative bioethics, Unraveling shifts the discourse on neurological disorders from such value-laden concepts as “quality of life” to develop an inclusive model of personhood that honors disability experiences and reconceptualizes the category of the human in all of its social, technological, and environmental contexts.Trade Review"Unraveling is a work of cultural reimagination. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer knits together neurological, psychiatric, and neuroscientific theories about ‘the brain’ in this broad-based inquiry into ‘communicative disorders.’ He insists that the many possibilities and blocked channels of communication depend on the interdependency of subject, personhood, family, community, and polity. He joins leading scholars in disability studies and feminist theory, illuminating the thoroughly social nature of all embodied communication and thus its ethical and political reliance on making a world where differences are welcome."—Rayna Rapp, New York University"This is a book for our times—a deep dive into the problematics of personhood in relationship to the neurological. This book, alluringly readable, vigorously challenges our conceptions of what makes a human being human and advocates for an anti-neoliberal vision of complex selfhood that is not dependent on predictable norms. While this subject could lend itself to predictable advocacy, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer stays ahead of the reader's assumptions and provides a new and thoughtful way of conceiving big questions concerning the very definitions of life, thought, value, and ethics. A must read for anyone interested in neurodivergence and disability in general."—Lennard J. Davis, author of Obsession: A HistoryTable of ContentsContentsPreface: Blind-Man-and-WorldIntroduction: Let’s Build a New Nervous System1. Neurological Subjectivity: How Neuroscience Makes and Unmakes People through Neurological Disorder2. Symbolic Subjectivity: How Psychoanalysis and the Communication of Meaning Disable Individuals3. Materialist Subjectivity: How Technology and Material Environments Make Personhood Possible4. Cybernetic Subjectivity: The Fusion of Body, Symbol, and Environment in the Facilitated Person5. Facilitated Subjectivity, Affective Bioethics, and the Nervous SystemEpilogue: Living and Dying in the Nervous System AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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