Search results for ""Author Robin James""

Discover the art of finding more through having less: more time, more calm, more energy, more money, more you.Filled with practical tips and ideas, this book will guide you toward a simpler way of life. Learn how to reduce your clutter and your stress levels, find advice on mastering your schedule and making time for what matters, and enrich your everyday by putting quality before quantity.From time to time, we all get lost in the flurry of a busy life, but we can always uncover a path back to our best and happiest selves. All you need is focus, a slower pace and the simple power of "less".

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In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

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In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

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The Lost Ethnographies reports on the methodological lessons learnt from ethnographic projects that, viewed superficially, failed. Experienced researchers write about projects they planned, and were excited about, which then never began, had to be abandoned, or took such unexpected directions that it became a different piece of work altogether. The topics and settings are varied and disparate, but the lessons learnt have important similarities. This collection focuses on absences; topics and settings that remain under researched; taken for granted aspects of social life that have not been scrutinized, and finally the potential insights that are gained when absences are carefully examined and explored. Readers will learn a great deal about research design, fundraising, writing up, access negotiations, serendipity in the field, and the complex interaction between the body and the brain of the ethnographer and the realities of ethnographic research. Maximising learning from the ‘failings’ of ourselves and of others is the positive message of the collection. The most poignant chapters are those in which the author ‘returns’ to reread and reflect on a past project; something that is not done often enough, partly because it can be painful. The accounts of projects which had to be abandoned or radically changed offer hope to researchers facing difficulties in their own investigations. These reflections, on projects that were never even begun, show how to gain fresh energy and social science insight from apparent rejection, and the collection approaches the whole concept of lost ethnography in provocative ways.

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